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
BootlegPopeye said:
One other thing that I don't think has been mentioned here in relation to shit search results is how they now seem to be pushing 'news' (read: propaganda) into every search result. News, news, news everywhere, even in apps like Plex, the default homepage of YT, you name it - you can't escape it. Ad revenue in news business has been on the decline since the early 90s, and dries a little further every year, but yet there is more money losing propaganda beamed into results than ever before.
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This is a massive pet peeve of mine, too. Everything is pushing news and current events, in every available smidgen of blank space you might be looking. I can’t empty a box in my webmail without it trying to show me a video of some news story I don’t care about.

Even most web browsers will, by default, confront you with a “feed” of news and current events every time you open a new tab. You actually have to go into the settings and change it to show you a blank fucking page.

It’s no wonder people are so polarized over politics. The lengths you have to go to just try and opt out of having this stuff shoved in your face everywhere you turn online is nuts, and I doubt the average user would bother (or even knows how) to do it.
 
Sperghetti said:
This is a massive pet peeve of mine, too. Everything is pushing news and current events, in every available smidgen of blank space you might be looking. I can’t empty a box in my webmail without it trying to show me a video of some news story I don’t care about.

Even most web browsers will, by default, confront you with a “feed” of news and current events every time you open a new tab. You actually have to go into the settings and change it to show you a blank fucking page.

It’s no wonder people are so polarized over politics. The lengths you have to go to just try and opt out of having this stuff shoved in your face everywhere you turn online is nuts, and I doubt the average user would bother (or even knows how) to do it.
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I nearly forgot about that, but I got legit mad when Brave started including "Brave Today" by default.

Yeah I know "Le Shill Lion" and they gotta make money somehow but god damn please do something... ANYTHING other than that.
 
Massively Strong Greed said:
I can’t imagine writing a research paper nowadays without the help of JSTOR or actual printed works.
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In a way, it's getting like before the 'net back in the day.

Sperghetti said:
Everything is pushing news and current events, in every available smidgen of blank space you might be looking.
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Everything is political in Current Year.

The Real SVP said:
Results now: Dogs in socks on pintrest.
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Or "Why Internet LOLcats Support Racism".
 
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Sperghetti said:
This is a massive pet peeve of mine, too. Everything is pushing news and current events, in every available smidgen of blank space you might be looking. I can’t empty a box in my webmail without it trying to show me a video of some news story I don’t care about.

Even most web browsers will, by default, confront you with a “feed” of news and current events every time you open a new tab. You actually have to go into the settings and change it to show you a blank fucking page.

It’s no wonder people are so polarized over politics. The lengths you have to go to just try and opt out of having this stuff shoved in your face everywhere you turn online is nuts, and I doubt the average user would bother (or even knows how) to do it.
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The news 'features' is something it would not at all surprise me if browsers were being paid to put it there for propaganda reasons and not (necessarily) trying to sell you something. I noticed this in Yahoo mail - the exact thing you're talking about, emptying your inbox gives you a nice propaganda video of some TDS story I don't care about.

I will say though that Brave's is the least intrusive of these, I guess the plan is to make it more customizable so you can use it like an old RSS feed. But it's a worrying trend - I use brave to avoid this exact thing.
 
Sperghetti said:
Even most web browsers will, by default, confront you with a “feed” of news and current events every time you open a new tab. You actually have to go into the settings and change it to show you a blank fucking page.
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Oh my fucking god, a few years ago I bought a brand new Samsung tablet (basically the Android equivalent of an iPad) and when I first turned it on, an entire home screen page was taken up with a CNN feed app that you couldn't remove. An entire fucking widget that displayed retarded articles and videos taking up the whole page, and there was no way to remove it -- the remove app function was grayed out. I had to Google search how to remove it, and they said you can't, and at most all you can do is put the app to sleep and do some administrative stuff to hide it from the home screen.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
Oh my fucking god, a few years ago I bought a brand new Samsung tablet (basically the Android equivalent of an iPad) and when I first turned it on, an entire home screen page was taken up with a CNN feed app that you couldn't remove. An entire fucking widget that displayed retarded articles and videos taking up the whole page, and there was no way to remove it -- the remove app function was grayed out. I had to Google search how to remove it, and they said you can't, and at most all you can do is put the app to sleep and do some administrative stuff to hide it from the home screen.
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Nova Launcher is your friend; I'm on my second Samsung tablet and after installing Nova on both I've loved both of them. I've used it on multiple Samsung phones, as well.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
Oh my fucking god, a few years ago I bought a brand new Samsung tablet (basically the Android equivalent of an iPad) and when I first turned it on, an entire home screen page was taken up with a CNN feed app that you couldn't remove. An entire fucking widget that displayed retarded articles and videos taking up the whole page, and there was no way to remove it -- the remove app function was grayed out. I had to Google search how to remove it, and they said you can't, and at most all you can do is put the app to sleep and do some administrative stuff to hide it from the home screen.
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... and people wonder why rooting Android devices is still a thing.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Can you imagine if file searches in an OS were driven by "smart AI algorithms" that looked for "what you really meant"? Or with text searches in Notepad or TextEdit?
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Yes, it's called VoidTools Everything. I don't even care where I dump files anymore because I won't have to look for them.
 
Speaking of file searches, Mac OS X used to have a really good one with Panther. After that, it's this stupid Spotlight crap that has to "iudex" every drive inserted (which can wear out flash memory). I hear it's Siri now.

Also on DuckDuckGo, I look up Pico (text editor), and it gives me this copy of the Wikipedia article on some Russian site, even though I said "pico editor wikipedia". I didn't see Wikipedia itself in any of the results I saw.
 
So I ve mentioned this in another thread.

But doing a home remodel. needed a long piece of lumber. for about a month of googling on and off looking for a solution.

Google would give me addresses to like home depot, local stores that sold wood model, stores that sold wood working tools. companies selling stuff from half the other side of the country. places that would sell you a saw mill

On null's stream he mentioned bing. So I spend 5 minutes on bing and boom found a saw mill an hour down the road went there and ordered what I needed.

So yeah search is shit .
 
You can't find anything even remotely piratey on google anymore. I used to be able to just google "blah blah blah game torrent" and find pages of it. The same for "xyz stream" when I wanted to pirate a show without using a torrent.

Shilling has also fucked up google. It's extremely difficult to find in-depth information on VPN's, for example, since its a buzzword used by a billion websites for advertising.

Amazon and its affiliate program has also messed things up. People "review" amazon products just so they can link an affiliate for click-thru commissions. It's seriously muddied the review waters. Good luck finding anything not biased due to monetization and seo milking.
 
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The soyification of search engines has lead me to a point where I always have to choose what search engine to use for the current search. Yandex is usually good if you want to search for something google considers non-kosher like free streaming.
 
jje100010001 said:
One thing I've noticed is that Google Images no longer allows you to search extra large images, or search for images larger than a certain size anymore.
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Google Images also removed the feature that makes it easier to sort images by date. Technically, you still can sort by date, but now you have to use the "before/after" operators.
 
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