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
I mentioned in another thread that Google's gimped time restrictions work. I used it a couple days ago to find out that it does not respect the time restriction if its having trouble finding results.
There was also that game dev who got into Gamergate and had some Google engineer push his own personal site's hitpiece near the top. Google has denied search manipulation but the leaks and that instance say otherwise.

Sperghetti said:
Also, can I just gripe about how Google won't index websites that haven't shelled out extra money for an SSL certificate? Doesn't matter if the site is coded entirely in HTML and CSS that would have been perfectly functional in 2001, and doesn't have any javascript, cookies, or trackers anywhere, it still needs to be verified as being "secure" or else Google pretends it doesn't exist.
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I think Google employees see themselves as the leaders in tech so they try to force their ideals on everyone else. They also rank "responsive" sites better.
 
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The Real SVP said:
And by "responsive" they don't mean efficient and fast loading sites with UIs that scale well, they mean sites using their bloated "responsive" java script framework.
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JS is evil. They're just moving the costs on the consumers of the website the same way CCprocessors push all the fees onto end consumers. Javascript is evil cancer. I am not looking forward to webassembly either. With webassembly the have Java bitecode like compiled binaries that the send to your webbrowser and your webbrowser has a build-in JVM thing for webassembly. Webassembly and JVM are not the same but the distrabution scheme is similar. It's all evil crap. :feels:
 
I'm not sure if this can be classified as being specific to search engines, but it involves social media and privacy, so here it goes:

Does anyone remember when Facebook (and to a lesser extent LinkedIn) used to employ questionable, intrusive, and borderline-creepy recommendations of people to add as a friend? I remember sometimes when I'd swipe right on a certain girl on Tinder in maybe 2014 or so, and I'd try looking up her up on Facebook based on her first name, but unfortunately couldn't locate her. Usually the next day I'd get some kind of prompt on my Facebook notifications that had a list of people to send friend requests to -- usually former coworkers and classmates -- but I'd also see the Tinder girl listed in the list of profiles. It's like, Facebook and Tinder used some dystopian algorithms to suggest people to me by reading my thoughts somehow. Hell, I once chatted with a girl on OkCupid and never got her phone number, then a few days later her Facebook profile was randomly suggested to me, which was really odd, because my Facebook and OkCupid logins were separate entities.

Does anyone else remember that? I haven't seen that in years. Nowadays I see all sorts of mysterious girls with strange names on dating apps, and when I try to look them up on social media to see if they're real people or spastics, I get zero results, and zero recommendations. In fact, in my Facebook recommended list it's all people I have absolutely no idea who the fuck they are like random men in foreign countries. LinkedIn doesn't even recommend me relevant profiles either.

My only guess is that they tweaked the algorithm due to privacy and data concerns.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
It's like, Facebook and Tinder used some dystopian algorithms to suggest people to me by reading my thoughts somehow.
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They literally just buy and sell your info. It's not complicated. I regularly saw things I talked about on discord (back when I used it) appearing in google ads. Silicon Valley is Railroad Barron levels of corrupt.
 
One thing I've noticed, especially over the past 6 months or so, is that there are many more Pinterest links showing up. Not just for image searching, but general searching. Ofc, being Pinterest, it's all locked behind a wall that requires a Pinterest login.

I'm now at the point where I have to specify "-pinterest" in order to get half-decent results on the first page of a search.
 
I'm getting really sick of Googling "[insert food place] near me", and the top results on my phone are all irrelevant links for different food places, as well as links to download the GrubHub or Doordash apps. Why the fuck isn't the restaurant I specified by name the top result with a Google Map with a list addresses like it used to be?

Pee Cola said:
One thing I've noticed, especially over the past 6 months or so, is that there are many more Pinterest links showing up. Not just for image searching, but general searching. Ofc, being Pinterest, it's all locked behind a wall that requires a Pinterest login.

I'm now at the point where I have to specify "-pinterest" in order to get half-decent results on the first page of a search.
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Pinterest is the devil. I hate it when I'm trying to find a PNG of an image with a transparent background to make a meme, and the results are all Pinterest photos with the backgrounds still there.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
I'm getting really sick of Googling "[insert food place] near me", and the top results on my phone are all irrelevant links for different food places, as well as links to download the GrubHub or Doordash apps. Why the fuck isn't the restaurant I specified by name the top result with a Google Map with a list addresses like it used to be?
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One time I was in an unfamiliar part of the state and I was getting dangerously low on gas. I was desperately searching for the nearest station. Google said the nearest one was 20 miles away. No, that cannot fucking be right. I'm literally inside a town right now. It has to have a gas station somewhere. So I literally got out and starting walking to find a place and lo and behold, there was a station not one block away.

Now here's the real fuckery: that station was registered on the map. It even said it was a gas station. It just wouldn't return the result as the closest when I asked where I should go. I don't think there's any explanation for this besides google giving priority to the top bidder to dissuade customers from using anyone else.
 
That reminds me of when the voice directions suddenly started saying things like "take a right turn after BRANDED CHAIN RESTAURANT", I guess they gotta pay for that shit somehow
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
I'm getting really sick of Googling "[insert food place] near me", and the top results on my phone are all irrelevant links for different food places, as well as links to download the GrubHub or Doordash apps. Why the fuck isn't the restaurant I specified by name the top result with a Google Map with a list addresses like it used to be?
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Companies are paying off Google to put their businesses up first. Google are a bunch of sellouts.
 
I just stumbled upon this on Twitter, and it's actually really frightening. It's also rather jarring to see the comments with people talking about their search woes with Google for searching for such things as "violence against women in 2020" or "happy white woman" in Google vs. Duckduckgo:


JamesLind.PNG


Evu2DzhXcAE8wwJ.jpg
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
I just stumbled upon this on Twitter, and it's actually really frightening. It's also rather jarring to see the comments with people talking about their search woes with Google for searching for such things as "violence against women in 2020" or "happy white woman" in Google vs. Duckduckgo:


View attachment 1972783

View attachment 1972782
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horrifying, but worth noting this is not new. I remember seeing stuff about this in 2018, which, coincidentally, is when their search started really going to shit.
 
Rusty Crab said:
horrifying, but worth noting this is not new. I remember seeing stuff about this in 2018, which, coincidentally, is when their search started really going to shit.
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Doing further research myself, and I found this video:


Then I searched on Google via Incognito mode, and look here...

hww.PNG


...and the results beyond that were far worse. Maybe 1 or 2 actual stock photos of white women, and the rest were black women, Arab women in Hijabs, and white women with black male partners. Also a few trash lefty news sites like Vox making fun of white women for being ugly. Also some troons.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
Doing further research myself, and I found this video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=j_cqzvt9YnQ
Then I searched on Google via Incognito mode, and look here...

View attachment 1972818

...and the results beyond that were far worse. Maybe 1 or 2 actual stock photos of white women, and the rest were black women, Arab women in Hijabs, and white women with black male partners. Also a few trash lefty news sites like Vox making fun of white women for being ugly. Also some troons.
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My only hope for the future is that even my mom, the most boomer of boomers has made comments to me that google is getting "hard to find things on". There really is a gap in the market that could be filled right now. DDG is almost there but has a lot of areas to catch up in.
 
Rusty Crab said:
DDG is almost there but has a lot of areas to catch up in.
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Translation = money.

It'll take a 21st century Theodore Roosevelt to kick Silicon Valley in the ass like Standard Oil over 100 years ago, because at this point, any alternatives are immediately quashed due to lack of funding and infrastructure. Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon are just so insanely massive that no one can compete in any capacity. Not StoryFire, not Duckduckgo, not BitChute, and sure as hell not Parler.
 
Fuck that potato nigger Jame's O'Queef. I tried to search through his website for the relevant documents, which may show where that image comes from, (If it's even real) but unless you download his totally-not-a-virus download manager, you can only download the files one at a time with delays and a bad GUI.

If anyone wants another potato famine (That was a mold, to be fair to O'Keef), feel free.
>https://www.projectveritas.com/news...oes-public-says-burden-lifted-off-of-my-soul/
 
longtimelurkerfirsttimepo said:
Fuck that potato nigger Jame's O'Queef. I tried to search through his website for the relevant documents, which may show where that image comes from, (If it's even real) but unless you download his totally-not-a-virus download manager, you can only download the files one at a time with delays and a bad GUI.
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What kind of shitty browser without adblocking are you using?

https://www.projectveritas.com/news...revent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/ (https://archive.vn/C2DDV)

At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF (attached to this post):
 

Attachments

Sir Bartleby Montclair said:
or there's a lot of porn for no reason 😕
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1615058730000.png
Michael Jacks0n said:
I just stumbled upon this on Twitter, and it's actually really frightening. It's also rather jarring to see the comments with people talking about their search woes with Google for searching for such things as "violence against women in 2020" or "happy white woman" in Google vs. Duckduckgo:


View attachment 1972783

View attachment 1972782
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They think that just pretending to care is going to make things better, that just showing more women as bosses in results is somehow going to magically push more women upwards. This is like bronze age cultures thinking if you write or paint something then its magically true which is why you found so many defaced statues and frescos from that era because everybody from the king to the peasant living in shit thought that if you for example scribbled over some scriptures then that was the new truth and you were basically modifying reality

Example: egyptians breaking the noses off statues so the person despicted would choke to death even if they were already dead
Michael Jacks0n said:
Translation = money.

It'll take a 21st century Theodore Roosevelt to kick Silicon Valley in the ass like Standard Oil over 100 years ago, because at this point, any alternatives are immediately quashed due to lack of funding and infrastructure. Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon are just so insanely massive that no one can compete in any capacity. Not StoryFire, not Duckduckgo, not BitChute, and sure as hell not Parler.
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The mcdonalds dinner boomer president had 4 years to do that, big tech had already fucked with him during his first election and he let them go

Its too late now, dementia sniffer is not going to do shit, he was big tech's candidate after all
 
Pee Cola said:
One thing I've noticed, especially over the past 6 months or so, is that there are many more Pinterest links showing up. Not just for image searching, but general searching. Ofc, being Pinterest, it's all locked behind a wall that requires a Pinterest login.

I'm now at the point where I have to specify "-pinterest" in order to get half-decent results on the first page of a search.
Click to expand...
Pinterest is evil, they'll steal images wholesale from websites and then Google reports the Pinterest links, not the originals themselves. They must have some sort of deal with Google to put their results up top.

Another thing I've noticed that Google does is if you're looking for something a bit salacious on Google Images, you'll only get pictures for products, even with SafeSearch off. Back in aught six, you didn't need to look hard at all for anything, like you could have SafeSearch on and be searching for something else, and still find a picture with a naked woman with N95 masks on her face, boobs, and snatch.
 
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