Has search gotten worse?

[Thumb Butler]

I've noted this over the last few years, but I swear it's gotten significantly worse in the last six months to a year. I can't find anything anymore. Even the most mundane searches bring up endless "top 10 x" pages and clickbait articles.

I was trying to search up something very specific photography related just now and it's just endless ads and articles that pretend to have the answer, but are near empty when you click on them.

This is with Google of course. I actually got an answer after searching on Yandex, the results there weren't great, but the top two or three were actually relevant.

I only use Bing, but lately very often cannot find stuff. It used to be excellent, especially when looking for videos and photos.

 

[Toolbox]

I only use Bing, but lately very often cannot find stuff. It used to be excellent, especially when looking for videos and photos.

Never thought of bing search as great, but bing maps has some superior features to google maps in several areas. Better coverage of street views in some areas, and higher quality imagery you can access in some areas because they buy aerial flyby data and not just satellite. No competition to googles 3d scanning yet, though.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

I don't think anyone else has commented on this one, but when I used to do searches for tech or other related questions, I used to get alot of forum thread results. And usually, there would be a back and forth discussion between the questioner and real people trying to figure it out.

At some point in the last perhaps 3-5 years, I get very few forum results, and instead get cancerous 'help' site results like Quora, or other 'help' sites with a similar format. It seems like Google has a bias against independently created small websites and instead wants to coral you a few 'approved' sources.

And when you find a forum thread for tech questions, it's one of the following:

A: "How do I do this?"
[no replies]

A: "How do I do this?"
B: "yeah I also want to know"
[no more replies]

A: "How do I do this?"
B: "...why? just use the default settings"
C: "I think that can be done but I prefer the default, just RTFM U NOOB."
[no more replies]

 

[BootlegPopeye]

And when you find a forum thread for tech questions, it's one of the following:

A: "How do I do this?"
[no replies]

A: "How do I do this?"
B: "yeah I also want to know"
[no more replies]

A: "How do I do this?"
B: "...why? just use the default settings"
C: "I think that can be done but I prefer the default, just RTFM U NOOB."
[no more replies]

Those threads with no replies are still more helpful than a quora post.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

Those threads with no replies are still more helpful than a quora post.

I still remember the first time I was led to quora over the matter of squat toilets without TP.

It was full of pajeets defending their shit caked left hands with the excuse that "it's ethnocentric defamation from the American imperialists! They think their chair toilets and paper are superior! Water cleans the spirit so it doesn't matter if we dunk our hands in our holes!"

 

[lemonsolebrother]

C: "I think that can be done but I prefer the default the default is actually better, just RTFM U NOOB."
[no more replies]

that the regulars on those sites might recognise that someone Might Have A Different Opinion

 

[Bongocat]

I'd like to start throwing examples of remarkable failures that would have never happened on google before. They're getting increasingly common. I was looking for a reaction to a dumb joke somebody posted. Literally fucking what.

 

[ditto]

"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...

What makes search even worse is that 99% of the material on the web is for absolute beginners, written by more advanced beginners.

Try and search for something even slightly advanced and be prepared for a deluge of outdated blogspam, Quora answers that tell some unrelated story, or Stack Overflow answers marked a "duplicate" because the jannies don't even understand the question.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

[...]

What makes search even worse is that 99% of the material on the web is for absolute beginners, written by more advanced beginners.

It really does seem like Idiocracy is being used as an instruction manual...

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

This is mostly a strawpoll. I've noticed that over the last decade or so the quality of web search results has gradually deteriorated for me. It seems like searches are less useful than they've ever been, but you can't really draw conclusions from a sample of one. What do fellow kiwis think? Are the quality of search results getting worse?

I'd say most web searches on any major search engine yields about 100-150 websites tops. At least in my experience most web searches tend to lead to a very small cluster of sites and don't actually give anyone with a smaller site a chance. Almost all engineering, computer science related topics I search up are covered by these huge information repositories, and it's only when I either go digging or search some really niche shit that yields some other, non corporately operated sites

Those threads with no replies are still more helpful than a quora post.

Quora is literally one of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen. Full of ads in between legitimate posts makes it so hard to read content.

 

[need shoeonhead nudes]

I'd say most web searches on any major search engine yields about 100-150 websites tops. At least in my experience most web searches tend to lead to a very small cluster of sites and don't actually give anyone with a smaller site a chance. Almost all engineering, computer science related topics I search up are covered by these huge information repositories, and it's only when I either go digging or search some really niche shit that yields some other, non corporately operated sites

earlier in the thread i posted a website called million short which removes the "top" websites from your results, so you arent seeing the same popular sites popup for every query.

also don't doublepost add all your replies in one reply

Quora is literally one of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen. Full of ads in between legitimate posts makes it so hard to read content.

like so

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

earlier in the thread i posted a website called million short which removes the "top" websites from your results, so you arent seeing the same popular sites popup for every query.

also don't doublepost add all your replies in one reply

like so

Ok cheers I'll have a look. Also no I'll post however I please (no means of being insulting if it comes off like that).

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Google Search is really annoying. Recently I had a random thought and I wanted to see if I was right.

The idea was, corsets are unattractive and not sexy. But women think that men find these things sexy, for some reason. I started to hypothesize that men would want to see a woman's tummy, and that the men who came up with corsets must have been gay, or maybe corsets were invented by women.

So I tried to search, "corsets are ugly, invented by gay." Nothing. "Corsets unattractive and made by gays." Nothing. "Corsets, bad, gay." Nothing. You get the idea, and many of my searches were more coherent than this, trying to figure out why women wear corsets and whether gay or female designers had anything to do with it. Eventually Google gave me a message in a huge font saying they don't have results for this and I should read up on how search works.

I did a similiar thing on youtube and google that I thought would make videos. Just out of curiosity there has to be videos on youtube about [technically] not being a whore, acting like a whore or dressing like a whore. Maybe my account is cursed but see if you anything that is not dressing like a slut and all that...

 

[TheRetardKing]

Damn it, Google! I wanna make a Mii of Fred Flinstone for Miitopia, not find poorly-drawn DeviantArt pictures of his feet!

 

[Solid Snek]

I only use Bing, but lately very often cannot find stuff. It used to be excellent, especially when looking for videos and photos.

Bing has been awful for at least the last couple years, and it's getting worse by the day. It used to be really good - better than Google, since Google made censored searching mandatory (even with safesearch off). Nowadays, though, Bing is horseshit; page searches return nothing but advertisements and journos, image and videos are worthless.

I don't usually post in this thread, or this forum, because techshit pisses me off. But I was looking for pictures of Michaelangelo's David the other day, and much to my horror, discovered that Bing censors Michaelangelo. You can find pics of David's head, but full body shots, with his junk and all, were verbotten. Maybe it was just me or the country I live in? Try it out and see.

Living Simpsons Meme... smfh

Try some foreign search engines instead, like Baidu or Yandex. Something based in a foreign superpower that respects your freedom and your intelligence.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

I don't usually post in this thread, or this forum, because techshit pisses me off. But I was looking for pictures of Michaelangelo's David the other day, and much to my horror, discovered that Bing censors Michaelangelo. You can find pics of David's head, but full body shots, with his junk and all, were verbotten. Maybe it was just me or the country I live in? Try it out and see.

I checked it myself because I was curious. I put on a private browser and searched for Michelangelo's David on Bing, and sure enough it was all close-ups of his head or angled to where you could only see the top part of David's body. Weirdly I also got a suggested query that added the words "body full real" which says to me other people are annoyed with this. There are a few images that show the whole statue but they're so zoomed out you can't really make out any details. I turned off SafeSearch (which is turned on by default if you open Bing with a private browser, at least on my end) and got identical results.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

I can't believe how a simple search can actually went to those stupid virus webpages (those with strange names and always getting into mediafire or zippyshare to download a stupid file).

 

[Solid Snek]

I checked it myself because I was curious. I put on a private browser and searched for Michelangelo's David on Bing, and sure enough it was all close-ups of his head or angled to where you could only see the top part of David's body. Weirdly I also got a suggested query that added the words "body full real" which says to me other people are annoyed with this. There are a few images that show the whole statue but they're so zoomed out you can't really make out any details. I turned off SafeSearch (which is turned on by default if you open Bing with a private browser, at least on my end) and got identical results.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FeL2yILctp0

I had this clip in the back of my mind as I was doing my research.

It's baffling because Bing has very little problem with porn, but suddenly classical art is a bridge too far.

 

[Conspiracy Victim]

i would switch full time to yandex if it weren't for the fact that most top results are in russian
it has pretty much everything i ask from a search engine, especially the one for images, but for christ's sake what i would give for a feature that gets rid of results from russia