Has search gotten worse?

[BootlegPopeye]

Nah, I can remember it being shit at least 2-3 years ago. There was a movie snapshot someone on another forum used as their avatar, and I reversed image searched it to find what the movie was. Only results were from that forum. That was probably my main usage for reverse image searching before - ie trying to find out what movie/show a screenshot was from. But now it reduces it down to keywords.

 

[Bongocat]

Nah, I can remember it being shit at least 2-3 years ago. There was a movie snapshot someone on another forum used as their avatar, and I reversed image searched it to find what the movie was. Only results were from that forum. That was probably my main usage for reverse image searching before - ie trying to find out what movie/show a screenshot was from. But now it reduces it down to keywords.

I should clarify. The "keywords" feature has been shit for longer than I can even remember, but a few months ago, it would AT LEAST find the image source. I would use that to find the first occurrence of an image, to see if it was old or not or to find a higher res version. Now it seems like it's not even good for that.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Looking for information about certain parts of games used to be mostly unaffected by Google's "improvements". It's often more effort now than using old school Gamefaqs guides. The time I spent sifting through reviews and refining the search could have been used to just play the damn game.

This is much worse for games with remasters and remakes. God help you if you dare need help in a game that got a new coat of paint recently.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

It seems like now it doesn't work on anything at all.

Finding where the hard drive is in an old dual USB G3 iBook was a BS image search. No matter what I tried, I kept getting photos of the thing from the outside, or just the motherboard, the older "clamshell" iBook.

iThis is much worse for games with remasters and remakes.

I tried looking up info about a specific thing in a recent remake.

All I kept getting were basic overviews.

aaarrrggghhh...

 

[Pissmaster]

Speaking of the likes of Pintrest and Quora clogging up search, Fandom.com is another big one that always comes up when searching for a video game, and shitty Fandom pages tend to be above even dedicated wikis with way more info. Like for example, there are at least two independent Tetris wikis (Hard Drop and Tetris.wiki), but Fandom and other random bullshit will come up ahead of either of those, if they even show up at all.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

This is much worse for games with remasters and remakes. God help you if you dare need help in a game that got a new coat of paint recently.

For some reason, Tomb Raider and Doom are the ones that give me the most trouble. Most of the time I'm looking up something regarding the first game, but I'll get results for the most recent game with the same title, and adding "1" barely works because the results are accounting for the 1 in the year (2013 for Tomb Raider and 2016 for Doom)

 

[Bongocat]

 

[Pissmaster]

For some reason, Tomb Raider and Doom are the ones that give me the most trouble. Most of the time I'm looking up something regarding the first game, but I'll get results for the most recent game with the same title, and adding "1" barely works because the results are accounting for the 1 in the year (2013 for Tomb Raider and 2016 for Doom)

What seems to work for me is just slapping on the year the game was released at the end, like Doom 1993 and Tomb Raider 1996.

I misremembered what year Tomb Raider was released and it worked really well if I actually meant Tomb Raider 2:

 

[Pee Cola]

Speaking of the likes of Pintrest and Quora clogging up search, Fandom.com is another big one that always comes up when searching for a video game, and shitty Fandom pages tend to be above even dedicated wikis with way more info. Like for example, there are at least two independent Tetris wikis (Hard Drop and Tetris.wiki), but Fandom and other random bullshit will come up ahead of either of those, if they even show up at all.

Thanks for reminding me. I should probably set up a macro with "-pinterest -quora -fandom" to save the trouble of typing it out every time I attempt a search.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I should probably set up a macro with "-pinterest -quora -fandom" to save the trouble of typing it out every time I attempt a search.

We shouldn't have any need to do that though.

But here we are.

 

[ditto]

Thanks for reminding me. I should probably set up a macro with "-pinterest -quora -fandom" to save the trouble of typing it out every time I attempt a search.

Add '-medium' to that list if searching for anything tech related.

 

[Staffy]

Google search shit the bed, even the image search. If you search for anything anime you'll find anything irrelevant and it'll be shown as "for teens" "smiling" "for adults", or "cartoon".

Back then they'll show the anime or the cartoon character. Looks like the diversity hires or troons there got lazy that they decided to dumb down the search to prevent hentai from showing up or something.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Looks like the diversity hires or troons there got lazy that they decided to dumb down the search to prevent hentai from showing up or something.

Increasing corporate incompetence - and not just in search engines - seems to be a symptom of hiring more people solely based on "gender identity" or the color of their skin, rather than their skills.

Current Year sucks sludge.

 

[Staffy]

Increasing corporate incompetence - and not just in search engines - seems to be a symptom of hiring more people solely based on "gender identity" or the color of their skin, rather than their skills.

Current Year sucks snail slime.

Good thing Yandex does the job really well with image searches, it has none of this shit. Hell it now outranks Bing when it comes to searcing porn. Based Yandex.

 

[Zero0]

One time I was in an unfamiliar part of the state and I was getting dangerously low on gas. I was desperately searching for the nearest station. Google said the nearest one was 20 miles away. No, that cannot fucking be right. I'm literally inside a town right now. It has to have a gas station somewhere. So I literally got out and starting walking to find a place and lo and behold, there was a station not one block away.

Now here's the real fuckery: that station was registered on the map. It even said it was a gas station. It just wouldn't return the result as the closest when I asked where I should go. I don't think there's any explanation for this besides google giving priority to the top bidder to dissuade customers from using anyone else.

This is true, and it happens with everything.

Ex: I can go on Google maps and search for "McDonalds" and it will show me a bunch of McDonald's on the map, the thing is I *know* there are McDonald's it isn't showing me, and if I cancel the search and just manually look for them they're there, on the map with all the information I could want.

This is a big issue when you search for "restaurants", "atms", "parking" or "gas". It just censors a ton of results for some (?) reason.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...-drops-bing-after-tank-man-censorship-fiasco/​

Notepad++ drops Bing after "tank man" censorship fiasco​

By Sergiu Gatlan

The latest Notepad++ release has removed support for Bing search from the app after the "tank man" fiasco Microsoft had to deal with on Friday afternoon.
"Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ settings for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability," the Notepad++ v8 announcement reads.
Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, one of the most popular open-source Notepad replacements, revealed on GitHub that the motivation behind this decision is Bing censoring results instead of doing "its job."
"When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, the search result loses its quality and it's not reliable anymore," Don Ho said in the GitHub commit removing Bing support.
"Hence, Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ for "Search on Internet" command."

Bing censorship tagged as accidental human error​

As first noticed by Shane Huntley, Director of Software Engineering at Google's Threat Analysis Group, Bing would not return any image or video results when searching for "tank man" in the US, UK, France, and other countries worldwide.
When searching for the phrase, users would only get "There are no results for tank man. Check your spelling or try different keywords." error messages.
While there was no immediate explanation to the problem, it is a widely known fact that China forces companies with businesses within its borders to abide by its censorship rules requiring to block references to China's 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests.
"This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this," a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer later on Friday.
China banned the popular Notepad++ text editor in August 2020 after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'
"I am not surprised about their reaction. But since the free speech is basic right of everyone, I won't keep silent," Don Ho told BleepingComputer at the time.

 

[Bongocat]

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...-drops-bing-after-tank-man-censorship-fiasco/​

Notepad++ drops Bing after "tank man" censorship fiasco​

By Sergiu Gatlan

The latest Notepad++ release has removed support for Bing search from the app after the "tank man" fiasco Microsoft had to deal with on Friday afternoon.
"Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ settings for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability," the Notepad++ v8 announcement reads.
Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, one of the most popular open-source Notepad replacements, revealed on GitHub that the motivation behind this decision is Bing censoring results instead of doing "its job."
"When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, the search result loses its quality and it's not reliable anymore," Don Ho said in the GitHub commit removing Bing support.
"Hence, Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ for "Search on Internet" command."

Bing censorship tagged as accidental human error​

As first noticed by Shane Huntley, Director of Software Engineering at Google's Threat Analysis Group, Bing would not return any image or video results when searching for "tank man" in the US, UK, France, and other countries worldwide.
When searching for the phrase, users would only get "There are no results for tank man. Check your spelling or try different keywords." error messages.
While there was no immediate explanation to the problem, it is a widely known fact that China forces companies with businesses within its borders to abide by its censorship rules requiring to block references to China's 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests.
"This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this," a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer later on Friday.
China banned the popular Notepad++ text editor in August 2020 after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'
"I am not surprised about their reaction. But since the free speech is basic right of everyone, I won't keep silent," Don Ho told BleepingComputer at the time.

yeah because google is so much better

 

[ditto]

yeah because google is so much better

They replaced it with DuckDuckGo, which is just Bing with extra steps.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Fandom links would be fine if the site wasn't riddled with autoplay videos. I'm going to the Megami Tensei wiki to look up stats so I can formulate a strategy, not watch some unrelated video. Now stop clogging the page up. Speaking of which, looking up Aya Nishitani on Google you get this.

The page this leads to isn't a stub. Why is this nonsense clogging the description up?

 

[Bongocat]

Fandom links would be fine if the site wasn't riddled with autoplay videos. I'm going to the Megami Tensei wiki to look up stats so I can formulate a strategy, not watch some unrelated video. Now stop clogging the page up. Speaking of which, looking up Aya Nishitani on Google you get this.
View attachment 2244719
The page this leads to isn't a stub. Why is this nonsense clogging the description up?

My computer is quite capable and trying to go on fandom with javascript enabled just makes the entire thing shit itself. I have to force close the browser every time.