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
YouTube's search has been completely castrated, both with English and Polish queries. It's basically useless for the most part.

For example trying to find the "dead nigger storage" scene or Randy Marsh saying "Niggers!" on national TV will give you a flood of irrelevant results and also the staples of Google trannies manipulating search results such as giving you the song from Clawfinger which is titled "Nigger" just so you won't find the actual scenes from the movie or the series.

And trying to find memes of a political figure like Alex Jones or Wojciech Olszański? Yeah fuck you, you'll get dumped with results of mainstream media or MSM approved talking heads, just so you won't find Alex Jones screaming about gay frogs or Olszański screaming about ripping someone's heart out.

Oh, maybe you're looking for this very specific tech thing? You will be FLOODED by soy riddled thumbnails of millennial talking heads that have no idea what they're talking about with the videos being just marketing fluff and nothing of substance.

What's worse, there doesn't seem to be a single alternative that won't do this kind of bullshit filtering. Invidious and Piped.video still take the results out of YouTube directly, and general use search engines aren't adjusted for it.

They've broken the comments where half of the comments get hidden for no reason, they've broken the search so you cannot find anything relevant, at this point they might as well remove those two features and castrate their platform even further, it's not like they care anymore.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Even on Brave search engine, if you look up something controversial, you can get flooded with RationalWiki this and MSM news that.

Also there any search engine out there that isn't censored?
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There's a video of a Hillary Clinton supporter calling a Black reporter an Uncle Tom. It's on YouTube but near impossible to find. You can be a specific as you want, it wont show up. At least for any variation of "hilary supporter calls black reporter uncle tom" that I can try.
 
Thanks to this thread I gave kagi a try and now am in the third month or so of using it for my work and hobby stuff and I am pretty happy with it. Now granted I haven't done any direct comparisons but from my view their search is very much pruned of a lot of fluff and bullshit spam that tends to clutter duckduckgo or Google.
I use it mainly for searching for technical topics so the quality might be different in certain search areas, certainly my /tech/ queries won't be controversial enough to reveal any potential censorship, but what I've gotten so far are good relevant results on top (usually 3-4) followed by less popular but very relevant sites that I wouldn't have expected it to surface to me.
They also added some AI tools recently and I've made reasonable usage of them for asking specific questions that I know are bound to be somewhere in a large document that I don't want to read in full or summarize either all search results or just one entry.
In my opinion kagi is well on track to being the choice for powerusers that search often about complicated or niche topics.
 
YT has gotten even more annoying with spamming ads.

The 1st video on the front page and in "related" videos on a video can be an ad, and there may even be ad suggestions in search bar.

Also when I went to Google account to see if there was any settings that could change that, of course there weren't. Also a survey thing there said had the satement that the ads were "in my best interest" with responses ranging from "unsure" to "strongly agree".
 
"why do pro-abortionsits strongly defend killing" on Google:

[that stupid-looking ice-fishing yeti]

"why do pro-abortionsits strongly defend killing" on Yandex:

Why do pro-lifers see abortion as killing/or murder?

[...]

Pro-abortion ghouls defend killing babies after birth

[...]

Abortion Supporters Defend Killing Babies For Their...

[and more results]
Click to expand...
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
YT has gotten even more annoying with spamming ads.

The 1st video on the front page and in "related" videos on a video can be an ad, and there may even be ad suggestions in search bar.

Also when I went to Google account to see if there was any settings that could change that, of course there weren't. Also a survey thing there said had the satement that the ads were "in my best interest" with responses ranging from "unsure" to "strongly agree".
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YT has the most intrusive search I've ever seen.

Who the fuck wants "For You", "Previously Watched" and "Other People Watched" suggestions interspersed in your Top 10 actual search results.
 
Mordecai 3 Finger Brown said:
YT has the most intrusive search I've ever seen.

Who the fuck wants "For You", "Previously Watched" and "Other People Watched" suggestions interspersed in your Top 10 actual search results.
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This is more of a rant about youtube than search:
I second this. When looking for specific videos a lot of unrelated shit pops up, and depending how obscure or "offensive" it is you may never find it.
I specifically hate "previously watched", since it pushes me the same 20 to 1 hour videos I watch, even on the homepage. (and no I do not want to rewatch them)
The banners on the homepage for "black creators" or "disinformation" are also a thing I very much dislike. I won't watch a shit video just because a nigger made it, nor will I watch your soulless corpo video about how "disinformation" is bad.
And don´t get me started on the shorts category that unhides itself after 30 days.

As for google search, looking up semi-obscure stuff is starting to become a chore. Most of the time you get websites trying to give you AIDS, or get irrelevant results. SEO optimization garbage and all that. Also quora being pushed almost always at the top pisses me off.
 
Mordecai 3 Finger Brown said:
YT has the most intrusive search I've ever seen.

Who the fuck wants "For You", "Previously Watched" and "Other People Watched" suggestions interspersed in your Top 10 actual search results.
Click to expand...
I've been working alone a lot and was listening to an old podcast of Elon Musk on JRE yesterday. He said that every user input is seen as a failure in design, as in the algorithm should be able to serve you what you want (in this conversation in a car) without explicitly asking.
That's the design philosophy that's guiding these things. If you have to search for it or follow a link in they see that as a bad interaction.
 
Puff said:
I've been working alone a lot and was listening to an old podcast of Elon Musk on JRE yesterday. He said that every user input is seen as a failure in design, as in the algorithm should be able to serve you what you want (in this conversation in a car) without explicitly asking.
That's the design philosophy that's guiding these things. If you have to search for it or follow a link in they see that as a bad interaction.
Click to expand...
It's the typical techie error: they deal with so many dumb user interactions that most develop a strong contempt for users and try to engineer themselves out of having to deal with them altogether.

But that's just a mild pressure on it. The heavy pressure is ideological, political and financial. If you don't have control over what you search, they can be paid to prioritize one over the other, or choose to imbue one view with more influence than another.

---

On the plus side, thanks to AI ask jeeves will finally be able to fulfill their vision of having a butlery answer to your search questions.
 
YT keeps reccomending videos of older people reading "Where The Wild Things Are" for some reason.

Mordecai 3 Finger Brown said:
Who the fuck wants "For You", "Previously Watched" and "Other People Watched" suggestions interspersed in your Top 10 actual search results.
Click to expand...
If there's no relevant results, a search engine should say something like "no results found" instead of suggesting "related" stuff.
 
Have you tried using "intitle"? I barely used it to filter videos a few years ago; now it doesn't work since soydevs at YouTube screwed up the search.

As I said: "YouTube deserves to be molten down and is history on the wasteland."
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Even on Brave search engine, if you look up something controversial, you can get flooded with RationalWiki this and MSM news that.

Also there any search engine out there that isn't censored?
Click to expand...
When I actually want to find something I use yandex. I'm not saying it's uncensored, but you still have a much greater chance of actually finding the thing you were looking for than using something that takes its searches from google. Google in the current year is just a search engine for ads and sponsored content
 
Search has become barely usable. Unfortunately I don't think it is the engines that has become worse, as much as it is the internet and SEO that has degraded search. The part of webpages that engines are allowed to index, is just much more tailored these days. The days where the internet was a network of searchable static webpages is just gone. And unfortunately I don't think there is a fix.

And I hate it. Google used to be such a bloody useful tool, applicable to almost any problem. Now it becomes worse by the day.
 
I've searched for very specific technical terms and it'll pull up unrelated stuff, like things that dont even have the term I searched for.

Completely fucking worthless.
 
Google is completely useless.

Try to google any tech problem or heck, release date of your favorite movie. You get flooded with irrelevant articles and bullshit irrelevant to your search.
 
Literally try search for a variant of "Pepe stare" on Google and compare that with Yandex's image search
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Yandex actually shows me different variations that I'm looking for whereas Google gives me some variations but they're not what I'm looking for compared to yandex. And if you're wondering, the "related results" when clicking on an image is even worse on Google since it's not related at all with what I searched for. Truly the absolute state of search.
 
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