Has search gotten worse?

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Is the quality of web search results getting worse?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1,238 94.6%

  • No

    Votes: 19 1.5%

  • IDK

    Votes: 52 4.0%
  • Total voters
    1,309
Search engines for stores like Amazon are fucking terrible.

You want an Android 11 phone? Here's a bunch of phones with Android 10 and back, including phones that don't show what version of Android they have! Not irrelevant enough? Here's some watches and random cables you should buy! I don't care what you actually want! Just buy our random shit!
 
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I'm excited, I signed up to trial Brave's search engine and they let me know I can start using it!

I tentatively searched for a few things on my mind and so far it's looking good. But only time will tell, I plan to use this as my main search engine while I can and compare the results to Google/DDG as I go.
 

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melty said:
I tentatively searched for a few things on my mind and so far it's looking good. But only time will tell, I plan to use this as my main search engine while I can and compare the results to Google/DDG as I go.
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How is it with bombarding you with FACTCHECKS or political bullshit ? Got so fucking sick of getting shitlib twitter hottakes on how what I am searching for is literally Hitler/rape/Hitler rape. They would have to do some serious curating of the results, ie make sure Quora or Pinterest never show up in results.

If it were to take off, it would probably start to get hit on all sides by 'journalists' dogpiling ie "the search engine nazis love', and why it needs fact checks for misinformation or they'll get brave's hosting pulled.
 
BootlegPopeye said:
How is it with bombarding you with FACTCHECKS or political bullshit ? Got so fucking sick of getting shitlib twitter hottakes on how what I am searching for is literally Hitler/rape/Hitler rape. They would have to do some serious curating of the results, ie make sure Quora or Pinterest never show up in results.

If it were to take off, it would probably start to get hit on all sides by 'journalists' dogpiling ie "the search engine nazis love', and why it needs fact checks for misinformation or they'll get brave's hosting pulled.
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So far I have not seen a lot of this, though I haven't been trying to make political searches. I did throw in a couple and did not get any epic fact checks and overall felt it was a better mix of articles than google provided for the same search and it does actually seem less biased.

While it's not perfect, it's actually really good. Here are some of the pros and cons I've seen so far:

PROS
-The engine seems a lot more focused on user-created content over Approved sources. Compared to google, I get a lot more results for niche blogs/forums/subreddits that are relevant to my query. But you still get news articles if you search for some things, there are just fewer of them compared to Google and they are less prominent.
-Better results for really specific things - I popped a bunch of searches for stuff I've been having trouble finding on google lately, like usernames, and immediately got more/better results.
-Results also seem better than DuckDuckGo, as in more relevant
-Searching felt fun again for the first time in a long time. I found myself thinking of all sorts of things to search for because it's bringing up genuinely interesting, quality, niche content that's relevant.

CONS
-Searching by time period is an option but it does not work well, just like Google. There's also not anything like a reverse image search, which I didn't really expect but it's worth mentioning.
-BIG BIG CON. There is only one page of search results. I have to hope this is just for the beta because I can't imagine why they would do this on purpose. Even if you search for something like "dog", you will only get one page of results. It's true most people don't click past the first page, but that doesn't mean they should remove it...
But despite this massive flaw, the search engine is good enough that I would still use it first.
-Pinterest still shows up a lot, but it doesn't seem as annoyingly prevalent as with Google and I think this was mostly when searching for usernames and specific stuff
 
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melty said:
-BIG BIG CON. There is only one page of search results. I have to hope this is just for the beta because I can't imagine why they would do this on purpose. Even if you search for something like "dog", you will only get one page of results. It's true most people don't click past the first page, but that doesn't mean they should remove it...
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That does strike me as pretty strange.

How many actual results is it (number of links). While "one page" seems low, I can see why they wouldn't want to return basically unlimited results like google does.
 
I signed up but I haven't gotten the invite yet, I can find almost no discussion about Brave Search anywhere (reddit, being a faggot site, gives worthless results. The Brave reddit is 1/2 a bunch of annoying BAT questions, wish they'd move those to a BAT reddit).

Not sure how this would go over, but I also would like to see wikipedia not be as high as it usually is. It sure as fuck shouldn't be the 'infobox' source like google and DDG give. It's not uncommon for that infobox to have wiki vandalism show up in it.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but another thing I wish Brave would target are those shitty 'review' top 5 sites that are really just Amazon links and not genuine reviews. Google being basically an ad agency wants these results highest because people pay for them to be.
 
Dick Justice said:
>when your search engine requires registering
for what purpose???
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It's a beta so I'd expect something like that.

For something like this it's good to slowly grow your test audience so that you capture the most critical bugs early when a small number of people are using it. Else you risk alienating a large amount of people that don't understand what they're even trying out despite your best efforts to communicate.

Also, it's a good idea to apply a small amount of friction to beta test participation and establish a line of communication. If you don't you will be flooded with absolutely inane bug reports that don't even mean anything with no way to contact these people to find out wtf they're even talking about.
 
I guess since this whole thread is essentially just a grieving thread for the death of Google, I figured I'd share my latest search engine woe from today:

I was trying to lookup someone I knew IRL a long time ago, so I typed 'FIRSTNAME LASTNAME whitepages" into Google, and got only a few results -- mainly irrelevant crap like weird Chinese websites and other things unrelated to the name lookup I tried doing -- and nothing from anything remotely similar to a Whitepages lookup. After a few results, Google told me there are no more results and to try a different search. So, I visited Whitepages.com directly and typed in the person's name/location, and got dozens of results of people with similar names that are all spelled differently than what I was trying to find (for example, looking up the fictional name Melinda Johnston gave me nothing but results for Melissa Johnson, etc.).

Jesus Christ, it was never this bad.

EDIT: I know I got their name spelled correctly because I eventually found them on Facebook, albeit their profile was on private mode and didn't accept friend requests -- but the name spelling and their photo was distinctly them.
 
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In the past month I've gotten hit 3 times looking for things related to C# on google and I get slingshotted to hardcore lesbian porn sites. This has literally never happened before and I cannot imagine what changed in the background.

No, it's not my history. This is a work computer I use only for work.
 
Rusty Crab said:
In the past month I've gotten hit 3 times looking for things related to C# on google and I get slingshotted to hardcore lesbian porn sites. This has literally never happened before and I cannot imagine what changed in the background.

No, it's not my history. This is a work computer I use only for work.
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Either someone has been using your computer without your knowledge, you have some sort of malware that is using your machine to fake views on some porn site, or some porn sites use fake-censored words like c#nt and Google is doing partial matches.
 
The Littlest Shitlord said:
Either someone has been using your computer without your knowledge, you have some sort of malware that is using your machine to fake views on some porn site, or some porn sites use fake-censored words like c#nt and Google is doing partial matches.
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it's the same way on multiple devices and I don't do anything but go on stackoverflow on this thing so...

I guess the last one seems plausible enough.
 
Rusty Crab said:
In the past month I've gotten hit 3 times looking for things related to C# on google and I get slingshotted to hardcore lesbian porn sites. This has literally never happened before and I cannot imagine what changed in the background.
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I was recently taken aback by the sapphic tinge of my search results when looking for info about fingerd. I don't know what I was expecting.

Not to worry -- I easily found what I needed by entering "man finger" in my terminal emulator.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
I guess since this whole thread is essentially just a grieving thread for the death of Google, I figured I'd share my latest search engine woe from today:

I was trying to lookup someone I knew IRL a long time ago, so I typed 'FIRSTNAME LASTNAME whitepages" into Google, and got only a few results -- mainly irrelevant crap like weird Chinese websites and other things unrelated to the name lookup I tried doing -- and nothing from anything remotely similar to a Whitepages lookup. After a few results, Google told me there are no more results and to try a different search. So, I visited Whitepages.com directly and typed in the person's name/location, and got dozens of results of people with similar names that are all spelled differently than what I was trying to find (for example, looking up the fictional name Melinda Johnston gave me nothing but results for Melissa Johnson, etc.).

Jesus Christ, it was never this bad.

EDIT: I know I got their name spelled correctly because I eventually found them on Facebook, albeit their profile was on private mode and didn't accept friend requests -- but the name spelling and their photo was distinctly them.
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I don't think google ever announced it, but I think they crippled searches for IRL info awhile back. Anyone remember the uproar when people realized you could put in a phone number and get the person's name (ie public info)? I can't remember when it started, but there was alot of complaining about it. Gradually, searches like that don't work as well as they used to, even before the post 2015 or so decline of Google. In this case, I think it was just privacy activists.

The caveat though is that I think they fucked searches for spammer phone numbers. Entering their phone numbers doesn't bring up sites identifying them as spammers as much as it did. Reason this matters to me is occasionally I would get a phone call from an unknown number and before I dismiss it I used to check to see if it was legit first. Not as easy as it once was.
 
"where is virtual memory located" mac --> multiple articles on "what is virtual memory?"

"where is virtual memory" mac --> same thing

[switch from google to yandex]

"where is virtual memory" mac --> where is virtual memory in linux

"where is virtual memory" macos --> answer from quora by some guy from india explaining what vm is

[eventually and back on google]

[something like "virtual memory location" mac] --> finally find it: /private/var/vm/

aaarrrggghhh...
 
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Google search just gives me a lot of irrelevant shit if I am searching for something literal, eg. a very specific image that I can not reverse image, so I prefer to use yandex, gives you far more "literal" results, google could give you anything thats yellow if you wrote "blonde" but yandex will give you blonde hair.


I couldnt come up with a better example, also please dont search blonde, you'll probably get porn since its 2021 google.
 
I'm trying to find if there's any observed link, of any kind between hypertension and constipation. Anything in the sense of high BP affecting the gut blood vessels and the like.

I only get pop website results for "your hypertension meds may constipate you!"
Uh, that's the total opposite of what my mother's going through... as soon as she started talking hypertension meds, her eternal constipation issues vanished.
 
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