Has search gotten worse?

[ToroidalBoat]

"What Happened To Google Search?" - Enrico Tartarotti

Spoiler: tl;dw

Google was originally made for the decentralized "Web 1.0", then "Web 2.0" internet got centralized with "social media", then SEO BS became a thing.

 

[Miller]

The Google Chrome extension store also got worse, the stuff you are looking for doesn't show up in the first result anymore.

 

[Omen_Sulk]

Google in the last week just implemented the "Fact Check Tools" on the backend.

If you are wondering why you search for a particular 3rd party news article, and only 5 results show up but the article. Then that's why.

 

[Toolbox]

I'm not saying it's uncensored, but you still have a much greater chance of actually finding the thing you were looking for than using something that takes its searches from google.

Not uncensored, censored for Russian interests rather than most of the things relevant to silicon valley which makes it far more bearable for anyone from the west. Even a Chinese se would probably have better results as long as you're not searching shit that counters the CCP.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

now this shows up on Google Translate:

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[postfeetpls]

now this shows up on Google Translate:

>the average amerimutt is so utterly retarded and completely stripped of his humanity that a special warning regarding gendered languages MUST be issued before risking exposure to potentially harmful translations

A world-ending apocalypse couldn't come soon enough. It's been at least 13 years overdue as of now.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

If the Google region is set to the West (or at least America and maybe Western Europe), the bottom of the front page of Google shows something like " Our third decade of climate action: join us". Beyond the West, there may not be such an environmentalist message.

>the average amerimutt is so utterly retarded and completely stripped of his humanity

Looks like public "education" in America is all over "social justice" indoctrination, and is elsewhere really dumbed down now.

Americans who finished their education before Current Year and stayed off the "social media" bandwagon got really lucky there.

 

[Null]

Seeing the good old logos on Google was unexpectedly emotional. Something in my brain tripped and I actually thought "oh wow so I can search again without expecting results hand-picked by the US intelligence agencies", only to realize it was an anniversary thing.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

Heard that someone I used to fuck is now in prison. So I started searching for news about arrested women in my city.

I got endless results about men arrested for killing women in other cities.

Mind you, I live in a Spanish speaking shithole, so I used the appropriate feminine verbs "detenida" or "arrestada". It still switched it to male culprits.

 

[Core1036]

Yes. Definitely. While learning the search syntax of the engine you use to specify what you are looking for exactly does offset the gradual deterioration of search result quality, I think yes, search has gotten worse. A lot of search engines have bias so you are either indexing the internet yourself with YaCy, using someone else's YaCy index or aggregating results using SearX. Before one search engine would just work but now you have to use multiple.

For some purposes different search engines work better:
Bing is really good for looking up anything related to piracy and works very well if you look up anything related to old IT systems.
Yandex is also good for piracy (the Russian speaking internet has much more resources regarding piracy) as well as having very good (reverse) image search, however they mostly focus their indexes at Salvic language sites.
Phind.com works well if you look up programming related stuff, treat it as chatgpt with a search engine attached to it.
Swisscows is a nice generic search engine that "just works" but indexes can be sparse and lagging behind.
People said nice things about you.com but I have not used it, so can't say much. Do your own research.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

internet search in the '90s: advertisements

internet search in the '00s: relevant results

internet search by the '20s: advertisements and propaganda

Spoiler

(of course one can still find stuff though)

 

[brocktherock]

Does Google even accept boolean searches anymore? My school taught me about that in 8th grade (I gotta give my education some praise) but I've never seen anyone mention this feature. Modern search results are so bad that I can't tell if a boolean in the query is making it better or worse.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

When using specific key words in google queries that are not written as a sentence, I'm seeing a lot of strange sites show up with the .de address. It's really strange.

 

[Pee Cola]

I'm now at the point where I find myself unironically using Yandex for searches, especially when it comes to stuff that goes against (((the narrative))).

Even something as benign as BrandNewPipe (a fork of NewPipe that supports multiple video platforms including - gasp - BitChute and Rumble) is almost impossible to find with a Google search, but came up just fine with Yandex.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Stopped going to the YT site since they started doing that "adblocker bad" BS. I think I used YT for almost the whole time it's up.

I don't want endless ad elements on this computer, nor do I want vids to be interrupted by endless Current Year ads, nor do I want to pay to remove ads. They said cable TV would be ad-free and now there's ads on it, same could happen to "YouTube Premium" as well.

 

[Susanna]

They said cable TV would be ad-free and now there's ads on it, same could happen to "YouTube Premium" as well.

It already happened on Netflix. In some countries the cheapest version now has ads on it. But worse is, if YouTube demonstrates that people will pay a subscription for their service, we would get "Netflix Community" or "Disney Social" or "Amazon Prime Connect" or whatever, ie other streaming services muscling in on the user-created videos market, and be forced to pay multiple subscriptions to get all the videos we want to watch rather than having access to it all, for free and without ads, on YouTube.
I'm old-fashioned enough that if YouTube blocked me for having an adblocker, I'd still be alright with my audiobooks and podcasts, but a lot of people are into content that is only available on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, and would definitely pay for it if the alternative was "read a book" or "touch grass". Subscription content is a quick path to the destruction of the Internet, it should never be tolerated. The reason I can search for "combination 10gbe and m.2 slot expansion card" and find the Synology E10M20-T1 is because dozens of forums have threads like "wow guys look at this cool combination m.2 bifurcation card and 10gbe nic I found!" which are all publicly accessible. If you needed a subscription (or even just they require you to register to read), this content wouldn't be available for the crawler, and the search term would never get associated with this particular NIC. YouTube is great because all the videos are free to read, and they have transcripts the crawlers can match search terms in. Turn it into a subscription service and videos would be no more searchable than TV-series episodes. I can't search "operating a lamborghini tractor hitch" and get a match to twenty minutes into episode three of Clarkson's Farm where exactly this happens, because that transcript isn't available without an account (or some piracy, which obviously would be impractical for a search engine crawler to engage in).

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Subscription content is a quick path to the destruction of the Internet, it should never be tolerated.

Corporations most likely miss the days before the 'net (when they ran mass media), and they clearly want to make 'net like cable TV.

(full of ads, "advertiser-friendly", censored, centralized, paywalled)

 

[Raspberry Pi]

I've noticed it's a lot harder to find obscure information, and there's a definite bias in some search results.

I've started making my own Yacy instance. It's slow going but whenever I access a new/interesting site I add it to the index. I've got it set to crawl pretty deep so I'm hoping it'll become useful after a few weeks/months of building it.

 

[Enig]

Update on the state of searching, Yandex's reverse searching has gradually started turning to shit and it's getting harder and harder to find results (i.e. backwater full res rehosts of porn and obscure technical manuals) that are worth anything since half of slavlandia's cut off and they left a ton of 404ing pages in the results indexing alongside.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

It's hard to find media that's just about the polar ice, as in media that's not environmentalism about how the polar ice is melting.