For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline. Google disagrees.
Honestly I don’t think it’s just Google, DDG has been getting worse as well, not quite as bad as Google but still similar issues where the thing I’m looking for is buried under spam sites built to a generic standard with shitty content but spectacular search engine optimization.
And pumping out sites and pages like that is optimal in the current market as it is the best way to get clicks, as supposed to investing in skilled writing, investigation and research.
The problem is that the major search engines have all kind of sat on their behinds about this and actively sold these bad websites assistance in gaming their search engine. The search engines would have to rebuild their search functions to find signs of bad sites and deprioritize them in the list, not just show things that seem relevant. They’ll probably never do this because then they’d hurt the part of their business that is helping shitty sites game the engine.
Stuttgart273@lemmy.one 11 months ago
The dangers of a monopoly. No matter how bad Google gets people will still use it because, in many people’s minds, there is no other search engine.
quatschkopf34@feddit.de 11 months ago
What are those? DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc. are all not really better than Google. I haven‘t tried Kagi yet, mostly because it costs money.
w00@feddit.de 11 months ago
You can use Kagi for free if you make an account and only use it when the others fail. Love Kagi, but won’t pay for it.
mnglw@beehaw.org 11 months ago
eh, ddg is equally bad with it insisting it knows better than me what my query is and “fixing” it, leaving me to have to either fix it or click a link telling it “yes I really did want to search for that and not what you assumed”