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
Pee Cola said:
I'm now at the point where I find myself unironically using Yandex for searches, especially when it comes to stuff that goes against (((the narrative))).

Even something as benign as BrandNewPipe (a fork of NewPipe that supports multiple video platforms including - gasp - BitChute and Rumble) is almost impossible to find with a Google search, but came up just fine with Yandex.
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Yandex's been googlified too. I have no single search recommendation as everyone lacks something.
 
This has been circulating:
1698416540227.png
 
I miss when you could search images on google without having one third of the results being stock pictures with watermarks. That you have to pay for to use.
Screenshot glass of milk.png
 
Sanity said:
I miss when you could search images on google without having one third of the results being stock pictures with watermarks. That you have to pay for to use.View attachment 5448636
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If you want free stock images of generic objects, I recommend a site like Pixabay. Google image search for generic images is horrible. Every other source is from pintrest.
 
How did Google's reverse image search get so fucking bad? You have to fucking login just to use the piece of shit and even then it's all fucking advertisements of shit I'm not looking for or trying to find. Absolute horseshit, TGD
 
One thing I noticed with Google recently is it will only search your language and region, and there is no option to disable these filters. I look up Japanese stuff all the time that uses English, but unless I manually change the region and language to Japan, it won't show up in the results. I just want a global results page without filtering down by country or location. I fucking hate that you don't get the same results regardless of where you search from. Duckduckgo turned it up right on the front page when replacing Japan with JP.
 
With safe search off on both search "boobs" in Yandex and Google.
Google shows mastectomies, gynomastia, transwomen, anatomical diagrams, etc.
Yandex shows conventionally attractive women with their boobs out.
 
BroccoliBrainMkII said:
Does Google even accept boolean searches anymore? My school taught me about that in 8th grade (I gotta give my education some praise) but I've never seen anyone mention this feature. Modern search results are so bad that I can't tell if a boolean in the query is making it better or worse.
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Boolean search still works.
If you don't know how to do it just use a chat bot to construct the prompt for you. (that is probably how ai enhanced search engines work).

For example, you can confine your search to websites with forum in the title and other patterns common to a forum:
"nigger" (inurl:threads | inurl:discussion | inurl:forum | intitle:"discussion board")

Also for anyone that likes the forum vibe just use a forum search tool like https://boardreader.com/
...searching for kiwifarms on board reader is like turning on a light in a roach infested kitchen.
 
alpha889boba said:
One thing I noticed with Google recently is it will only search your language and region, and there is no option to disable these filters. I look up Japanese stuff all the time that uses English, but unless I manually change the region and language to Japan, it won't show up in the results. I just want a global results page without filtering down by country or location. I fucking hate that you don't get the same results regardless of where you search from. Duckduckgo turned it up right on the front page when replacing Japan with JP.
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I wish it was like that for me.

If I search stuff in Spanish, I get shit from Spain like in the 90s when South America pretty much didn't exist in the internet. Or worse, stuff from the rest of the shitholes in the continent. And I'm not searching for irrelevant stuff, I'm looking for shit to buy, news, local stores, law shit, etc. I'm sick of having to append my country to everything I search for.
 
Rusty Crab said:
Also, for the past several months I have been making use of Kagi and it has solved every problem I have with modern search. Everybody I've convinced to try it has signed up for it. I've been using it for work every day and I don't think I have a single complaint about it. Now I am shilling it to people because my god I want them to stay in business. If they catch on they could 100% be a google search killer.
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Tried to open it on Tor and got greeted with a 403. Great service.
 
I find it amusing that now, in 2023, if somebody made Google from 2008 it would be considered to be the best Search Engine. Things are supposed to get better, not worse over time. dammit
 
Sucks how on Google, you can't get an actual link by right-clicking on the link to copy it.

What you get instead is this really long BS redirect URL, with the actual URL buried in it.
 
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