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
Dick Justice said:
SEO was an inevitability. Search, and particularly google is the portal to (supposedly) all knowledge. That's too tempting not to try to manipulate, and too exposed to be impervious to manipulation whether by hook or by crook. Ergo are we better served by democratized SEO, or would we have been better off if SEO was only available to major governments and the biggest of business?
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I guess my point is that we were better off when successful SEO was rarer. You could still find good indy sites back then. Whether it's preventable or not, it exists, and everything is fucked.
 
3119967d0c said:
The fact that one can sometimes get better results from a search engine with a lot less investment like Yandex or Bing can get better results than Google can suggests the fact that the web has been perverted to optimize for sitting high up in the Google results may be part of this.
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C9FIiTzXgAAbm2f.jpg
 
yandex image search is legitimately far more helpful than google images sometimes, especially their reverse image search - not sure how the russian botnet pulls it off but it does...
 
Ponchik said:
yandex image search is legitimately far more helpful than google images sometimes, especially their reverse image search - not sure how the russian botnet pulls it off but it does...
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Yandex blows google image out of the water. Google's side has never been able to pull off looking for cropped images and yandex can see 1/4th of one and still somehow find the original. Google has ruined their algorithms.
 
Toolbox said:
Yandex blows google image out of the water. Google's side has never been able to pull off looking for cropped images and yandex can see 1/4th of one and still somehow find the original. Google has ruined their algorithms.
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Probably just Sergey Brin trying to make it harder to find himself in cropped CSAM.
 
Toolbox said:
Yandex blows google image out of the water. Google's side has never been able to pull off looking for cropped images and yandex can see 1/4th of one and still somehow find the original. Google has ruined their algorithms.
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Google Image used to be able to do cropped images reasonably well. Someone earlier in the thread(or another one) speculated that it was nerfed to avoid reverse image searching people for various reasons and that's why it turns up results as "man" or "woman" for most everything.
 
Rusty Crab said:
I work in tech so the majority of my searches have absolutely nothing to do with politics, and I'm still getting screwed over by whatever google changed in their algorithms. One thing I'm near certain about is that it's deranking forums (with the exception of stackoverflow). I think that's likely related to their "raising authoritative sources" strategy they talked about before.

When looking for solutions to obscure problems or error messages, I used to get hits on lesser known forums containing exactly what I needed on the first or second link. Now they hardly come up at all. The first pages are usually irrelevant garbage that just sort of sound like what I'm looking for, but they're "authoritative sources" so they get first dibs.
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I forget the name, but it's in my toolbar at home. There's a search engine that only searches forums and it's a lifesaver.

On political subjects about 1/10th of hits are kiwifarms, lol

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Search has really gone down the drain. I moved from google to bing and duckduckgo. Now I find myself using yandex and archive.today to find what I need. I try to treasure these, because I don't expect them to survive the war with russia.
 
Lemmingwise said:
I forget the name, but it's in my toolbar at home. There's a search engine that only searches forums and it's a lifesaver.

On political subjects about 1/10th of hits are kiwifarms, lol

----


Search has really gone down the drain. I moved from google to bing and duckduckgo. Now I find myself using yandex and archive.md to find what I need. I try to treasure these, because I don't expect them to survive the war with russia.
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if you get a chance, I would very much like to know the name of that forum search tool.
I'd find it with google but.... ya know.
 
Searching has always been a bit of a crapshoot in a minefield. You can put in almost any search term and there's guaranteed to be at least a couple of dodgy "buy x search term here" links as ostensibly organic results on the first page.

Maybe it's worse than it was, but I find myself mentally blocking out the obviously sketchy links and zeroing in on the more convincing ones, thus not noticing just how bad current year search actually is.
 
Hoe-Lee-Shit! Do you remember the song from the Bionic Commando Rearmed Trailer? This one:

That has been disappeared from the internet. Google, Bing, and Yandex would not even show me the original trailer. Duckduckgo had the trailer, but the song is gone. All that is left is the OST track Power Plant, which uses the same theme but is considerably less aggressive.
 
Search is so terrible that I think I'm finally switching away from Google to duckduckgo and yandex. I have no reason to use Google if they can't even provide good search results. I could never stick with others in the past because they just weren't as good but Google is such shit now it doesn't seem to matter.
 
Yandex Image is very good. Done a lot of tests and they work great. Do you need an account to get the most out of it?
 
I've been using DDG and google side by side for several weeks now but I've been putting off writing that summary because
  1. it's a fairly extensive comparison and might come out as an essay
  2. Some stuff produces wildly different results, but the pattern is is not easy to quantify
  3. It's taken longer than I thought to get a really comprehensive sampling of daily use
I intend to do a full writeup when I have a day off, but a few easily explainable points are:
  • After weeks of use, I can say that for technical matters, google's and DDG's search is fairly identical in most cases. There are exceptions that I understand but are difficult to explain in a few sentences. If you're doing tech work, you might as well use DDG as a primary and google as a backup in those exceptional cases.
  • DDG is friendlier to 'unofficial' forum searching than google is (which is actively hostile to it)
  • DDGs image search is garbage
  • DDG does not have a lot of quality of life features like currency conversion. One would expect that stuff to eventually come however.
  • I have not found any indication of DDG actually tracking you in any way that matters. Google is exceptionally obvious about that.
In short DDG used to be an exercise in pulling teeth and that is definitely no longer the case. While it's hard to put aside my bias, I can say that DDG's failures are much less frustrating than googles are. DDG's failures will slingshot you in some random direction and god knows where you'll end up. Google's failures actively push you to the same fucking place over and over and over and over again no matter how hard you try to get away. Making it even worse is the fact that YOU KNOW that IT KNOWS what you actually want, and it's making the decision to not give it to you.
 
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Rusty Crab said:
I've been using DDG and google side by side for several weeks now but I've been putting off writing that summary because
  1. it's a fairly extensive comparison and might come out as an essay
  2. Some stuff produces wildly different results, but the pattern is is not easy to quantify
  3. It's taken longer than I thought to get a really comprehensive sampling of daily use
I intend to do a full writeup when I have a day off, but a few easily explainable points are:
  • After weeks of use, I can say that for technical matters, google's and DDG's search is fairly identical in most cases. There are exceptions that I understand but are difficult to explain in a few sentences. If you're doing tech work, you might as well use DDG as a primary and google as a backup in those exceptional cases.
  • DDG is friendlier to 'unofficial' forum searching than google is (which is actively hostile to it)
  • DDGs image search is garbage
  • DDG does not have a lot of quality of life features like currency conversion. One would expect that stuff to eventually come however.
  • I have not found any indication of DDG actually tracking you in any way that matters. Google is exceptionally obvious about that.
In short DDG used to be an exercise in pulling teeth and that is definitely no longer the case. While it's hard to put aside my bias, I can say that DDG's failures are much less frustrating than googles are. DDG's failures will slingshot you in some random direction and god knows where you'll end up. Google's failures actively push you to the same fucking place over and over and over and over again no matter how hard you try to get away. Making it even worse is the fact that YOU KNOW that IT KNOWS what you actually want, and it's making the decision to not give it to you.
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Pretty much mirrors my experience of the two.
 
The Real SVP said:
Hoe-Lee-Shit! Do you remember the song from the Bionic Commando Rearmed Trailer? This one:
Bionic Commando Rearmed Launch Trailer-fY3OczxXBks.mp4
That has been disappeared from the internet. Google, Bing, and Yandex would not even show me the original trailer. Duckduckgo had the trailer, but the song is gone. All that is left is the OST track Power Plant, which uses the same theme but is considerably less aggressive.
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You might like this:
Links on the Internet last forever or a year, whichever comes first.

To everyone else: The consensus seems to be that search is Bad™ now. I think it might be bad enough that we could benefit from a thread specifically for link sharing and indexing like we're back to 1998 on Netscape Navigator. If no one gives me a reason not to I'll make that thread in a few days.

EDIT: Here is that thread
 
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Dick Justice said:
You might like this:
Links on the Internet last forever or a year, whichever comes first.

To everyone else: The consensus seems to be that search is Bad™ now. I think it might be bad enough that we could benefit from a thread specifically for link sharing and indexing like we're back to 1998 on Netscape Navigator. If no one gives me a reason not to I'll make that thread in a few days.
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Ironically, won't that hurt the SEO of the links in the list? The Googlebot will think it's a link farm.
 
Dick Justice said:
You might like this:
Links on the Internet last forever or a year, whichever comes first.

To everyone else: The consensus seems to be that search is Bad™ now. I think it might be bad enough that we could benefit from a thread specifically for link sharing and indexing like we're back to 1998 on Netscape Navigator. If no one gives me a reason not to I'll make that thread in a few days.
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ditto makes a good point, as well as potentially hurting the SEO of KF itself. We might want to ask Null about that first. He's been on SEO stuff recently and might have some ideas.

In the meantime, we could start the thread in one of the member-only sections and move it later, mods willing.
 
Rusty Crab said:
ditto makes a good point, as well as potentially hurting the SEO of KF itself. We might want to ask Null about that first. He's been on SEO stuff recently and might have some ideas.

In the meantime, we could start the thread in one of the member-only sections and move it later, mods willing.
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Anyone can @Null , you know.

I could post the thread in the sekrit club but that would pretty much defeat the purpose.
 
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