This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I haven't used Google for awhile now. It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
Do people not have ad blockers anymore?
That's not what we're talking about. Ad blockers don't do anything to fix Google's search algorithm
I love science, like experimentally observed science or at least practical theoretical science, but Youtube tries to shove every crackpot nonsense they can at me. I watch one political thing and now they try and shove every conservative propaganda they can at me. It feels like when I was young, the internet was too much for conservitives to understand and control....not anymore. What's the one true power conservatives have? Money. Now they're ether buying up social companies or their CEOs left right and center - or at least bringing tech leadership into the ultra-rich fold. Where they are winning without exception, is in isolating the majority of their voters. Now, there's no longer a shared reality and the divide seems to wide to close. Conservatives wanted brainwashed cult followers and did everything they could to make it happen. Now Idiocy seems far more real on the right with each passing year.
There's some theory on this and it goes beyond conservatives.
Once, the internet was small enough that whatever happened on it could be seen by most users. Now, things can go viral in one 'part' of the internet and people in other 'parts' would have no idea what was going on.
The solution to this is to recognize that the internet should be treated as more of a local place, where we interact with the communities and people we want while ignoring the ones we don't.
We can't expect "the internet" to share any overarching views because there are too many people from too many places online now.
Search engine are pretty much over. They ate themselves
SEO destroyed the search providers, and now that search is useless, seo has become useless.
It's almost like greed/the need to step on others to get ahead ruins everything or something.
Here's my theory... Google wants to artificially fuck up it's search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it's going to be doing that by giving it's own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that's my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people attempting to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
If other services like kagi can offer better results they should be able as well, right?
I think it's simply a question of what are Google's interests. Users doesn't pay anything to Google for the service, so that's not where Google's interests are. Advertisers pay Google, so that's where Google's interests are. Google has no interests to make the search better for users, they want to make it better for advertisers.
They still need to make the system appealing to users.
If users had higher standards, then Google would have to meet those standards or lose out on business.
I'm finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I'll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.
Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn't really exist anymore.
The problem is, you can't trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.
And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can't trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that's a coin flip.
OTOH, you also can't trust humans not to lie to you.
That's the coin flip.
The newer ones search the internet and generate from the results not their training and provide sources.
So that's not such a worry now.
Anyone who used ChatGPT for information and not text generation was always using it wrong.
Except people are using LLM to generate web pages on something to get clicks. Which means LLM's are training off of information generated by other LLM's. It's an ouroboros of fake information.
Oddly I prefer Bing because it'll cite the source!
I use Qwant for my searches. I find the results better than DDG. https://www.qwant.com/
Thanks for your visit
Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country.
And no way to set my country.
you could set your country with a vpn 😎
That's less than optimal, for a website that is to be used as a search engine.
Whoa. I did a search that would inevitably bring nothing but sponsored bullshit on Google - "best tires"
My results were cartalk, consumer reports, cnet, and the consumer insider.
Nary a national chain trying to sell me something in sight.
Aren't all of those sites just more adverts masquerading as information?
That's the biggest problem, can't even get straight data and ads separately. Now the articles are the ads, and SEO/adspace has made search results even less useful.
Comments are the ads now too.
I think they got removed from privacy guide unfortunately.
https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/342
I want to support a European based service, but unfortunately I have to stick with DDG for now.
I’m surprised in most posts I’ve read about this there wasn’t a mention of Yacy which is a P2P distributed indexer / search engine. It heavily focuses on privacy. I’ve used it in the past and it worked great for my use cases to bypass censorship. It’s still actively developed after all the years. Would definitely recommend it or try it out as an replacement. The installation and usage is fairy simply.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded.
After pouring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google's declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted.
Along with that, the researchers determined that all three search engines are prone to being gamed by large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns, and their efforts to subvert such manipulation through algorithm updates have, at best, "a temporary positive effect."
Google even claimed in 2022 that it was updating its algorithm to prioritize "people-first content," but as the researchers found, those efforts have been in vain as SEO experts and spam factories have simply figured out how to game the newest tweaks to the system.
Janek Bevendorff, research assistant at Leipzig University and an author on the paper, told The Register that it's hard to say whether there's an easy way out of the current online search predicament in which we find ourselves.
"Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now," Bevendorff said, but noted that "banning it entirely is probably not a solution," as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream.
The original article contains 748 words, the summary contains 242 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What is everyone else using instead?
I use DuckDuckGo, you can configure it as your default search engine in Firefox.
I find myself hitting the same issues with ddg as with Google. The 1st page trys to sell me the thing I want info on
I find google better than ddg the vast majority of the time... and google sucks
I use DDG when coding and generally find it to be a bit nicer, but from the article it sounds like they're prone to the same issues. Anecdotally, I have noticed non-code queries do seem to be similarly crap
ETA: You can set it as default in Chrome too, under Settings -> Search Engine
Searx. That it doesn’t ignore operators legitimately arouses me slightly.
I use DDG like others have mentioned, but I also like Perplexity, because it's not a chat like ChatGPT, it just answers queries without trying too hard to chat to you.
