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.
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.
The internet has gotten worse in general, and it’s accelerating.
The vast majority of online content is now AI-generated.I always feel a sense of dissonance (I think that’s the right word?) when I see posts like this. Everyone seems to be talking about this, but I haven’t noticed a difference. Honestly, when I look up something, what I’m looking for is usually in the first few results. Not really sure how to feel about my experience being so different from others.
Are you pretty consumercentric, or do you have some niche interests as well? Google is great at basic tasks and delivering product results and promoted content, and if that’s what you’re usually looking for it probably works great for you. People have trouble these days trying to find the specific stuff. Google used to really excel at this in the past, but now it’s buried under pages of promoted content or pages SEO gamed to the top but not being very helpful
Try finding old band photos. Basically impossible
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.
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.
Golden parachuted away
More to it then that. tl;dr The engineers in charge at google were pushed to the side by the ads people.
Oh wow. Thanks for the added details
I use Ecosia instead of Google, but I know that Google recently added a “forums” category to the top of their search. Have you tried that? Hopefully it will help bring back to life independent forums.
The internet has slowly become more and more useless over time since the pandemic. It’s fucking impossible to find anything now. Half the time it’s like I have better luck doing an lan search on my home network than looking it up on Google and I’m not even very deep into the self hosted everything rabbit hole.
It’s like they want us all to be stupid, uninformed and not know how to do anything.
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 shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working
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. Or tell you there were no results.
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 didn’t realize. I’m horrified.
You mean when plused strings stopped? Because that was tragic as hell
YEAH WHAT THE FUCK
I wouldn’t know I haven’t used Google search in about 3 months.
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
There are many factors at play here, some of which including:
- AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there’s an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
- Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
- Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn’t need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
- SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing “page ranking” algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. “Search Engine Optimization” is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
- Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.
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).
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
I used to a hater of Kagi but honestly its a damn good alternative search engine. They are doing some actual innovation and are very transparent. I still prefer a good searXNG instance but searxng is more for technical people who understand decentralized meta search instances. Here’s my simple guide on search engine alternatives to help you get away from google best you can.
Google is finally collapsing under the weight of its own greed and lack of innovation. Now other companies are showing up to steal their lunch especial with the big monopoly case going on right now.
You might be interested in learning how opaque Kagi really is…
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.
Might want to go through and click the hyperlinks. Otherwise, I got nothing else to tell ya homie. It’s all right there.
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.
I am glad to have helped you out! @angrystego I hope you enjoy searxng and it bcomes a useful tool in your life. Paulgo is an excellent first instance choice. It was my daily driver when I wrote up that guide and seems to still hold up well today.
Now I use search.inetol.net and can recommend that as a good alternative in case paulgo isnt quite what you’re looking for or has too many timeout api errors. As always its a good idea to visit searx.space and try out some of the top instances with highest response time.
Thanks again for even more useful tips! I will definitely try it all out, it looks really good.
Thank you for actually reading what was provided! SearXNG is pretty good, and I kinda want to give self hosting it a try! Good luck on the hunt!
