- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.
I love a good, informative troll.
Strange how Google became the default search engine back in the day because they were so good at filtering out the dumb websites that just spam search terms all over the page.
They’ve regressed and become Yahoo
Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.
Personally really like ddg over it though. Only gotta be more precise with keywording for finding what you need.
I use DDG but i do wonder what i dont see sometimes.
I often google a specific brand of components at work and even with the exact brand and/or part number in the search it sometimes doesnt turn up any results (say 5-7 random unrelated webpages) and thats it. Then i put the same search in google and bam, top result.
That’s what I said - the right key wording. It’s pretty strict, whereas Google’s results sometimes are a tiny bit more loose understanding of what you roughly mean. Though not always, and on Google I found myself often just adding “Reddit” for specifics. Though really really depends on what you search.
For me DDG offers a lot more than just search results, the bangs and features like I added a script to directly port my questions to some AI is really useful.
I don’t know what “right” key wording you want if not the exact model and part number.
Quotes help. So
"model" "part number"since those force them to be in the results. DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results.“DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results.”
Wow sounds extremely useful and like a feature I want. I love searching for something specific and they are like “did you mean totally unrelated thing?”
Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are “use the search function, this question has been answered already”
That was my issue with old school SymForums. I don’t see that so much on reddit.
I’ve noticed half the subs are now marked as “NSFW” when searching for something like a plumbing issue for example, which won’t allow you to see the posts without using the reddit app.
Use old.reddit as long as you’re able to. Don’t even need to log in (at least where I live), you just hit the “I’m 18” button
I think it takes a while for that kind of competitor to emerge and gain enough traction to become a genuine alternative option. The primary option everyone long since adopted kinda has to suck for a while :/
It also is going to take another leap in algorithm.
It was a hard problem to solve when Google’s founders cracked it, but it’s an even harder problem to solve now that you have state of the art spam bots filling the Internet full of shit that looks like it was composed by humans.
If someone cracks how to figure out whether something is ai or not (for real, not the fake solutions we have now) and adds that to a good search algorithm and filters the fake shit by default, they will have a hell of a product on their hands.
I’m of the opinion that it will require human interaction to fix this. It can’t be purely solved via algorithms.
What people don’t realize is that the original Google search algorithm, PageRank, effectively looks at how real humans interacted with the websites they were indexing. Only websites referenced by other websites were being considered by Google’s search engine. And at the time, that meant real human beings were making those links. This gave them a real advantage over other, purely algorithmic search engines.
Something like this will have to be recreated. We will have to figure out a way of prioritizing search results that real human beings have found to be useful.
Tough to do when those services tend to get infiltrated by bots as well.
DDG has been around for quite a while. Now it was a few years ago I used it last time, but the reason I switched back to Google was because I was clearly less productive with DDG.
I don’t think something like duckduckgo is gonna be the eventual contender to take on google. I think it’ll have to be an engine with its own index or some kind of lateral solution.
Something like brave, kagi, qwant, or stract could maybe turn into something exciting with more momentum, but honestly I have a hard time seeing them be the kind of scrappy competitor with a new approach that unseats the old king who has lost their way in pursuit of more profit at the expense of product quality. None of them seem like they truly have a new approach, but only time will tell how that story plays out this time.
To be fair when Google solved SEO spam in 1999, thanks to pagerank, it was no small feat. The others were bad not because they abused ads but because they didn’t know how to deal with cheating webmasters.
I’m starting to feel like a shill because I say this so often, but Kagi is the only one I’ve found that actually does the job anymore. To me a search engine that works is worth the small cost each month, but unfortunately I don’t see paying for search becoming mainstream anytime soon.
chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.
Not sure if you read the recent article or not, but the guy responsible for this enshittification came from Yahoo, where he applied the same policies. So you’re more literally correct than you may think
Destroying search engines as a career…
And here is the link for anyone who didn’t read it.