Has search gotten worse?

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Is the quality of web search results getting worse?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1,181 94.3%

  • No

    Votes: 19 1.5%

  • IDK

    Votes: 53 4.2%
  • Total voters
    1,253
Un Platano said:
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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Oh you know what would happen. Chinaman runs off with your credit card number.

Run a whois on the domain and look at their address.

1716740999549.png
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
>inb4 Google drops that feature?

(like they dropped caching site)
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Fuck. I did not know they dropped caching too. The rare times I used it it was very useful for content that was no longer available or gated in some way.
Makes me wonder if it's because the cache is being optimized in some unreadable way to pass it through some AI junk. Or maybe they are just assholes.
 
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Premium Dog Food said:
Fuck. I did not know they dropped caching too. The rare times I used it it was very useful for content that was no longer available or gated in some way.
Makes me wonder if it's because the cache is being optimized in some unreadable way to pass it through some AI junk. Or maybe they are just assholes.
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It’s almost certainly because people were using the cached version to browse sites without all the normal tracking cookies, ads, scripts, and other Web 3.0 bullshit that just generally makes the internet a worse experience. It’s the same thing that made all those newspapers demand Facebook stop summarising articles posted in people’s feeds, it cut them entirely out of the ad and tracking revenue they’re funded by, except the google hits are worth too much to easily make the same demand.
 
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Unpopular opinion but the last couple of months Google has been better for me. This AI Overview bullshit is not available in my country yet and the search results are more relevant than before. I tried many search engines, including searx, but I always go back to Google even though I fucking hate them...
 
After reading this thread, I said fuck it and got a trial for kagi.
My shitty review: it's great for English searches, better than Google was before the recent changes.
For Chinese or Japanese, it's...usable, but not great. Chinese results are nice because it doesn't force all simplified results on you, if you search in traditional then it actually heavily prioritizes results in traditional Chinese without completely shutting out simplified ones, which I think is the ideal way of handling it. A minor adjustment for this would be kinda nice for one reason: Malaysians can't decide which system to use, and will mix between the two in one sentence, which kagi doesn't seem to know how to handle. Because of this, results from Malaysian typers seem to always be deprioritized, even (to a smaller extent) if Malaysia is selected as the country of focus. All this being said, even this isn't entirely helpful because it doesn't seem to have quite as robust of a crawl for Chinese-language sites.
I don't speak Spanish or Portuguese, so I can't vouch for those. I'd really like to know how it handles these, since I know most Latin Americans I've met don't love seeing results in other forms of Spanish from their own.
The question now is, is kagi worth paying for? Assuming privacy isn't your main concern, I'd say to stick with a free trial. Use the shitty "free" ones first, and if you're unhappy with the results then try kagi.
 
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khaine said:

Look forward to even worse results as SEO spam uses this leak
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Analysis of the leak by knowledgeable people:
https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak (cancerous repeated pop-up when your mouse leave the site window)

Those are the two researchers quoted in various articles, took me a surprising amount of time to find it (several minutes), even when searching the author names or quoted text in quotes. Finally got it when an article bothered to link their sources. It's all so tiresome.
_

Also I want to mention again Where's Your Ed At that gives a sourced and detailed explanation of why Google is so shit (corpo greed overtaking and pushing out ethical and competent engineers), it deserves more visibility. The blog in general is an interesting black pill about the state of tech in current year.
 
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Related to search engines: Google captchas. The 2 most annoying ones:

  • "select all parts of the image with [something]" (good luck figuring out which parts count as thing)
  • "select all pics with [something] until none are left" (and the crap seems to drag on and on and on)
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
what's "Web 3.0" involve?
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Everything on the internet will become completely meaningless (not like it wasn't before) since you can just generate any creative thing you could ever want exactly how you want it. Why go on twitter or social media when all the accounts will be flooded with self bots parroting things all day?

Good side is it will force people to go outside for real meaningful entertainment again and put a bunch of stuck up tumblr artists out of commission permanently
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Related to search engines: Google captchas. The 2 most annoying ones:

  • "select all parts of the image with [something]" (good luck figuring out which parts count as thing)
  • "select all pics with [something] until none are left" (and the crap seems to drag on and on and on)
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Agreed, I hate when it asks me to select images with motorcycles, and one tile just has handlebars in it
 
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peewee said:
Everything on the internet will become completely meaningless (not like it wasn't before) since you can just generate any creative thing you could ever want exactly how you want it. Why go on twitter or social media when all the accounts will be flooded with self bots parroting things all day?

Good side is it will force people to go outside for real meaningful entertainment again and put a bunch of stuck up tumblr artists out of commission permanently
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Hyphanet bros will be winning
 
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