Has search gotten worse?

[Zero0]

You guys should really get BlockTube and just get rid of all the shitty channels you don't care about.

 

[TurdFondler]

I used Quora for a little bit a few years ago because I found a lot of the personal anecdotes amusing.

Quora has some okay answers sometimes but the boomer anecdotes are the best. Was looking for info on marine gearboxes, quora was the only place with real info but it was all hidden inside boomer stories "back when I was working in the Everglades..."

It's gotten to the point I'll mostly skip google and just go to wikipedia.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Tried to search for why screen primaries and secondaries are different hues than the print counterparts.

All I got were the basics of CMYK vs RGB.

(It's almost as if Big Tech wants you to know only basic stuff, and never become an expert in anything.)

 

[Kane Lives]

Maybe it's just me being old and not having to need to use a search engine in awhile, but why the fuck is Google search, the one thing they're supposed to be good at, fucking useless now? No fuck off, I don't want your sponsored adlinks that has nothing to do with what I want. No, I don't want to have scroll past your barely disguised ad links just to be met with a plethora of equally useless suggestions. And what legitimate search results are there were all off topic wildly.

When fucking Bing does search better, you know something is terribly wrong.

 

[stares at error messages]

I think search has gotten worse. Maybe it's due to the increase in machine learning. Like how you can read text from a Marchov string generator and it sort-of look like a really book or what ever source text, but It's actually not meaningful. If the search results are just trying to mimic what people are searching for and not actually trying to identify the concept of the query it would fallow that the results are not human-meaningful. For example, if I search of chocolate cake and I get pictures of chocolate and cake but not chocolate cake I'm really not getting back what I'm looking for. It seems the algorithms have gone in the direction of just throwing a bunch of suggestions out without trying to match the query correctly.

All day I've been looking for this video, I think it was on Internet Archive, of lecture about programming and playing the electric clarinet. The lecture was about how music has changed it's timing abstraction a few times thought history and this can be metaphoric for how to write programs that use dependency injection. So the same way a piece of music can change timing systems so can your software change what it operates on while not changing the core logic. The guy doing the lecture looked like KingCobraJFS in his 50 or 60s. I really wish I could find it.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9koJOCL8Bms>

 

[ditto]

It's gotten to the point I'll mostly skip google and just go to wikipedia.

That's what Apple starting to do by default. In iOS 15 the built-in "Look Up" doesn't just redirect to Google anymore, but does its own lookup.
There's results for Wikipedia, Dictionary, Stack Overflow, IMDB, local apps and only if there aren't any other results then a "Search the web" link appears right at the bottom as an absolute last resort.

 

[ditto]

What did Google mean by this?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

What did Google mean by this?

Speaking of scifi, the animated Star Trek episode "The Infinite Vulcan" has the Japanese title of "惑星ファイロスの巨人" ("Planet Phylos' Giant"). Google Translate "translates" that as "The Infinite Vulcan of the Planet Phyllos" instead. Looks like Google Translate now can "translate" to the "English version" instead of translating.

 

[Yeshua Moon]

I'm guilty of adding "reddit" on my searches lately because the results are often clogged with pajeet spam blogs trying to sell you shit. But sometimes I notice Google would omit results coming from reddit on certain topics, I think stuff about health/meds and covid vax.

DDG shows things fine.

https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying

Why are people appending “reddit” to their queries?​

There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory. The claim is basically that most of the internet is bots. There aren’t real people here anymore.

IlluminatiPirate:

TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

This isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone. The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots. Everything is commercialized. Someone’s always trying to sell you something. Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.

So how can we regain authenticity? What if you want to know what a genuine real life human being thinks about the latest Lenovo laptop?

You append “reddit" to your query (or hacker news, or stack overflow, or some other community you trust).

Google is dead.

Long live Google + “site:reddit.com”.

 

[ditto]

Here's a challenge:

Try to use a search engine to find the song that Keyboard Cat is playing.

The SEO is so tight the you'll only ever find the cat playing "a cheery tune" or "a tinny song" but never the same of the original. Even Wikipedia that has thousands of words about a 30 second video of a cat somehow "forgets" to mention it.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Looks like Google Translate now can "translate" to the "English version" instead of translating.

"The Brady Bunch" is "ゆかいなブレディー家" ("Happy Brady House"), but Google Translate "translates" it as "The Brady Bunch" instead.

If one replaces "ブレディー" ("Brady") with something else, it can actually translate.

Here's a challenge:

Reminds me of when I was trying to find the name of some French song.

IIRC all I got was unrelated stuff and someone claiming on Quora that no one searches for songs using uploaded clips anymore.

 

[skjora]

Tried to search for why screen primaries and secondaries are different hues than the print counterparts.

All I got were the basics of CMYK vs RGB.

(It's almost as if Big Tech wants you to know only basic stuff, and never become an expert in anything.)

You just can't mix a glowing lime green from CMYK inks. There's physically no way to get such a hue from mixing those inks because you're limited by the physics of light. To get special colors like that, you need to print with ready-mixed spot colors and a printing setup/software that supports handling them.

 

[Boom Boss]

Here's a challenge:

Try to use a search engine to find the song that Keyboard Cat is playing.

The SEO is so tight the you'll only ever find the cat playing "a cheery tune" or "a tinny song" but never the same of the original. Even Wikipedia that has thousands of words about a 30 second video of a cat somehow "forgets" to mention it.

Reminds me of when I was trying to find the name of some French song.

IIRC all I got was unrelated stuff and someone claiming on Quora that no one searches for songs using uploaded clips anymore.

Maybe you can use an app like BeatFind to find your songs.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

You just can't mix a glowing lime green from CMYK inks.

I guess if one had a really saturated or fluorescent CMYK, one could make more colors.

But yeah, spot colors or just going with less saturated equivalents instead is the way to go to get "RGB exclusive" colors.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I've complained about this with YT, but anyone else noticed more and more of this shit? "In-line" propaganda in your not-even-remotely-related search query:

I searched on YT the other day for a commentator who does not typically comment on US domestic politics and it was the same thing, 6 videos of commentator on war issues, 1 video of 'see new released shocking violent 1/6 footage', 6 or so more videos of said commentator, 1 more 1/6 video, etc, basically repeated the pattern several times.

 

[Kiwi & Cow]

Ok, so for all those who want yet another alternative, I found this German site last Wednesday (I also recommend that you use it with an AdBlocker or hardened browser. By looking up the name of the site on DDG or Google, the results weren't so great, so I'd be careful): https://ch.temposearch.com/

Here's an example of the results you can get.


I guess if you're on the Drachenlord thread this could be useful since it gives priority to German sources.

EDIT:

Here's a challenge:

Try to use a search engine to find the song that Keyboard Cat is playing.

The SEO is so tight the you'll only ever find the cat playing "a cheery tune" or "a tinny song" but never the same of the original. Even Wikipedia that has thousands of words about a 30 second video of a cat somehow "forgets" to mention it.

Just searched "play him off" with nothing else and found an extended clip with kids in it, I don't know if I was meant to find the song the cat plays or the full clip, but whatever.

Also from the description of the video, I found this:

But anyways it seems that youtube's search is completely fucked aight.

 

[TurdFondler]

I've complained about this with YT, but anyone else noticed more and more of this shit? "In-line" propaganda in your not-even-remotely-related search query:

Totally. YouTube used to be really good for showing you related media. You could fall down a rabbit hole pretty easily. Now? The videos at the end of whatever I'm watching aren't related in any way. Just bullshit that's trending.

 

[Captain Hastings Official]

I searched on YT the other day for a commentator who does not typically comment on US domestic politics and it was the same thing, 6 videos of commentator on war issues, 1 video of 'see new released shocking violent 1/6 footage', 6 or so more videos of said commentator, 1 more 1/6 video, etc, basically repeated the pattern several times.

Totally. YouTube used to be really good for showing you related media. You could fall down a rabbit hole pretty easily. Now? The videos at the end of whatever I'm watching aren't related in any way. Just bullshit that's trending.

That's strange. YouTube still only recommends me stuff obviously related to videos I've been watching recently. A lot of it is shit, sure, but it's shit that's really clearly connected to what I do watch. I watch chemistry videos, it starts recommending me 'World's STRONGEST bases!!!'; I watch urban exploration videos and it recommends me 'CREEPIEST abandoned mall!!!'; etc. And I simply do not get current events videos pushed on me at all. Perhaps it flags some people as 'need to propagandized at'.

 

[TurdFondler]

That's strange. YouTube still only recommends me stuff obviously related to videos I've been watching recently.

That might be part of it. My youtube account is fairly new and I don't watch very much. I think they create a profile for you based on watching habits, and if there's not enough data you get whatever is trending.

Which is different than it used to be, I think. It used to be videos were linked to one another via content or hashtags or something.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I don't really think it's based much on history (well OK maybe in part - my YT history is paused so supposedly they don't factor it in), but certain topics they want everyone to see. During peak covid mania, I would get similar search results about how vaccines are safe even if I was searching something zero percent related. To be clear, what I posted above was results from a search and not recommendations on the sidebar, which have always been somewhat hit or miss.