Submitted 2 months ago by TheBeesKnees@lemmy.sdf.org to [deleted]
I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
I was honestly getting so frustrated the other day at work when searching for something very specific and coming up empty handed. Tried DuckDuckGo and even fucking Bing and found what I needed in a matter of seconds. Google search is trash now. I have to go to the second page or further just to find something that isn’t an ad, AI response, or reddit. None of which are helpful.
DuckDuckGo is just Bing with a duck on it.
Regardless, I still got better results than Google.
I’ve been swapping around search engines too, but they still seem bad. I always end up back at Google just because I know how to manipulate the search terms better.
The results are usually the most clicked, not necessarily the factual links. Others have recommended kagi. I haven’t tried it yet. Yahoo still works….
I’ll have to try kagi some time
Is that the one that costs money? You can’t have a true incognito search if that’s the case.
Not if you used Dogpile. Also it still exists somehow.
I’ve used Kagi’s free trial. I’d turn to it when nothing else was helping and it did really well, but recently it hasn’t been helping either. It’s probably still fine for most things, but I’m often searching niche developer/programming things that are too burried under SEO/AI spam to find anymore.
FWIW, the default “programming” lens works quite well in Kagi, you can also create your own lens if you have a set of websites from which you routinely search info, and there are tons of bangs already (which can also be mapped to lenses BTW). In addition, you can downrank AI/SEO stuff when you find it (it is downranked by default in kagi), so that over time your results are quite clean.
I shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working
YEAH WHAT THE FUCK
You mean when plused strings stopped? Because that was tragic as hell
I didn’t realize. I’m horrified.
What are quoted strings?
A string is just a collection of characters, in programmer speak. When you use quotation marks in your search to find exactly what you want. If your search was:
dog “fast drive”
Google used to show results that only had both the word “dog” and the joined phrase “fast drive” in the same result.
Now it feels like Google uses that as a suggestion, giving you “dog” and any combination of “fast drive”, “fast driver”, “fast driving”, or whatever else Google thinks you want, instead of what you asked for. Or if they don’t find it, they serve you up whatever they want, with a small message about there being no matching results.
I recommend Kagi, I’ve been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.
Yes it’s paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn’t a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I’m either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I’m paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.
Now it’s up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.
Kagi is amazing. I absolutely love its’ filtering features and I use that forums toggle all the time. It feels like such a more relevant experience for me. I tried it out with the 300 searches limit, but that wasn’t even close to enough, turns out I easily use 4 times that in a month and even though it’s not cheap it feels like it’s worth it.
Got some bad news about Kagi…
I’ve read it, I read the discussion around it, idk man. One guy’s thoughts on a company and it’s founder isn’t enough to move me off of something without better proof, better alternatives, and worse crimes than maybe having a bad long term vision.
Hopefully every company outgrows it’s founder and becomes a system. We’ll have to see, right now I’m satisfied and that gets me off Google and signals to others I’m willing to pay.
I second kagi. Have been using it for almost a year now and I will stick with it. I switched from google to ddg some years ago to ddg before, but kagi is simply better.
A colleague also uses it and is also very satisfied with it.
SEO became too well known and is now filled with bullshit.
Google makes money on ads. They make $300-$400 annually per user by displaying ads.
They are motivated to tarpit you in order to show you more ads.
Giving you your results quickly and efficiently costs them revenue.
Use kagi, or another search engine.
Is it sorta built similar to google? I keep switching search engines but Im SOOOOO used to google that its hard for me to adjust. I need something that kinda looks like google, but I can both Customize it more and just isnt google.
aHHH NAHHH i just tried it. It’s everything I want BUT THEY MAKE ME PAY TO SEARCH??! fuck no- I’m not about to fork over cash for a Subscriptions to USE THE INTERNET. Sounds really really nice but I’d much rather not. They aught to have it so you can pay for extra perks but paying JUST to search??? I’m good-
I remember Google saying like 2 decades ago that it was actually their goal to get you off of their website as quickly as possible. If you clicked on a link, and then clicked back in less than 30 seconds, then Google would consider that search result to be not what you were looking for.
The people who said that are long gone.
Google Maps is utter crap lately too. It seems to be making up locations, and several times in the past month, it’s taken me to the wrong place. It’s getting almost as bad as Apple Maps
My favorite one recently is constantly telling me to keep straight to remain on a highway like 7 times before I need to actually get off the highway. Glad I turned off the sound a long time ago otherwise I would have lost my fucking mind.
We have express (toll) lanes on some highways around me, and the navigation system loses its damn mind every time. “Keep going straight”, “continue going straight”, “proceed in a trajectory perpendicular to your current trajectory”; I fucking get it!
I went to a low data plan and learned that Google Maps consumes a vast amount of data (relative to my plan limit), and I download all my maps and had location off. 1 single bus route between two pinned locations was 30Mb. Maps and search could be so simple but they are insanely bloated.
Hey now, Apple Maps is more accurate and provides better directions where I am and has been for years. I only use google to search because Yelp is god awful.
Oh god, yes this too. All the sponsored location spam drives me crazy. I love when I zoom in to a location and it doesn’t ANY of the shops besides STARBUCKS^tm^
Apple Maps is fantastic for navigation, but it doesn’t have enough locations on it. I use Gmaps for searching locations and apple for navigating.
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
Aside from DDG, these are all new to me. I’ll take a look this week, thank you.
I used to a hater of Kagi but honestly its a damn good alternative search engine. I still prefer a good searXNG instance but if you haven’t try it out. Here’s my simple guide on search engine alternatives
You might be interested in learning how opaque Kagi really is…
Thank you both, Smokeydope and LucidNightmare. That was an interesting read! I gave SearXNG (paulgo.io) a try and it was a refreshing experience, I’m going to start using it regularly to see how well it does.
An article full of inaccuracies, but the most interesting bit is, all these conversations are possible because they clearly explain their views, which are publicly available on their website (for example, the philosophy behind the use of AI - which BTW is opt-in).
How is that an example of being opaque is beyond me.
I stopped using it last year it got so bad, I ended up using DDG but that’s gotten shit and I’ve found myself back on Google. To me it feels 10% better than it was when I stopped.
Although everyone’s experiences are so different we’re probably all being A/B tested.
The internet has slowly become more and more useless over time since the pandemic. It’s fucking impossible to find anything now. I’d have better luck just doing an lan search on my home network than looking it up on Google and I’m not even very deep into the self hosting rabbit hold.
reddit has been 10x more useful than google and this fact alone bothers me to high fucking hell because im STILL BANNED.
I’ve been using Kagi since ~February and it’s changed my views on Search. Beforehand, if use a combination of Google, Bing, DDG, and Brave and rarely find what I needed in satisfactory time. Now I’m typically finding it in the top 5 without all the cruft + have access to a handful of LLM assistants to choose from for other tasks (when needed).
I’ve also heard good things about SearXNG.
Yes, it’s fantastic!
They fucked it all up with that AI bullshit awhile ago and it hasn’t recovered. I use start page now and am much happier.
Yeah, last month I finally had enough and DDG has been alright
The problem with DDG is if it doesn’t find results it just ignores your search terms and throws whatever shit it wants at you.
Oh my god, I feel this so much… Also, I think that recently got even worse, as I recently found myself switching between DDG/Google and finding both extremely bad for my query
google does this as well, unless you switch on verbatim mode
There are many factors at play here, some of which including:
That said, it depends on what you’re searching for. If you’re searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they’re still online).
People still use Google?
Lmao. Don’t kid yourself, a vast majority do. Id bet 80-90%
This is what I call the linux bubble. People who use linux and are used to alternate solutions, which may offer better performance than the norm. Then they surround themselves with other like minded people. So much so that they begin to forget that they are using alternatives rather than the norm. Despite what benefits they gain from alternatives, some people can’t grasp that they are, in fact, alternatives.
Twitter has 368 million monthly users. I find it to be a cesspool of hate, racism, and right wing agenda.
So you would think mastodon or bluesky would have equal or better numbers.
Bluesky has 9.7 million monthly users, which includes a huge recent boost because of brazil ceasing twitters ability to operate. I think that alone was 2 million users.
And mastodon has 975,000 monthly users.
So yes, despite it’s flaws, twitter is still the default in microblogging. By a LOT. But I’m sure the feeling around here is “who still uses twitter???”.
Everybody. Same way everybody uses google. Same way everybody uses instagram. And it’s not even close to being close.
Those poor bastards
Probably 99%. This question was only meant to be taken as “I am above the common pleb, those idiots”
The internet has gotten worse in general, and it’s accelerating.
The vast majority of online content is now AI-generated.
I have fully switched to kagi, it’s not perfect but for the average case it’s better than google.
It is half okay, but only if they are not getting paid to screw up your results. It is a coup against democracy where freedom of information is freedom of the press and is an entire fundamental pillar of democracy. Google’s entire business model has always been neo feudalism. A web crawler and search engine is like a library, it must be neutral, objective, and publicly funded as a non profit. Much the same with YT, it is our digital public commons and the most efficient form for information sharing in the primary form of human communication.
HAHAHAHAHAH no. Google Search has gotten so much worse in the last couple of YEARS more like.
The reason behind this is not a bug but a feature. Google wants the trip from search to result to take longer as they can show you more ads that way.
It’s crap.
You can use udm14.org though.
As a basic bitch that hasn’t gone to page 2 of a google search in years I don’t really notice a difference.
The ai answers, related questions, and ad results are not especially helpful but at the end of the day I will find what I’m looking for.
I tried Google again after a few weeks of DDG and gave up on the first search. DDG has some troubles with German but I can work around that
I read on here (I think) a couple months ago that adding “before:2023” improves results a lot. I’ve found it to be true. Unless I’m looking for something specifically from the last couple years.
Try finding old band photos. Basically impossible
i’ve been manually curating your search results the past few weeks. Sorry boss, i’ll do better.
Ill add something I’ve never really seen anyone mention: it used to be a lot better at staying on topic without ME keeping it that way
For example: this weekend I was playing Blops 3 and googled shit like “Winslow accord bo3” and after 1-3 searches I could just type shit related to bo3 and even if it had relevant pages related to other shit, it’d remember my recent searches and keep them rather relevant even if it was on my phone or a new window rather than the same search bar
At least, it used to work that way. Now every 4-5 searches it suddenly forgets what tangent I was on and I have to start adding qualifiers again to get relevant searches
Yes. Its AI generated slop. I use SearxNG, and I have it tuned to go to Startpage first, Google second.
They hired the guy the ruined Yahoo to run it
TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee 2 months ago
*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it’s just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Don’t forget your glue on your pizza! Can’t have a pizza without glue…
Nikls94@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s not just glue it‘s Elmer‘s Glue. They still have some standard.
Linnce@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The other day I asked google what season we were in. The AI got it wrong, and that’s like the simplest question ever.
TheBeesKnees@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
It has definitely been getting worse over years, but I specifically meant the last couple of weeks. I could still find what I needed between all the garbage… now I can’t even find it after adjusting the search multiple times.
Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
If we could roll back the internet 10-15 years, everything would be much better.