I agree with you. It has gotten worse.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that's just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
EXPONENTIALLY worse.
Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.
It's not you. Google has been getting worse.
https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.
Kagi is pretty awesome
4get.ca
Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!
I legit had no clue what a Fumo plushie was 😵💫
It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.
I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.
Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there's not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
Funnily enough I've found using an LLM to parce the data, then cross checking it's source as well as my own sources to be superior to previous searches.
It's annoying to change the way you just mindlessly search, but if you're upset by it just mindlessly search, end of discussion.
The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.
Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.
Huh...Can't replicate that claim (though I would believe it happening)
On the 20th Sep. I asked my Google Home if it would be raining.
It responded that it would rain. I asked when it would rain.
Home responded with "Today it won't rain."
Like what? 5 seconds ago you said it would. No weather report reports rain. Where did you get the first response from??
And I could even replicate it (have it on video)
I can’t get it to repeat it either but it was definitely an ai auto response thing from google ai overview or whatever it’s called
Now it’s giving distance from burner and everything lol. It’s learning 👀
Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.
It’s both.
And the AI is trained on the shitty search results. It just parses them many times faster than a human reader can, which does at least make it better at getting to the fucking point. Once paid advertising is fully integrated with LLM, it will be as shitty and useless as traditional search. And then the entire world will collectively hop to the next trend so it can get hyper-monetized/enshittified, too.
My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
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Kagi is good. I’m very happy with it.
Yes, it is a premium service, but it really works well.
It is, and it's not just the search engines to blame.
The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn't pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.
Spam sites laden with key words and massive SEO to farm advertising dollars from clicks long predated AI
It doesnt help that big search engines like google have realized people will go as far as page 2 or 3 to find the results, so intentionally worsen their search results to increase ads being served.
It's not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.
Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every "product" they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It's not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.
I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).
There's an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you'll never see another Quora article again.
Idr the name of the extension - I'll check when I get home and follow up.
Follow-up?
Sorry, that was a LONG fuckin day. On call, and we had a couple addon surgeries go late.
Anyway, this one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/
I need to be more diligent about actually using it, if your search gives garbage in even like the first 5 hits, add those to your filter and it'll start to add up fast. This extension has only been on my radar for a few months, and it's already made a big difference - I'm in nursing school right now, and trying to look up info on the shit our profs are lecturing on invariably yields like 10 websites that are just cheaty test question databases that don't actually help you learn jack shit; and there's so much of that garbage that it makes finding actual info a challenge. Screening that bullshit out alone has been great!
10/10
It's probably uBlacklist, available on both Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers. Filters websites and results for search.
I'm going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or "AI" tools predating the LLMs we have now.
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