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
ToroidalBoat said:
The way the 'net is going, I see it becoming like cable TV: corporate-run, censored, centralized, and full of ads.

Hopefully what you predict is how the 'net goes instead of that.
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Well, what I’m predicting is two internets. One will the be the dystopian corporate world and be interacted with solely through apps, the other will be full of nerds and generally cooperative because our communities share interests. The two will doubtless continue to intersect, like my online life isn’t just gossiping on the farms, I also make videos on YouTube and TikTok, and I have an instagram, but the separation will be such that the nerdnet won’t be profitable for the corpos to infest. Like you’ll still install the Facebook app because your parents and sisters are on it and you’d be antisocial not to, but all your actual friends are either irl or on the nerdnet. The key thing here is apps. Normies love apps, nerds generally can’t stand them. So when sites like Reddit move to be entirely app-based while sites like Kiwifarms or Serve The Home stay on the web, we’ll see the less devoted people leave for the walled garden of apps and algorithms, while the nerds stay on the old Internet. Discord is already doing this to us, lots of communities are shutting down their forums and putting up “join our discord” instead. This is bad for now, because it means a lot of information isn’t readily searchable/archivable, but I don’t think it’s a trend that will last because Discord are still monetising their walled garden. Once Google does finally manage to kill adblockers you’ll see these groups abandon the apps very quickly and go back to self-hosted forums. Normies can put up with ads, but us nerds abhor them. That’s the basics of my theory of the Two-Internets future. If you want an example from the past, I think usenet is pretty good example. There’s still activity on it, and in some cases those are actually still the best forums for some very niche topics, but everyone else moved on long ago. The quality of average usenet poster dropped precipitously in the 90s, but then when those new people moved on to the web and only the old nerds remained behind, quality quickly improved again.
 
Kiwi Lime Pie said:
I still use an old program that hasn't been updated in years and seems to be Abandonware that might not work on the latest version(s) of Windows. Searching for potential replacement software returns hits for online apps and web design and nothing related to the particular type of software I'm looking for apart from the old program itself.
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What's the software called/what's it do?
 
anustart76 said:
What's the software called/what's it do?
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FormTool 7. It's for designing paper forms.

In doing some more digging last night, I found it's still being sold and the current vendor shows it compatible with Win 10 (thank Godbear). However, the current version hasn't been updated in years, so it's anyone's guess whether the program will run under Win 11. I may end up keeping an old Win 7/Win 10 box for it.


Thread tax: Not sure if it was brought up yet, but I've also noticed search results seem to be tiered in that the results seem to be loosely ordered in the following sequence.
  • Ads
  • Direct hits or close hits
  • Potentially related hits.
  • Totally unrelated hits.
  • Sites containing gibberish, porn, or malware.
 
I have noticed that when I google specific, technical things that are spelled sort of similarly to normal things, Google will try very hard to autocorrect my searches to the normal thing. It 100% didn't used to be like that. I have also started to develop a blindness for the AI trash that Google generates and shoves at the top of the page because every time I search something it is always either wrong or answering an irrelevant question which is more basic.

I do think that the authoritative search results have been pushed further and further down the results pages, too, but I'm not sure if I am just getting answers to the normie query even when I tell Google to search the actual words I typed.

Susanna said:
Normies can put up with ads, but us nerds abhor them.
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I am not convinced that this is a normie/nerd thing. I think the main distinction is "people who are worth advertising to don't like ads." People who are not worth advertising to see the ad as a simple distraction, and their time is less valuable anyway. People who are worth advertising to see it as a forced sales pitch, and get very annoyed at being trapped in an elevator with a salesman. Nerds happen to more frequently be worth advertising to. It could also be the autism, though.
 
I am convinced that search engines have been programmed to randomly insert news articles containing propaganda into results. I can search a completely non political topic topic and I get a cluster of results containing articles about orange man bad or global warming will kill us even though the query is completely unrelated.

uBlacklist has been a godsend. The sites that regularly post rage bait inflammatory articles get binned. The paywalled sites also get binned. Search results finally start getting a bit sane again.

Youtube searches with a certain political keywords automatically get short circuited to mainstream network and local TV news sites without exception. Its about as obvious as brick wall. Occasionally, you can come up with some search terms containing an indirect variation of the forbidden topic you are searching for, then suddenly you get the videos you were expecting to find. Watch those videos, then the recommendation engine takes over which isn't nearly as heavily censored as search.
 
Let's say your looking for a certain kiwifarms thread...I was looking for this very thread just now. So I googled "kiwifarms search getting worse." I get absolutely nothing but biased articles on news sites about the Keffals drama and crap like that.

And you may ask...why was I searching for this thread? Well, because I want to vent about another BS issue I have with Google and the internet in general that had just happened for the umpteenth time...let's say you search for how to set the time on a certain brand of clock radio. The "people also asked" feature looks like it's about to conveniently give you the answer...
I. DO. NOT. WANT. TO. WATCH. A. FUCKING. VIDEO. JUST. TELL. ME. HOW. TO. DO. IT. I. CAN. FUCKING. READ.
 
Lately that Google captcha BS thing usually only does that stupid "select those parts of the image with [thing]" and I "get it wrong" every single time -- even if the parts with [thing] are centered on [thing]. The only way through is to click that refresh icon until I get that stupid seemingly endless "select [thing] until none left" BS. If I select an audio captcha, that stupid thing may say "try again later" because "it looks like my system is sending automated responses" or some BS like that. What time-wasting incompetent BS!
 
NyQuilninja said:
View attachment 5793676
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Screenshot_2024-09-29-04-07-04-16_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b12.jpg
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Well, as stupid as that warning message is, at least it's fair and unbiased across the board. I actually wasn't expecting that from Google, all things considered...
 
I've been using the Brave browser more often recently, and I also started using the Brave search engine which I dropped in as a replacement for that recently killed search engine Metager. Their AI answers work pretty well, including for easy coding stuff since they reportedly integrated "CodeLLM" as of August 23. So I can ask it a tard question like what regex finds non-ASCII characters and it will give me [^\x00-\x7F]. The fruit of years of Stack Overflow slave labor.

 
>search for "non-humanoid robot"
>get a bunch of AI-generated images of humanoid robots
>specify "before:2020"
>some examples show up but still humanoid robots also
>at least no AI-generated images of humanoid robots

wat
 
ToroidalBoat said:
>search for "non-humanoid robot"
>get a bunch of AI-generated images of humanoid robots
>specify "before:2020"
>some examples show up but still humanoid robots also
>at least no AI-generated images of humanoid robots

wat
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The availability of AI to the public has allowed your average idiot to generate hundreds of thousands of images of whatever they want. This means all the search algorithms have a lot more junk to sift through in order to find what they want to show you.
 
Even entering exact quotes from a site won't always have that site show in a Google search. One may see the ice fishing yeti instead.
 
It's not a new issue but I hate how the search options move around after doing a search. Image search should always be the second alternative, not suddenly the fourth or third. I don't want to read, I want to look at pictures!
 
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