Google is now longer a search engine.
It’s a storefront.
Has Google’s search results drastically declined for anyone else?
Submitted 9 months ago by Aces@lemmy.today to [deleted]
Comments
fujiwood@lemmy.world 9 months ago
zaphod@feddit.de 9 months ago
The entire internet has drastically declined for me.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 months ago
Yeah, it’s not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they’re covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I’m not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
Google got outsmarted. I feel like there’s maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
TommySoda@lemmy.world 9 months ago
For literal months now because of ChatGPT and reddit, if you google “countries in Africa that start with the letter K” for the first two results Google will say that none exist.
So yes, I would say Google search results are getting worse.
brenno@lemmy.brennoflavio.com.br 9 months ago
Yes, and that’s why I switched to Kagi
rootsandcalluses@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi’s 100 free searches, and decided that it’s worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.
I don’t blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.
ozoned@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I stopped using it years ago because they were going downhill and still collecting your private information. I run my own SearXNG now. It proxies from multiple sources, no ads, no tracking. I really enjoy SearXNG as it’s mine.
Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Public instances
Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 9 months ago
I’d say site blocking is SearXNG’s main selling point. (I switched when it got recommended to me on Lemmy :-).) Blocking just a few annoyances (Amazon, Pinterest, etc) make the search results so much better and relevant.
Also, Google is plagued by censorship.
Lmaydev@programming.dev 9 months ago
100% the page ranking system is too easy to abuse. So a lot of garbage gets to the top of results.
But the internet is just too big to do proper index searches like the old days.
livus@kbin.social 9 months ago
Google sometimes tells me there were only 4 results (and none of them are the thing I'm searching). It's super annoying when it's something I know is online.
Atemu@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
It’s super annoying when it’s something I know is online.
That may also simply no longer be true. Things do disappear from the internet; quite often actually.
What’s the thing you were looking for? I want to try whether Kagi can dig it up.
Lanila@lemmy.world 9 months ago
YES
Cairden@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes it has. And it’s talked about all over Lemmy. Is there a circle jerk community on Lemmy?
panchzila@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It is getting tiresome. It seems the main lemmy communities are worse hiveminded than reddit.
Vlarbgersplah@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
It takes less effort to poison a smaller well.
x2XS2L0U@feddit.de 9 months ago
I use Google with modifiers like plus and minus, quotation marks and most importantly with uBlocklist. This way I can hide seo bullshit with a single click
GbyBE@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
If you like modifiers, privacy and no ads in your search, try out Kagi. Since you don’t pay with your data, you do pay with your money however, but I find it worth it.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Yeah, they’ve been getting progressively less useful. UBlock Origin helps but I feel like Google Search was much better in the past.
I saw an article on a technology Lemmy the other day that showed how Google was pretty much helping to make sure you get shitty results. I’ll have to see if I can find it and link it.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I haven’t used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months
yoz@aussie.zone 9 months ago
I use perplexity.ai
Hoping that one day it takes my job and I am okay with it. I already hate my job
orcrist@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Yes. It varies by topic, but on many topics now it’s 100% useless.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Now that every website has a search function, Google has slowly turned into “I’ll show you to the website and let them take it from there”. It’s absolute dog shit. I think the AI has already taken over, and it’s progressing really slowly so we aren’t aware of the change. It’s already too late to pull the plug, the AI knows we’re all driven by greed for attention and occasionally money, and it turns out those are both easily created and distributed in the modern age of the Internet, and very very unregulated.
konalt@lemmy.world 9 months ago
In contrast to all the other comments here, Google has worked perfectly fine for me in the past, and still continues to give me the results I want. I have uBlock Origin to avoid sponsored results and live in the EU, so maybe that helps. So far I haven’t felt the need to switch search engines because Google works perfectly fine.
Eddyzh@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that’s seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product.
shellsharks@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Yes. Bring back blogrolls!
smb@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
the only cenario i actually use google search for but only in very rare occasions is when i am curious why i don’t find more results in another search engine, i then sometimes want to validate “missing” results are also missing in other/minor search engines that could theoretically have hits instead of misses, but usually i don’t find in google what i was already missing elsewhere, so mostly no gain, only sort of validation.
someguy3@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Big time decline in the last few months.
ohlaph@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It is rather terrible.
nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
It seems gradual to me. It’s a combination of Google’s actions (They make money from ads and storefronts so they promote sites with ads and storefronts) and adversarial attacks on PageRank by spammers. PageRank used to work well until people started designing sites to game the system.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s worse: google.com has started to remove the “also available in English” button and defaults to the localized version based on IP geolocation on every call to the home page. Seriously, I wish that company every bad and rotten thing in the world.
Shenanigore@lemm.ee 9 months ago
oh yeah
whatsisface@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
YouTube as well m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3dSkkEr-wk
catculation@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Yes, search results are terrible these days. I switched to DDG and Bing
Infynis@midwest.social 9 months ago
It’s been getting worse for a while, just like anything sold by a large corporation, but I have noticed it getting especially bad in the last year or so. Even Google Maps is getting less accurate. I never used to have a problem with it, but now it can’t figure out what road I’m on usually a couple times per trip
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes. If you do a search on this site for post about google, you’ll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
IronKrill@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
It was bad before LLM spam became widespread, it’s just even worse now.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes, there’s a great article i read a while back about how and why recipe web sites became so bad and frustrating. Basically, a good website which show you the recipe, you would read it and leave. However, since you didn’t spend much time on the site, google would rank it much lower.
On the other hand, if you encountered a long rambling story they had to read through and scroll through ads, before getting to the useful information, that the google would rank the site higher because you spent more time on it. That’s why there are so many memes about how bad the recipe website are.
And of course, even before LLMs, it was trivial to implement a copy paste bot to create a massive number of web sites.