Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
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Comments328https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/26/google-execs-hope-new-search-feature-will-help-amid-reddit-blackouts.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.
Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on "the best impact hammer" or "how to buy solar panels" without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.
undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we're ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we'll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.
I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I'm sure it's a people circle thing.
It's way too easy to use Twitter and complain.. it's way to easy to use reddit .. (if you use their app) and complain.
I don't think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.
Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I've gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse.. so would I get that experience here ever? Idk.. but it's a minus for me.
Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don't see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.
I'd prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it's currently in.
It seems like we're heading towards all of this becoming "better for end users", it's just going to take multiple years to reach a point where the fediverse is there for a random non-technical person. Assuming it does get there, there's a lot that can go wrong of course. It does feel plausible to me, if the userbase stays large enough to keep regularly generating fresh content and devs keep improving things. Certainly the incompetent leadership at companies like Reddit and Twitter will continue to do ridiculous things that drive users away in the years to come.
Pretty much this. I agree with you 100%.
As much as I'd like to see Reddit die out and places like Lemmy become more mainstream, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.
Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it's an okay vid.
My understanding is plugin is alright (I have it too), but it’s increasingly inaccurate, especially for videos uploaded after it was created. I believe it took data from YouTube before the dislikes were removed and uses that as a snapshot, then adds the thumbs up/down of users of the plugin and uses that to extrapolate trends from the very limited data it has coming in.
The real solution would be YouTube showing the scores again, but I guess their stupid corporate videos getting BTFO was too much for them.
The plugin you are mentioning is based on dislikes and yes it is very inaccurate. The one I mentioned works off of the ratio between the likes vs the view count so the accuracy is always there, it's a different way of going about it.
I agree that YouTube just needs to bring the dislike count back, it's a pain trying to find these alternative ways to know if a video is good when the data is there. It's so greedy of them, outright harming user experience for profit.
there's a browser plug in for that.
Which isn't entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube's monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you'd only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.
I'm positive that extension has more than 1000 users.
Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?
You'd have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you'd be able to tease out any bias that exists.
Yeah this, it's demented.
I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and "no further results."
It's more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.
Well, what caused the chase for ad-money and affiliate link clicks? Google, Amazon & other mega corps. It's just indirect enshittification :-|
I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it's been working out fairly well.
Which is great.. until it becomes influenced by all the other AI generated crap.
Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.
The last couple of times I've had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.
If it keeps up this way, we're going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.
Google sucks now at giving me information. It seems like now it just gives me products.
We will have AI write the junk and click bait articles and AI sift through the junk. What a future
That's not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don't like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it's an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.
I haven't been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it's just stupid crap that isn't helpful. 'Here's 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.'
I'm in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google's attempt to be useful was to to search for "baluster" instead of "banister". It's a complete fucking joke.
And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you've ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I'm located in the US.
Also is it just me, or did search engines (not just Google) suddenly start disregarding quotation marks a year or so ago? I've been adding quotes to tell the stupid thing "no, I really did mean that weird word you think is a typo" and lately it just fucking auto-incorrects it anyway!
Yea I have this problem as well. Brackets, quotes, nothing forces the search engine to ONLY return that specific term.
It's awful and it's sad. I remember when I could find everything on there and now it's just all garbage. I'd be pretty annoyed getting links outside the US when that's where you live. Sure wish it was like it used to be.
Ah that's interesting. I get US results all the time but I assumed it was because the US dominates and New Zealand is small and obscure. Yet now I see you literally live in the US and it still doesn't help you!
How to fix your tech problem:
Yep, that's exactly it. Every fkn search result.
The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.
I've found that bad addons, spyware, and adware can immensely affect your Google results. Which is... Really alarming, but.... Its true.
This is not to say a lot of seo hasn't absolutely ruined search. Because it has.
If you know exactly what you want and the perfect key words you can usually get it to show up on the first page as long as you’re willing to scroll. Compared to its peak of “have a vague idea and we’ll find it” it’s really sad
Even Wikipedia results are 20 or more results down. I use Google search less every day.
As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I'll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.
Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn't restore your comments? They've been doing that to a bunch of people.
So far they have not.
You still can request a data export to see what they still have.
As a plus point if your GPDR request was logged and they can't fulfill it in 90 days they will be fined.
They won't be fined if you don't report it
Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error
It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.
What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.
It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers
What were you searching?
An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)
Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause
Wow that's pretty awesome, I'll have to give bing a try
That's a phrase you'd never have heard ~5 years ago lol.
I'm a beta tester for Google's Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it's easy to see that Google's focus on its AI seems to be search results.
PS: It's also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.
Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.
Of course they are. Adding "Reddit" at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).
That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.
It depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers
They still are on archive.org. you'll get the info you need and reddit gets nothing. Win win
The issue with that is Google doesn't index IA, and I don't think it has any kind of keyword search. ~Nai
It's going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.
Google's got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now...can't find shit. And it's about half its own fault.
I'll put right around half of the blame on "platformization." Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn't get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what's there. Twitter is slightly more open...but not really.
The other half of the problem is Google's own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.
That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they've gotten in the habit of appending "reddit" to google search strings because a. that's where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit's own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn't work so well.
So what are we keeping them around for?
Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don't feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.
DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.
https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.
https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.
But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.
And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven't used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I'm going to a specialized information website, for buying things I'm looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I've grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I'm having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.
That's why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.
There are no better alternatives.
I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there's so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that's why they don't see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on.. So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far.. and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they've been worse than competitors for years.
That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I'm willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit's only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that's how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).
Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.
I've got the Nitter equivalent that works just as well. Well, until Muskrat breaks it again, lol.
It's amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.
In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we've built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn't, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. But if the niche communities die, that's a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.
Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.
So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit's own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won't realise this.
I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.
My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.
Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.
Keep checking, see what happens
Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.
Certainly, I've had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.
But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It's only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I'm getting info the recent ones they've been lingering on.
I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they're all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I'll have logs to show their violation.
I downloaded shreddit, made a few changes because the main repo is broken and unstable, configured it to edit all of my comments to “fuck u/spez” before it deleted them, and then let it run. Who knows if they keep reddit history, but whatever data is retained will hopefully be replaced by my “appreciation“ for the admins.
I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I'm new) smacks of the "old Internet." I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.
I'm very new to it, but it feels like a very complicated and polished webring.
They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google's retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn't satisfy it's ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.
I literally couldn't find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.
Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.
Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match... They don't fucking work anymore.
You can add date restrictions in Google search. Very helpful.
Google heavily prioritizes .com, .org and other similar "popular" top level domains.
.world, . travel and similar ones are heavily penalized in Google's ranking for search results.
I can see it on the localized version of Google where I'm at.
We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)
I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).
Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn't significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.
i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling "how to x site:reddit.com", we'll just fedisearch "how to x"
in fact, i'm pretty sure i already found one but it wasn't very good, and i've forgotten it's name
I ditched Google years ago. Lemmy is still in very early stage of development, so things will change most likely.
I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.
If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…
I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.
It's pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.
I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world's most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn't know I needed regarding how they all work.
To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.
Not a vacuum salesman but repair man. Still active on reddit, but that's the last AMA he did.
I doubt vacuums have changed that much in 4 years.
Thank you!
I do wonder sometimes if that advice still holds, or if vacuum tech made it obsolete...
i wonder if chatgpt will eventually replace reddit.
You have to have some idea as to what the answer might already be
it doesnt provide sources etc. which is a bit annoying.
the chatgpt "bot" in the edge browser is actually decent at providing sources, but its terrible at finding specific info. i tried finding information about what TIME a certain game would be available to play, and it just kept giving me its release date. (which i also gave it, in my query)
but they're still very new.
google, and such, have had over 2 decades to refine their search etc. and to be honest i think the issue is its not giving you "generic" results. its trying to specify the results based on your previous searches etc. which means it can be difficult to find new info...
as for chatgpt ..
i use chatgpt quite often to summarize a large blob of text, in a simple manner, or give me code snippets for generic stuff im too lazy to write. test-data as well. or just "facts" about some topic. simple stuff.
chatgpt works by looking at your query, and then based on that, it tries to find the queries "key words" and fetches some result based on that. It only gives you one result. and as we've all tried when searching the internet, often times the list of results will show stuff that is clearly not what we're looking for.
For simple coding it is a dream. Or like, shitty DNS errors that need to be sorted out because apparently you can't have 2 SPF records lol. I copy and pasted all of the records over and said WHAT IS WRONG lol, and it figured it out for me.
I get that some people don't like it, but... its not going anywhere.
I second that, it's been very useful for coding/debugging for me too. And the cool part is that it's only going to get better.
Exactly - this is the worst it will ever be.
Machine learning is here to stay. This is really just the beginning of mass market adoption for it, there's still a lot of room for the tech to grow.
I really don't think your representation is fair. For Chat gpt at least, it will sometimes be wrong, it will sometimes make things up, but is an extremely useful tool for getting quick answers and meaningful insight into questions.
But if we know that it makes things up and gets things wrong, how can we trust any information it gives us? Fact-checking is one thing, but at that point, you might as well skip the LLM and just look the information up yourself.
At the end of the day you can't 100% trust anything you see on the internet. You have to think critically about the answers it gives you and cross reference it against other sources. No different than when evaluating search results, which can also be wrong. But it's a great starting point.
It's a lot easier to get a thorough and concise answer from chat gpt and double check it than it is to wade through a search engine.
I think you vastly underestimate the impact machine learning and large language models are going to have on our society. It's like saying "I really can’t wait for the Smartphone trend to die" in 2007. Or "I really can’t wait for the Google trend to die" in 2000.
All aspects of our lives are going to be infiltrated by machine learning and large language models. Personal organization, work, grocery shopping, entertainment... Everything!
The hype around it is pretty insufferable though, in a way neither of the other examples you gave had.
The closest example I can think of is NFTs.
I don't think it'll go the way of NFTs, but it's also going to disappoint people because it's promising to be everything for everyone.
As far as I'm concern it's a very powerful search assistant and especially for bridging the gap between regular and power users - being able to use natural language is a game changer.
I also found it great when getting set up with a new piece of SW, and rephrasing or summarising text on general topics. It's not so good for parsing specialist information even when asked for specific items.
I'm looking forward to seeing what other tools people build with it but thus far I've been thoroughly... whelmed.
Speaking from personal experience, it was obvious NFTs would go nowhere and large language models would succeed. They've both been hyped by the public, but one of them has the utility to back up the hype and the other doesn't.
I use chat gpt all the time. I use it at work, i use it for looking up recipes, I use it to help with DIY projects around the house, and I use it to just get more information about a niche topic. The results are catered specifically to me and my question, and they're better than a search engine. This tech is only going to get more common from here.
And no matter how well GPT will or won't work, we shouldn't forget who we're dealing with here. I wholehardly trust Microsoft to completely screw up and shit the bed once they got a (semi) monopoly on AI assistants. Google worked pretty well for a very long time until they got too cocky, same with Internet Explorer from Microsoft. History will repeat itself and GPT will become shit one way or antoher.
Its more like "As an ai llm, 2+2=4. Now invest 500 billion in my creators company."
in the same way that infinite monkeys will replace Shakespeare, maybe.
(this is not meant to imply that reddit posts/comments are praiseworthy works of literature. although obviously, they are.)
I didn't realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It's just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.
I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.
What's even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don't even work half the time these days.
If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it's safe to assume chat GPT's training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.
That would explain why it's all written like wiki content edited by a redditor.
Fuuuuuuck... Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with.. "EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt... tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR"
That'd be so damn annoying haha
Like that story of a child saying "remember to like and subscribe" at bedtime because she thought that was the words for goodbye
Wait is that some kid IRL? Or we talking about gpt speaking as a child?
actual kid, supposedly.
A bit like kids trying to swipe to scroll or zoom on a printed magazine article or book (to be fair, I've done that too!)
Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.
Months? You mean weeks.
Are you saying they were going to... regReddit?
First they will rename it few times, Reddit+, RedditOut, RedditWave then merge it will Google Groups wait for a year and then pull the plug.
I actually think Google has a long term plan to buyout Reddit. Google Groups failed miserably several years ago, so Google would LOVE to own a mature social media platform.
The former, despised owner gets to cash out. And Forbes and WSJ will write glowing articles about how Google "saved" Reddit. (Narrator: what's left of Reddit will get unbelievably sh*tty. And then it will die, like Google Groups).
Google Perspectives will highlight results from Quora? That's the last thing I want.
Dear God, i hope that's not true. Quora answer quality is probably worse than Yahoo answers; at least those were just shit posts, 90% of Quora answers are ads by the creator of some project in my experience
Yeah the quora answers are just advertising
Even when someone was asking about something for free that they'd not have to pay for some fucking idiot would come in selling something
It's typically either that or some conspiracy theorist screeching about how the Uyghur genocide is a CIA psyop or that the (((psychopaths))) are trying to take over the world or something. Or some random who has little to no experience in a subject acting like they know everything about it. Or some abuser who should be on a watchlist who thinks that children axiomatically evil until the evil is beaten out of them. Those people are terrifying. ~Nai
For real. Looks like speedrunning digging one owns grave is becoming hella popular in silicon valley as of late. Everyone wants to set a new record.
And TikTok. They've listed that one, too.
TikTok? Really Google?!
It is astounding how reliant some mega corporations are on what people do for free. If people coordinated they could do serious harm to Google bottom line.
Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can't get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.
The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I'm aware that it could years and that's only if the fediverse picks up well enough.
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It's so accurate it hurts me
That's way too straight forward for Kojima. You need at least 3 more hours of cutscenes.
Back in the early Sega Genesis days, Sega used to send out hints for games if you wrote and asked them. My favorite was for the game Last Battle (a Fist of the North Star game in the JP market), the tips for several levels simply said "Punch and kick your enemy on your way towards victory".
This is fair. GameFAQs is still this if I look something up for a pre-2010 game a lot of the time.
A few weeks ago, when things started to get heated, I had the reflex of copying all the helpful posts I made amd putting them on my own knowledge base in case something goes wrong with reddit. I can always put them somewhere since I've secured that info on my own server.
Maybe you should put them here somewhere
DuckDuckGo has great results IMO
I find DDG has the same garbage AI generated content as Google. Also, search operators have been broken on DDG for years
Search operators? Quotes and dashes?
Yes
They work for me
Probably going to be different experiences depending on what you are searching for.
DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it's not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn't going to cut it.
Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.
Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.
Ive started going to chatgpt to help me out with errors i dont understand and google hasnt helped with
Same, it helps with a lot of issues and even skips the part where people are questioning why you even want to know that and how you're doing it the wrong way and should do their way
Yesssss, me too. And often it gets to the right response on the first try which is the ultimate timesaver. This is why Google may be toast unless they can figure out how to integrate this.
The only caveat is that sometimes Chatgpt just hallucinates an answer or it's incomplete, so you need a bit more dead reckoning to make sure you're going the right way.
I liked them well enough, but recently is it just me or it seems like every time I reload a search by simply going back to the page, the ranking of the results immediately changes?
That is supper annoying to me, as now I can't keep track of the results I opened easily
This happens sometimes if you search for a new non-cached search phrase. It'll give you a couple pages, then update it's index and when you go back you're on the updated index.
Interesting, but how come it never did that before? Did I just not notice?
I don't know. I've noticed it happening for the last few months. Maybe they have the ability to update caches faster now and want to give the most fresh results. It can be irritating if you're like me and like to click a result and then go back and open a bunch of results in new tabs.
Sounds plausible yeah, so I haven't gone crazy haha, it really is annoying since usually the new results are also worse than the first batch in my experience. Guess I'll just pick up the habit of opening everything in a new tab from the get go
FWIW I thought the same. Seems like every search engine turns to doo with time.
Would be a great moment for a great open source search engine to take everyone by storm, well, like that's ever gonna happen...
That doesn't happen to me. When I go back, I see the same links, but the ones I clicked are in purple.
Well it doesn't always happen to be fair, but I'm seeing it pretty often
DDG mostly gets its results from bing
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
True, but they also have their own crawler. Bing is also very bad for privacy.
I tried them last year, but I kept not getting what I wanted compared to Google. Will have to try again.
Google search is a pain from a year ago.
When searching for something on Google, you should include terms like “Reddit”, “superuser”, “Stack Overflow”, etc., to get better results. Because if you don't include them, the first page of Google looks like a bot-generated page. Of course, Google are ‘not quite happy’.
It's really frustrating how much blatantly AI-written shit is at the top of every Google search nowadays.
Like, you Google "how to install a door" and you find an article that's like
"Here's how you install a door. Installing a door is really easy when you know how This guide will tell you how to install a door on ten easy steps. The first step in installing your door is to pick a door at the store." It repeats the title of the article everyother damn sentence, and takes FOREVER to get to a useful point. And sometimes they give flat out incorrect advice.
Then, you check the urland it's something like "techbuiz.com" and you've never even heard of this shit before, why the hellisit the top indexed result?
This isn't a problem to do with the reddit blackout at all, it's the enshittification of Google algorithm. They sell those top slots to the highest bidder, it's no longer about who actually has relevant information about the thing you searched for, it's about who had just enough matching keywords AND gave Google money to put up top.
Of course Google blames other sites, like reddit. It makes up all kinds of bullshit to obfuscate what they are doing, and sin e they have a proprietary algorithm nobody can prove that they are doing what I described above. But it's so blatantly obvious that they are that it's nearly insulting that they keep pretending they aren't.
Random vaguely relevant confession: Every time I see "RDR2," I misread it as R2D2.
We all do.
At that point YouTube is might only be the next best thing for that...
…where you run into a problem similar to the one described in the original comment. You’ll get twenty minutes of useless filler because the youtuber wants to make their video long enough to monetize, while also advertising themselves because they want you to become a follower.
It may not be AI generated text, but the end result is the same: an annoying waste of time. Good luck finding a quick, direct answer to a simple question.
Idk, maybe that’s the case for ppl covering popular games, but droves of the videos I’ve searched up for old/obscure games are short and to the point.
Also, while annoying, at least with YouTube the item you’re looking for is SOMEWHERE in the video. Google just fails to provide even breadcrumbs that the user can follow to an answer most of the time now.
"Here are 4 results for Moose brand t-shirts and an article about Donald Trump insulting a moose. If you click 'more results' we will show you product links for desk lamps since we know you were looking to buy one of those last week."
Google used to punish sites that used more than 3.5% keyword density, but it seems that they stopped doing that at some point. It's interesting that with every update to their algorithm their results have become less reliable, yet more profitable for them. By interesting I mean frustrating.
Yep now Google is 99% useless. Bunch of AI written nonsense
SEO scammers are already figuring out how to game Google's new Perspectives thing: https://searchengineland.com/optimize-content-google-perspectives-427876
I know this because when I Googled for, "Google Perspectives" Google gave me that URL with all the tips & tricks on how to game it 🙄
The natural degredation of google just comes down to the incredibly stupid levels of search engine optimization and ads. Most articles in particular are so terrible, I'm convinced a lot of them are just written by bots. What I want are answers actually written by humans on discussion boards with a rating system. That's what made me add "reddit" to the end of everything. Genuine humans, NOT people being paid to write articles or ads.
Not necessarily by bots, but a lot of product-related articles - say, "What's the best washing machine?" or "What's the best hot wire cutter?" or anything like that - will have multiple near-identical articles across multiple websites with links for each product generating a kickback for the author. Whereas Reddit was just people talking.
Articles like that are probably starting to be written by AI for sure though. You could write an article on every type of product that way, and get kickbacks from all of them, all while depriving people of actual useful info. Woo, innovation!
How many meeting did it take? Meddeling managers with sparkly eyes and a powerpoint sending the business into a doom loop and giving themselves a POB and a payraise.
This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.
Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol
Google has a better search algorithm buried somewhere deep in their behemoth of a codebase, but you have to specify the site to get around all of the damn ads and shitty articles.
it's weird that all these articles talk about this only being a problem for people who put "reddit" in the URL; I never do that, and 90% of the time when I search Google for something (especially something about a video game), the first 5 or so results are all from reddit anyway.
Are you logged in when searching? Probably reddit just has the best answers for your questions.
But for newly released games reddit is most often the best source in my experience.
Google search has been pretty weak for awhile now. I/O spoke a lot of big talk about bring generative AI into search, but from my part of the world it still seems the same.
Ai isn't going to fix the first page being all ads, that's a business decision.
If they wanted to return actual content they could do that without AI.
that's not even close to the issue, though – Google Search fell because of SEO pushing irrelevant auto-generated garbage towards the top.
I think it's both - the SEO fight as well as the explosion of ads on Page 1. Throw in a dash of average-user search optimization (vs a flatter term-based search) and you've got Googles downfall in a nutshell.
While we are fixing things Google, can we also not have the first 20 results be YouTube videos that are 30 minutes long, when the answer I want is typically a sentence or two....?
im adding "-youtube" to searches for a long time. The amount of Clickbaitvideos, no matter what you are searching for, is just crazy.
remember, when the execs of an evilcorp announce that their users are unhappy with something, it usually means that the execs are unhappy with something (and it's usually their profit margin)
It would be cheaper for google to just buy reddit, remove the adds and open the api's again.
Having relevent search results is priceless.
Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.
Knowing google they would buy it, release a big roadmap of plans for the website and then shut it down the next day.
Either that or announce a replacement app with 50% of the features removed and then kill off the original just because
lol, this is google we're talking about
More realistic is having to watch 2 unskippable 15 second ads before you can see the post
3, if you're on a popular sub.
This would low-key be a great way to have your very own sweet sweet human contributed ML-data pipeline, and a pretty high quality community moderated one at that. Give access to 3rd party devs and lock all competing ML techs out. [r word] is valued at $10 billion (fucking lol) but I bet that gutless scumbag sp*z would fold for less than 10% of that if he has more than two braincells to rub together.
Big part of me hopes Google's myopic corporatised ass never sees the opportunity and we rebuild the mf free internet from here on out.
LOL, Google already did that once, literally two decades ago. Remember Google Groups?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2800078/google-acquires-usenet-archive-from-deja-com.html
That's a big "if"
Eh, if you only have two braincells, you aren't capable of narcissism. Spez's problem isn't lack of braincells in general but lacking braincells in empathy, critical thinking and whichever brain part gives rise to theory of mind.
I thought his problem is he's just a giant bag of smashed asshole.
Maybe, but like I and I'm sure many others think, not going back regardless. Kbin is it.
Yeah, no kidding. Google's been getting lazy with its search results. The first dozen hits on most Google searches are either YouTube or Reddit results.
Oh so it's not only me. 15 minutes of video, 3 ads, to get some information that I cannot copy paste with distractions and entertainment, when all I was looking for was the equivalent of half A4 page of text.
I don't blame the creators, to be clear, but I blame who created the economical conditions that made this happen.
And this is why it's objectively moral and ethically good to use ublock.
uBlock Origin is better. I'm pretty sure uBlock sold out to that Better Ads Commission thing. ~Nai
Imagine an encyclopedia.
Now imagine I own the encyclopedia, and Walmart offers me money.
So i paste Walmart's Xmas catalogue pages in between the useful information in the encyclopedia. You ask about frog facts, you get frog pajamas. You try to look up cultural information and get travel ticket prices. You never planned on purchasing anything, and you are too poor too anyway. But somehow I and Walmart make money off of your displeasure.
This is ad revenue. This is the modern economy. Its a sham. Its an infinite money go brrrttt machine for billionaires.
Enshitification.
I hope the articles and us talking about it so much can get some scientist to do a study about this!
What immediately comes to mind: how long does enshittification take to progress through the stages typically? Is there any company owned platforms who managed to avoid enshittification? What percentage? Is practicing enshittification more profitable and thus pushing out companies who don‘t do it? If yes, how much more profitable?
I need some cold and hard facts cause there is still an amount of denial around even these parts, which perhaps scientific research could help with.
Wow, one meaningless, entirely replaceable piece of shit brought two giant companies to their knees. Good job, capitalism. Such a fragile snowflake.
I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you'd eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I'm grateful.
I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.
No, it was the Google that failed me.
I've noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.
Agree. Something definitely changed in the last two years. It's unbelievably bad now, to the point where I give up if the answer isn't among the first 3 results. It's insane.
As others mentioned, Google just straight up ignores most of my quotes and excludes and just shows me what it wants to. Shockingly bad, I remember a time when if I couldn't find something, it was my own failing.
edit: this is with ad-blockers etc btw. Imagine using Google raw, must give you e-AIDS
Yes it had been slowly declining into corporate-centric results but in the past couple of years it's like... almost incomprehensible.
Like what is it even trying to do? On some searches half the results are bizarre AI scraper sites with nonsense content.
I’ve noticed the degradation of google search since they introduced search suggestion completions. That is forever the timemark (landmark for time?) in my mind of the enshittification of google search.
Verbatim search is the only way to use it anymore. I changed that to the default when doing address bar searches.
I've stopped using it. I now bounce around alternatives but Kagi is the best and my go to now. Here are some alternatives to consider:
Thank you for bringing up Kagi, I had never heard of it before. An intriguing idea for sure and I am not averse to paying for searches, but as a serial Google-fu practitioner $10/month for 1000 searches (1.5c per search after) seems quite steep to me. Some days I swear that would last me 24 hours at most. I need to start tracking that I think.
I do however applaud the seeming transparency on their website. It may or may not be for me, but if they really plan to operate how they lay out on their website, it truly is a breath of fresh air and I wish them luck.
Just seeing this for the first time also, but one of the features they list is it looks like you can "block or boost" domains in your search results. I miss when Google let you block domains for results, so this would be a killer feature for me. I don't mind paying, but just the pricing seems a bit odd. I could see myself paying $5 per month for unlimited searches, not sure if 300 or 1000 is enough, $25 per month for unlimited is crazy.
After using a search engine with this functionality, I quickly realised how many domains I never wanted to see again, and how many I valued. Google has been promoting garbage domains for so many years now because they pay better than the quality sites. The algorithm goes both ways, as in, "show me more," and, "show me less." To make the bad ones disappear, you'd need a notepad next to your Google window with a list of dozens of domains you don't like to append to every query you make. Unfortunately Google doesn't offer you the ability to positively bias domains because they'd earn less. So you'll still see the first few pages of garbage, depending on your search.
Comparing search engines is not easy. I went down the rabbit hole and concluded Kagi is the best right now. A search engine has one primary function. Everything else is icing. That is to find the best result as fast as possible. As their incentive is to find you the best result, not the result which pays Google the most. I find relevant results more often, and much less spam. That's the value proposition.
They also have great features like the ability to block and rank domains, and a kind of filter feature which focuses on certain kinds of information you're looking for.
As for ranking, no search engine uses humans to rank results. There are billions more pages going online every day. It would take the entire world's population working on nothing but that to accomplish. So the magic is in the algorithm and how data sources are combined. As above, Kagi's motivation is to provide good results, and I think they're succeeding. I'm sure Google could provide amazing results to us, but that's not profitable. Of course, humans review the algorithms and test them and improve them, and Kagi appears very good at this.
FYI they have a $5 tier which includes 300 searches a month, and this is enough to cover most users. You might be surprised if you actually track your habits over time. You could start on that tier and upgrade if it's insufficient.
Google is the reason recipe websites are notoriously bad. They try so hard to keep you on the website long enough for ads to work and for Google to think you like staying at that website and so on.
So that's why we have 20 paragraphs of life stories before each recipe with 10 add shoved in between them, 6 adds on the left and on the right of the page, ads at the top, and so on. You spend so long trying to find the recipe, it's a win for all the ads that you're staying on.
And it's a shame because obviously the smaller blogs don't WANT to do that but they have to in order to have any chance to compete with major conglomerate corporate recipe websites.
I don't know if I'm ready for kagi yet... But it's tempting and definitely something I'm considering.
It is SHOCKINGLY bad to search for recipes now. To the degree I don't even bother or I use ChatGPT now. Google is going to have their lunch eaten by others if this keeps up.
I thought I make a ton of searches too (and yeah apparently I do vs normal internet user) but when I tracked my usage it turned out to be around 30-40 searches / day. So, it's not that bad. ATM I still have Ecosia as the default search engine and when it fails to turn up good results I rerun the search with Kagi (which is indeed quite a bit better). So far I seem to use Kagi like 1-3 times a day so it's not that bad.
which one you think would be the best for tech support ? :,(
I've been using Kagi for ~6-9 months, as a developer. Gives satisfying results and I never feel the need to go back to Google. When I was using DDG, I always went back too Google to get better results.
Say the execs of the company who has ruined the internet with seo crap.
I'm genuinely curious, what's the alternative? Google tries to rank the "best" results, so naturally people try to game that system. How do you design a search engine in such a way that you get the better results without manipulation?
DDG tries to help with bangs etc
Try Kagi
I wasn't asking for alternatives to Google, I was asking for alternatives to the solution Google offers. Google is the largest provider, so all the SEO is focussed on them - if an alternative became the biggest provider, people would target them instead.
So if Google is to blame for their solution, what is the alternative solution?
I think the solution here would have something to do with micro-transactions. For whatever reason, whether it being technical or social or else, it has never worked. But in an alternative internet where you can pay content creatores gradually as you traverse the net, gatekeeprs such as google would be less important, since they are not the only ones who can pay.
Projects such as search.marginalia.nu/ are also an excellent place to look, which yield limited but quality results.
You're basically describing the concept behind web3, but that's a dirty word now due to greed from capitalists and environmental concerns from... environmentalists. (The environmental concerns being reasonable concerns, but they're often overstated / people think it's all as bad as Bitcoin.) Web3 could've meant seizing the means of entertainment production by the people producing the content. Maybe it still can, but it doesn't look like it.
unfortunately true. however I'm in no way into web3 hype. it tries to replace traditional financing system with a new one, which is imo as central and doesn't want to take responsibility for anything (and has been a fertile ground for get rich quick and ponzi schemes).
so I didn't mean crypto in anyway.
I don't use the feature myself, but Brave Browser has something like this. You can opt in to this token system and you earn tokens as you view their non targeted ads, which can then be "spent" to give content creators whatever couple pennies (I assume) those tokens equate to.
It's more like "a free lunch every few months" than just pennies. I think I've earned like $40 over a year or two. Not going to make your rich by any means, but a decent incentive.
I guess with inflation that's more like a free lunch every year lol
Super interesting the trick we all thought was a secret, stopped working, and now executives from one of the worlds biggest companies are having trouble as a result lol
I've started using DDG as defacto since the last 3 months. Use Google search only for sports updates because they've good widgets for those.
I gave an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn't been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.
I don't like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it'll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I'm using from them and it's working out I'm kinda okay with that.
If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I'll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.
You might want to give Searx a shot. It's a FOSS, self-hosted (with several public instances) search engine that can pull results from several other search providers while stripping ads/tracking/personal data.
I've been using DDG for a few years now. Occasionally when I can't get the results I need there I try a !g search to see if Google will give better results. They never do. I have no idea where this "DDG search results are bad" argument comes from.
Personal experience, and having a much better experience after switching to Startpage
Try Brave search... It's so underrated. They have made big improvements in the last few months. As a long time Googler I use brave about 98% of the time now and have it set as my default. I never did like DDG but brave actually gives quality relevant results.
People will just have to start adding lemmy instead :)
Better yet, add "fediverse".
Sadly, Google Search doesn't seem to index Lemmy instances the way it does Reddit.
Sure, you can add "site: lemmy.world" to your search strings, but that mostly returns links to community or user feeds that mention your search terms, not links to the actual posts. And it doesn't group the results together for convenience, the way it does for Reddit.
Hopefully, this will change as Lemmy becomes more popular. We could also outright ask Google to start treating Lemmy this way.
Let's just say that my use of the Wayback Machine is up by 1000% since the blackout started
I read half this article and just thought, “yeah no shit.” I swear Google conditioned everyone to just settle for dumb answers.
It’s amazing how few people understand how SEM works or the fact that Google makes services for freely available in order to build a profile on you and sell targeted ad space. The algorithm is tuned to for clicks. The amount of sponsored results and crappy listicles you need to scroll through is unreal. “Reddit” was the shortcut to opinions outside of sponsored influencers with affiliate links… but I’m sure TikTok and YouTube will fill that void just fine.
I would love it if they built an extensive profile on me and used that to serve results but they don't. Any time there is any commercial interest in what I am searching for it forgets everything and just spews out whatever bullshit the highest bidder wants me to see.
Current way to search on google for me is: Add reddit to search string, and set data to before may 1st 2023 Copy link suggested by google and change reddit to reveddit or any of the alternatives there
Results will go out of date but maybe this will tide me over until a good lemmy search is up and running.
Most of the time you can just click the 3 dots at the side of the search result and then click the "Cached" button on the bottom of the popup.
I'm not shocked whatsoever. Especially as of a few months ago, I only get SEO spam around 80% of the time, unless I stick [r word] in front of my query. It's not even just Google or just [r word] going to shit, I can see the internet of just 10 years ago dying in front of my eyes.
My biggest concern with the downfall or even small proportional depopulation of Reddit is 100% going to be /r/sysadmin and /r/msp not being the best place to determine if there is an actual outage in progress for various cloud based IT services. I mean, it's a real, legit concern to worry over if you're in IT.
Lemmy has one comm for Dev/Ops I think but not the convenience of having a place for network guys, sysadmins, and programmers all in different spots.
We've been not happy with google search for years(Because it is garbage now) and it has very little to do with Reddit.
Users weren't happy with the search results before the blackout either, and "quite" has no part in it. Google traded quality results for revenue over a decade ago... right about the time they changed their Don't Be Evil motto.
Hahahahhahahahah
That's pathetically laughable for google
I'm "not quite happy" with the current state of Google, either. What are you going to do about that? You used to be a good search engine... what the hell happened?
If Google makes changes that stop people from clicking through to reddit due to the protests then the protests will have likely done more lasting damage than anyone imagined.
If they did they'd probably just scuttle it after a few years. It's what they do.
In that case, I hope they buy it.
Reddit wave +
Google has not been shy about grabbing content from other sites and showing it directly on their search page.
I imagine part of their frustration is that the technical issue of caching and showing relevant reddit/stackexchange/y!answers in their search results is a solved problem, but they're being held back by pesky legal and business constraints, and therefore are forced to remain vulnerable to external events.
The obsession with giving people results directly in the search page was a huge mistake on their part. Content quality is just decreasing, people get wrong answers to questions they would have otherwise answered easily and accurately by reading an article on a website rather than a sentence taken out of context.
And for businesses to make it to the stupid Google box, they have to write articles formatted not for human eyes or cognition, but for SEO.
Thus Google is one of the main drives of quality decreasing online. Their unhealthy practices forces everyone to write dumb shit (like those Q&A or click bait articles) in order to have some kind of platform or presence.
I've been using qwant for a couple years now without any issue. It mainly uses Bing as a backend.
This is a good change as it may expand to more sites. I'm one of those users that used reddit in query often looking for opinions or reviews. We should get Lemmy on the list.
It feels absolutely nutty that it's gone from
to
Google used to be synonymous with reliable results and Reddit as the awkward website you barely spoke about. Now you need to use reddit to find proper results because the slow bleeding that is SEO has screwed over Google.
What search engine are you guys using now? Any workaround?
That was one of the first things that I thought about. People can't affix "Reddit" to their Google searches in good faith anymore, so what is the next most reliable community?
Google today reminds me of what AltaVista became before Google. ChatGPT is amazing but now it and other LLMs are being used to generate crap content. I fear that the incestuous nature of AI training on AI may lead to “inbreeding” and all the problems that brings with it.
Boo fucking hoo
"people come very close to realizing what public services are" - texas, probably
No shit lol
Why do they call stuff "Googling" as it was a real word, if Google is failing at being a search engine?
Big suprise! I'm this close to Uninstaller reddit.
I discovered the kagi search engine last week and it's so much better. No ads. I can move favored sites up or pin them in the search results.
Edit: Found out they only allow 100 searches for free, after that it's a paid monthly subscription. So ignore my previous advice...
Who still uses Google in 2023
What do you use? Bing? Yahoo?
I have never heard of these other ones, only DDG, I'll give them a try! Thanks!
https://www.duckduckgo.com
Is it any good? I haven't used it in ages. Last time I used it was a few years ago, and it kept returning bad results.
I've been using DDG pretty much exclusively for the past couple years now, so yes it works just fine. If you want to see what another search engine would have shown you, you can use a "bang" , and search wikipedia or reddit for example. Pretty useful !
Holy shit bangs are amazing. I'll need to add this to my daily use. Consciously remind myself to do it until it becomes habit. Thanks!
I've never heard of this, but if you want to see that other search engine's results consistently, there's no advantage to this is there?
duckduckgo.com for images
search.brave.com for everything else
I find that brave still has the same problem as google a lot of the times though. If I search for info about something in Zelda for instance I get the same useless IGN and Gamerant articles rather than a wiki page or actually useful information.
I have yet to find a search engine that doesn't have this problem.
Duckduckgo mainly.
Startpage still seem to give me good search results despite using Google index itself. I guess a lack filter bubble have its own benefits.