Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything?

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overcast5348@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

An example of search engines failing me miserably last month:

I wanted to hire a photographer, so I started searching using keywords like “wedding photographer MAJOR_CITY_NAME”, “photography MCN”, “event photographer MCN”, etc. The top results I got were all mostly along the lines of “top ten wedding photographers in MCN” i.e. listicles with links to a few photographers who probably paid the listicle creator? There were maybe one or two links to a photographer’s website itself in the first page.

I’m okay with ignoring the first page of results and moving on to following pages. But rather than giving me individual photographer’s websites in subsequent pages, I started getting listicles for “top ten wedding photographers in OTHER_CITIES”. I’d click through multiple pages of results to find maybe 5 direct website links.

What actually helped me find a photographers eventually was entering the exact same key words on Instagram. Almost every single one of them that I found on Instagram had an excellent website and the city name, and their addresses were mentioned clearly on their websites. So, it wasn’t a case of them not having enough information on their website. It’s just that search engines chose to prioritise listcles of photographers from other cities rather than giving me links to individual websites of photographers in my own city.

In this case, I got lucky because photographers have a presence on Instagram which has a functional search engine. What if I want to find a plumber, or someone else? I’m forced to just trust a listicle creator because search engines don’t want to give away links to single purpose websites and only want to keep us on websites with a shit ton of content (that may or may not be what you need) and ads.

/rant

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