Has search gotten worse?

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Is the quality of web search results getting worse?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1,182 94.3%

  • No

    Votes: 19 1.5%

  • IDK

    Votes: 52 4.2%
  • Total voters
    1,253
>search Google for something only vaguely recalled
>"irrelevant results"
>reword it
>"more irrelevant results"
>reword it even more
>"nothing found" claims that ice-fishing yeti
>try another site with the reworded query
>"irrelevant results"
>try that other site with another reworded query
>"nothing found"
>screw this crap
>give up

a not uncommon search procedure in Current Year
 
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LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV] said:
Social media platforms welcome it because they love bloated fake growth statistics they can use to to scam investors so on every side things are only going to get worse and no one will work to make it better for actual users.
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Almost everything online is related to scamming investors with "huge growth!!".

Its amazing that they still fall for it over and over again. AI is going to be leaving a lot of pension funds empty.
 
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whogoesthere said:
Almost everything online is related to scamming investors with "huge growth!!".

Its amazing that they still fall for it over and over again. AI is going to be leaving a lot of pension funds empty.
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Startupcel cvs be like
-failed startup that never delivered
-failed startup that never delivered
-startup delivered a shitty gimmick product that never became profitable. and doesn't exist anymore
-startup delivered a product that actually made things worse and created new problems that were expensive to fix
-startup delivered a product that made it to marketplace. Its been 10 years propped up by investement money and still doesn't see profits.
- failed startup that never delivered
-startup made a buggy beta that was bought by microsoft. Microsoft never made it work or saw a way to turn it profitable This is the flagship success of this man's career. He wrote a motivational book about it.

Tech culture is all hustling on smoke. Its like banks and corpos burning money to subsidize corrupt retards, the thing they always say can only happen in communism
 
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Probably late, but I will say that I noticed Google become totally worthless back in March. It now can't handle more than one search term, goes insane on the "related term" chains (e.g. search the word silver and it shows up a bunch of results for chips, because they use gold, which is tangentially related). "This exact term"/using quotes no longer shows the exact term, instead it only gives one degree of "related" rather than multiple.
If you want a quick example, try searching any error code, and watch as it gives you results for unrelated error codes because they're both error codes.
I'd say since this change, maybe around 30% of my attempts at searching things have been successful. The results are even worse when searching for memes or images, which if I can put my tinfoil hat on, I suspect the goal was either this given the upcoming election, since they seem to have believed that memes were the issue; or pushing everyone toward using ChatGPT for everything under the sun, now that they've figured out how to prevent non-kosher responses.
so fucking sick of seeing people acting like there hasn't been any changes, god bless this thread
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Entered in some text which was a mix of Japanese and English. But for esome reason, Google Translate auto-detected it as Kinyarwanda.


same here with DDG
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Google products seem to be getting worse across the board. I don't have specific examples but I've had a few similar experiences where things that worked fine before suddenly don't. It's crazy how a company can go so backwards.
 
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GustavoDíazOrdaz said:
Duckduckgo and Bing are not working for me right now and i don't want to use Google. I've been hating Google for years because of its inaccurate results and their filthy censorship.
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There's https://kagi.com/ if you want something other than the big (Western) two. Of course it's paid - so it depends whether you're willing to pay a few quid a month for the privacy/lack of commercial or political influence in results.

Kagi has an in-built site prioritisation link in its results. So if you don't like Reddit for example, you can just click on one of the search results that show reddit and change the prioritisation to lower or even "never" and it will respect that in any future searches. Quite nice feature. Also very good for categorising the type of information you want your search to apply to - academic sources, news, last 24 hours / week / month / year, and so on.

Like I said, paid service. But easy to cancel at any time and at the end of the day if you're not paying Google or Bing for their services, then you are the product they sell to their real customers.
 
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Overly Serious said:
[...]
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Almost everything costs so much these days, so it's BS that when it comes to search engines, you either gotta shell out even more money or have digital footprint become the product (maybe negated by ad blocker). But with the latter, you get a crappy search engine that's almost as bad as just randomly selecting sites. Current Year really sucks.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Lately I've been seeing a number of "answers" to questions that are "for sale" (for high prices) in Google Images results -- looks like images for sale somehow? Maybe it's some AI-generated thing? The legality of such sales looks "sus" to me. Here's one example that showed up in Google Images when I was looking up SW stuff (for some reason):

technology How do the star fighters in Star Wars fly with no side thrusters? Science Fiction Fantasy Stack Exchange - Online Store (site is storkclips.net)
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These are websites that are abusing SEO by spamming keywords and phrases all over the pages. It's not exactly AI in the sense that it's not generative, but a much more simple algorithm that scrapes words and phrases out of posts on reddit, quora, stack exchange, and other such websites. It's a way to try to force the website to the top of search results by hijacking the mechanics that filled search results with reddit and quora in the first place. Perhaps we'll call it 'keyword mining.' This kind of manipulation has been around for as long as search engines have been a thing (in its most primitive form, websites would simply hide keywords in white text at the bottom of the screen) and for a while it seemed like they fixed it, because you rarely saw this kind of stuff a decade ago. It's becoming an issue again as part of the ongoing enshittification of search engines- one can only conclude that google stopped caring about quality of results a while ago.

What exactly it is they're selling, I'm not sure. It might be a front that sends you random junk from aliexpress or temu (these are surprisingly common now), or it might be an outright scam trying to steal your credit card info. No one is eager to try it and find out what happens.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Almost everything costs so much these days, so it's BS that when it comes to search engines, you either gotta shell out even more money or have digital footprint become the product (maybe negated by ad blocker). But with the latter, you get a crappy search engine that's almost as bad as just randomly selecting sites. Current Year really sucks.
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I notice you rated my post horrifying. Maybe it's the old Capitalist in me but to me it's not horrifying. I feel that you rarely get something for free that is actually good. We did for a while with search engines but that was in the start-up phase if you will. Investment was pouring in and the goal was to capture the market. Now that phase has passed and Google's investors want the returns on their investment. I actually like paid versions of services - so long as it's reasonable - because I like that I get a better product out of it. I'd rather pay with cash than be a product which - according to some services, they're averaging nearly $300 per user from marketing your data.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
For a long time now any attempt to search Islamic terrorism will yield a million results about anti-Islamic terrorism.
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search Google and DuckDuckGo for "list muslim terrorist attacks"*:

blank (not even that ice-fishing yeti on Google)

search Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex for "list muslim terrorist attacks"*:

many relevant results

*(in quotes BTW)
 
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