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 can also say that the search engines are shitting the bed. Just now I was searching for the Ren'Py SDK for linux and bing gave me some suggestions that made my skin crawl:

wat.png
 
I remember seeing other people complain about Quora/Pinterest/etc. shit cluttering their search results, so I came back here to share this.
There's apparently this browser extension called uBlackList (Chrome & Firefox) that you can use to make sure you'll never see any of those trash websites again. No more having to append "-site:quora.com -site:pinterest.com" to each and every search query you make.
 
Kiwifarms is legit referenced like shit. I wish the site was more visible on google.
When I try to search a lolcow I made a thread on, I only find the kf link on the third page.
For a time it was the only source about the guy and the first and only result.
Now you only find knowyourmeme,shitty news sites and blogs with shitty opinion pieces.
 
I can't speak for Google as itself, aside from back-room fuckery of manipulating results, but I can say something about YouTube. They base reccomendations based on trending shit, things similar to what you watch, but also recommend videos that are watched by creators you watch. So in a way, a number of "viral" videos aren't really viral, because even if a big YouTuber doesn't watch it on a live stream or react to it; because they watched it, it could show up in a reccommended feed, which is then seen by millions of people. It feeds itself data on what it thinks people want to see.
 
Doesn't matter which search engine I use, but looking up song lyrics for anything using common verbiage is fucked and you essentially have to stumble upon what you want by accident these days.
I'm not looking for Jay Z or Katy Perry - fuck you, that's not even the right genre.
 
Zinc1257 said:
google is literally unusable without quotation marks these days
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Quotes combined with site: and after: have made Google barely usable again for the time being.

I really want to punch the nose off that smug "no results" yeti demon thing:
thing.jpg
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
That's what happened with me when I tried to find Tinder catfish accounts. Google reverse image search used to be sophisticated enough to pull up Facebook profiles of girls solely from phone screenshots of Tinder bios. Yandex is a mixed bag of Russian porn results, and PimEyes charges money for mixed results.
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I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier, given blackmail regarding "sexual harassment at conferences" was how the ideological vanguard took over tech to begin with all the way back in 2009. Ruining image search for everyone to prevent people from stalking their Tinder matches sounds like the first thing they'd do.
ToroidalBoat said:
I was trying to look up articles about "the future is fixed", as in the future is fixed just like the past because of the Novikov self-consistency principle.

But there happens to be a song with that name.

(aaarrrggghhh...)


That's probably deliberately written into the algorithm, likely because "diversity".
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I doubt it even needs promotion, rap dominates modern culture worldwide (not sure about China though) just like Michio Kaku gloatingly predicted, or perhaps relayed from his acquaintances who planned it so.
 
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I realized today how absolutely useless the web has become. Zoomers won't actually know an internet. I was searching something spergy about art history. I remember getting actual, real results about 10 years ago during spergouts. Academic stuff, opinions, essays and that kind of shit. This time I got 2 or 3 results that were tangentially related then 10 pages of results written by bots and the rest was all ads that had taken words individually.
 
TurdFondler said:
10 pages of results written by bots and the rest was all ads that had taken words individually.
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The bot sites on google are so fucking horrendous. When I'm trying to find a old internet thing (i.e. PTKFGS) I'll only get 6 results of old PTKFGS YTMND sites, then abunch of bot sites that more than likely have a virus with a suspicious domain name.
 
It's with everything.

Had a spergout last year about DIY hang gliders and the only real results that popped up were from decades ago, everything else was auto generated
 
Youtube's search engine is so useless now that when I just tried searching for a Dilbert clip, what I got was:

>David Pakman Show clip about Donald Trump
>Scott Adams giving a speech at a conference
>San Francisco robots okay'd to be armed with bombs
>FTX CEO admitting to fraud
>A full Dilbert episode, but not the one with the clip I'm looking for
>Chiropractor video
>Pay to watch movie
>TV commercial compilation from UPN

This is obnoxiously useless. It gives me everything but what I typed in. The one time it gives me something related, it's a miss.
 
Youtube's search is aggressively nonfunctional. You can be as specific as you want and it will still include irrelevant bullshit, even if you have something like the de-mainstreamify browser extension. Searching with google using site:youtube.com surprisingly yields much more useful results. Google is, at the end of the day, a search engine for ads and approved propaganda. You have to be nauseatingly specific in what you include and omit to get to anything that requires more than a cursory search and God forbid you try to find anything that may be controversial in the mind of a leftist redditor cuck such as anything that contradicts any aspect of pharma industry propaganda or globalist equity drivel. When the megacorps became infested with leftists and the leftist interest became what we now know as globohomo it was inevitable that the internet, especially search, would largely cease to be useful if you were looking to find neutral/factually correct information.
 
I feel like it's going to have to be a combination of Google dorking to get anything relevant, Google would rather serve you bullshit ads that aren't relevant based on the keywords then give you anything meaningful. Boomers that refuse to learn the technology have no chance.
 
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