What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it’s own way i feel…
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I need an engine where if I put something in quotes it appears on the site, visible to the human eye. sure sure it can ignore case, but otherwise the damn word or phrase should be there.
This is such a simple ask and yet it seems almost impossible with modern search engines. They all seem to insist on second-guessing you. It’s a lack of respect for the user: “We know you are dumb but don’t worry, we will figure out what you really mean. Oh and don’t forget to watch your ads.”
My other pet-peeve is that they will almost never admit that maybe they just don’t have any good hits for the query. They insist on pushing some irrelevant crap in your face instead. I guess it comes down to needing to show the user something so that they can mix in those ads.
I need an engine where if I put something in quotes it appears on the site, visible to the human eye
I can confirm this works on Kagi:
Google is definitely iffy for me, which is why I’ve been bouncing between alternates. A lot of people like to complain about how google is filled with ads and spam results like Pinterest, but even then it just doesn’t really seem to give accurate results anymore, and even when results are accurate it’s very surface level. From what I found, it loves to push listicle articles and such when googling a new topic, as opposed to say, Wikipedia or an encyclopedia article. Like if I search about Barbie, I’ll probably get a bunch of ScreenRant-esque articles before I get the IMDB page. There have been dozens of instances of me searching for controls for video games and getting clickbait-y articles, some of which barely even make an attempt to answer the question, before getting an IGN or GameFaqs article that’s to-the-point and answers my fucking question.
There are definitely better search engines out there, but they all have their own flaws. DuckDuckGo is pretty bare bones and can also give poor results if your search is too vague. You have to adapt to that one. Others like Brave have AI to help out with summaries and stuff, but Brave’s management is “problematic” and so some people might not want to support them.
TL;DR: on google, not only is there ads and spam, but it’s just hard to find answers anymore. Everything is clickbait. And with other options, they are good but they also have their own major flaws that some might find unappealing.
Exactly, I’ve noticed this over the past few months, actual relevant results are being pushed much further down the stack.
If you want to explore alternatives, I’ve been using SearXNG, a so-called “metasearch engine”, where you can get a combination of various search engine results, based on your preferences. It’s pretty good, when it works (it tends to get rate-limited fairly often… or at least some of its results / search engines do, which can get annoying).
You can also selfhost SearxNG with modest hardware and side step the rate limits. I love it. Happy to answer any questions
Just set this up on my Unraid server and it’s amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.
Just to help me understand: Why is it that when I try the same search on different instances of this, I get very different search results?
This would depend on the search engines enabled and/or the default language/country set (if any) for that particular instance, you can find those in the settings of the instance itself (and enable/disable whichever you’re most interested in, as well as a few other relevant settings).
Woah thank you for this!!
SEO and AI-generated clickbait have basically ruined most search engines. I’ve yet to find one that can really tackle this properly. I believe Kagi offers higher quality results but I can’t really verify that myself as I don’t have an account with them.
kagi seems very enticing to me, but man thats expensive… anyone here use it?
I’m still on my trial period but I think I’m going to pay when it runs out, I’ve been really happy with it so far. I think it’s saved me a good chunk of time at work I would have wasted digging through Google SEO crap so it feels like it’s worth spending a few bucks on.
I have the $10/mo account but I’ll disagree with @mrmanager@lemmy.today that it’s worth the money.
Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t go back to Google/DDG, but while I can afford Kagi’s monthly cost I don’t believe that everyone can, nor do I think it’s an appropriate cost for a search engine.
I feel like I am an average search user, and I easily burn through 1000 searches a month. I’ll possibly be upgrading to the $25/mo unlimited account.
If you’re used to doing conversion searches like “100 USD in EUR”, or “2.5g in oz”, or even “20 * 12%” - you get charged for each of those. That doesn’t seem so reasonable to me.
I also considered Kagi a bit and I think it might work if I start to change my search behavior. I got too used to abusing search engines as a quicker way to open websites (I could use bookmarks for that) or for bangs (I could use the browser itself for that).
If I managed to untrain myself from this and start using tools for their core-purpose, the limits of Kagi might indeed be more than enough. But currently I am too lazy for such a deep change in my daily workflows.
If I managed to untrain myself from this and start using tools for their core-purpose, the limits of Kagi might indeed be more than enough. But currently I am too lazy for such a deep change in my daily workflows.
Exactly - exactly my problem. And why I’m probably going to reluctantly upgrade to the $25/mo unlimited. It just irks me that I feel like I’m getting ripped off :P
Imagine installing and opening a separate units conversions app just to find something that used to be an instant search away.
Well for unit conversion I have a plugin for ulauncher. That is even quicker than having to alt+tab into the browser. So THAT particular problem isn’t one of mine :-)
It hasn’t worked for a while. Even a year ago it was considerably better.
I can’t believe it, but Bing is now the better search engine. What is happening to the world?!
MBAs and VCs
I agree! I find myself amazed that I’m binging now when for so long that was a joke.
Google is absolutely useless now, nothing but SOE farmed rubbish.
It’s become completely unusable.
I’ve moved over to Kagi 100%
It’s well worth the money for the amount of control I have over my experience. Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome
I like the idea of Kagi a lot, but the pricing structure is not yet the right one for me. I fully support the idea of paying for search - I paid for Neeva and now that this has shut down I pay for Brave Search Premium. But I despise having limits, that’s a mental burden I don’t want. And with Kagi that would mean I have to pay $25 a month, and that’s not worth it for me.
You’re not limited to a set amount of searches if you pick a cheaper Kagi plan… the plan is just for how many are pre-paid. You’d have to do six times the pre-paid number of searches on the $5 plan to get billed $25, so there’s no point in paying $25 monthly unless you’re actually doing thousands of searches every month.
But either way, there is no limit.
Idk, that might even be worse imo. I don’t want to go back to the days of surprise bills like you’d get because you went over your alotted minutes/texts/GBs, or to have to think about whether or not a particular search is worth $.
The typical surprise bill would still be a lot less than your monthly payment for the infinite searches option. You probably aren’t going to unknowingly perform several thousand more searches than you normally do without noticing it.
Anyway, your other option is to scroll through infinite ads trying to find the few actual search results.
Pick your poison.
Never heard of Kagi but it does sound I intriguing.
Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome
I’ve never heard of Kagi, but yeah, those features sound like a godsend. I’d love it if you could have that on a search engine that isn’t pay to use.
I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.
And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.
I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.
It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.
But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.
To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.
It’s complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for “Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me”. The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don’t even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It’s horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.
Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.
And God forbid you look for anything involving troubleshooting your home network. Good luck sorting through pages and pages of the same copy and pasted article telling you how to restart your router.
“Have you tried port forwarding? Here’s some vague results and a screenshot of a netgear gateway page from 2006.”
I’ve noticed this even when trying to find the name of a song. I used to be able to search:
lyrics “a specific part of the song I remember” whatever random words I can remember out of order
and it would very reliably find songs, even obscure ones. Now the only way it works is if I happen to remember part of the name of the song, usually it’s full of entries for the same popular song that has one word in the title that I included that is definitely not what I’m looking for.
It sounds stupid, but I really miss that working.
Google is one of the worst offenders, with constant effort to force you to login, sponsored links etc but it isn’t unique to them.
AI (or human) generated rubbish, optimised for SEO is making it harder and harder to find what you actually want. This isn’t entirely new, there has always been a battle but it does seem like now with the AI push they are winning and we (the users/consumers) are losing.
Google is almost impossible to use when I search for solutions to maths problems. The first few pages are dominated by those sites gaming Google’s algorithm and their articles usually don’t help.
Have you tried WolframAlpha? It can break down math problems and is a wealth of information for just about everything
I think google made the web worse with SEO. Sites have to be designed in ways that users and creators do not really care about so that they may show up in search results.
If I have a site about star trek and it has all the relevant information that the user is looking for, then do not derank my site because the text is not a specific length or whatever other unrelated stuff is there.
I think there are some things that are worth while, like I think https sites are preferred over http sites. I think that this is a good thing to promote.
I hate where the internet is right now.
Anyone trying to get information written by a human or decent benchmarks of CPUs is in for a real crap time.
Just tested i5 12400 vs i3 12100f and was met with results in this order:
- Userbenchmark
- Userbenchmark
- CPU-Monkey
- 3 shitty YouTube videos of obviously fake gameplay benchmarks (that’s a whole other thing on YouTube)
- Technical city
- cpubenchmark.net - the first kind of decent result as it’s from the people at passmark.
- versus (dot com)
- gadget versus
- pc Praha (dot cz)
- cpu-compare
- cpu-panda
The crap just goes on. SEO optimised lists of (at best) affiliate link laden spec sheets with no real information form an actual human.
At this point I get most of my CPU/GPU info from GN, HWUB, and derbauer.
It’s so annoying to look for it elsewhere.
I had the same experience when choosing between the Intel or AMD versions of a prebuilt. Went with Intel due to having comparatably better specs at the price. Theading is better on AMD (as a rule?) but I can only have so much fun running multiple VMs.
It sucks. I hope you got the best part.
What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore?
Depends what you’re searching for. For some searches I’ve given up on using it. For example I just purchased a new TV and one of the features wasn’t working. It took me several hours of Googling to figure out how to fix it — almost every result offered by Google didn’t contain an answer to my question.
Are there any better search engines?
ChatGPT works well for some searches. Especially if you pay for GPT-4.
It’s pretty impressive how ChatGPT is better than Google despite never being designed as a replacement for Google. I think when someone applies the same technology to a proper search product, the result will be really awesome. Time will tell who manages to pull that off - it might even be Google.
Why did the quality of search results go down?
The main issue, I think, is all the websites these days that exist exclusively to show banner ads. Many of them are packed with information that Google’s algorithm determines might be relevant to the user, but the algorithm is wrong.
The websites want you to click on an Ad, and you’re a lot more likely to click an Ad if you give up, don’t find what you’re looking for, and decide to buy a new weight loss gadget instead.
I’m sure part of the problem is Google itself is an ad company. A lot of the things they could do to fix this issue would harm their own revenue.
Google is broken because AI is making it obsolete. I bet in 10 years google will be a historical footnote.
You’re talking about the AI that provides accurate-sounding results but can’t fact-check and is also used to generate the kind of spam that’s constantly being pushed by search engines, right?
Not exactly. Stupid people with advanced tools make stupid outputs. Venture capital is pushing the propaganda sauce hard and a lot of stupid people are jumping on AI as a corporate trend. These are the idiots.
The tools are next level. We are on the edge of this tech becoming a really big deal. There are several research papers making breakthroughs regularly and making double digit percentile improvements on efficiency and accuracy. The reason it is a big deal is because you can have around 1/4 of the knowledge of the entire internet running on hardware as powerful as a current flagship phone. Sure it lies around 1/2 the time, but these are problems that are being solved. Like, the latest and greatest models are ancient history in a matter of 2-3 weeks. To be honest, have a casual conversation with an offline and uncensored LLM. You may know it is lying from time to time, but if you’re being objective, so are most humans you encounter under casual circumstances. The sociological function and potential value of this tech is pretty powerful medicine. Like if you need someone to talk to, or to talk out an issue in private, this is a way to make that happen.
The core limitation is that the problem is dramatically more complex than it was when Google started. The number of sites were smaller, there was much less dynamic content, and there wasn’t a sizable portion of the internet committed to an adversarial relationship with search engines forcing everyone else to go to the same extremes just to play catchup.
What this means is that you’re looking for answers in a much larger search space, and the indicators you used to use are much less reliable. You have more resources to try to balance that out, but there’s so much straight trash to weed through that it’s pretty difficult to do.
Seems to mostly work fine for me. However Google as a company is a fucking mess so doesn’t surprise me people have problems. I have had more problems with my Pixel 7 and Google Maps seems to be getting worse and worse.
My Google results change like the weather. Sometimes I can’t take it anymore and use Bing but quickly switch back as it’s worse. There’s no replacement yet, but you need more google Fu than ever before.
