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
Back in 2010-2015 the only times I remember seeing a 'no result' search was because I put one or two entire sentences in quotation marks, and those sentence were too specific or had a typo in them.

Now a day I feel like you hit 'no result' as soon as the engine don't want to bother with you when you play the game of adding quotes around one keyword at a time so it finally does the search you asked for.
I wonder if it's due to incompetency, general disregard of fulfilling the primary function of a search engine; or maybe, they've had some flavor of AI slop running in the background for a while and it has harsh a cut off on 'search complexity' to save on computing power. I'm just making stuff up for this last part, I'm just hoping there is an actual reason for it.
 
I was of the opinion brave search was around just as good as Google now days. Not necessarily better.

But recently I installed Firefox again, which of course comes with Google as the default search engine. And used that for a few searches. And no I was wrong. Duckduckgo, and especially brave search are very noticeably better at this point.

After coming from using brave for a while. Then back to Google. It a very noticeable drop in quality. As someone that hates Google anyway, I'm happy to see it tbh. Their search engine being good was always something I had to concede on, but not anymore.
 
Quioui said:
Back in 2010-2015 the only times I remember seeing a 'no result' search was because I put one or two entire sentences in quotation marks, and those sentence were too specific or had a typo in them.

Now a day I feel like you hit 'no result' as soon as the engine don't want to bother with you when you play the game of adding quotes around one keyword at a time so it finally does the search you asked for.
I wonder if it's due to incompetency, general disregard of fulfilling the primary function of a search engine; or maybe, they've had some flavor of AI slop running in the background for a while and it has harsh a cut off on 'search complexity' to save on computing power. I'm just making stuff up for this last part, I'm just hoping there is an actual reason for it.
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It's because the search engine is actually a sapient being: one that's lazy and easily annoyed. The moment it notices that you're trying to trick it into doing its damn job, the engine starts just ignoring you entirely.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Around the time "normies" using "smartphones" got widespread?
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Who could've guessed just anyone having pretty much unlimited access to the internet through a thin glass machine would be devastating for the quality of its content, and per this thread's topic, the quality of the search engines that sift through that content.
Kids these days get smartphones fresh out of the womb. I remember when my - no, our family's phone was wired to the wall and mom hoarded it every hour of the day.
 
boards of canada said:
I remember when my - no, our family's phone was wired to the wall and mom hoarded it every hour of the day.
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When I hear "phone", I still picture landline to this day. It feels off to hear the "smartphone" referred to as just "phone" somehow.

And I think search engines being dumbed down along with computer error messages could be in part because of a "competency crisis" BS.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
When I hear "phone", I still picture a landline to this day. Feels off to hear the "smartphone" referred to as just "phone" somehow.
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I don't know how to work a touchscreen, and I'm pretty sure I've "used" a smartphone maybe once or twice when I picked up calls on my sister's behalf. When people say they've done something that requires the internet using a phone, my brain freezes for a second before I figure out it's not 1999 anymore.
ToroidalBoat said:
And I think search engines being dumbed down along with computer error messages could be in part because of the "competency crisis" that's been brewing.
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It's easy to feed preposterously terrible propaganda to people who are so poor regarding basic knowledge that they just don't know any better.
If you encounter an error, shouldn't your priority be to fix it? Because said error messages contain absolutely no useful information about the error itself other than the fact that it's there. Do young people these days go belly-up whenever something goes wrong and expect it to fix itself or something?
 
boards of canada said:
Do young people these days go belly-up whenever something goes wrong and expect it to fix itself or something?
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Yes, they absolutely do and it's a nightmare to deal with in the workplace. They lack the critical thinking needed to actually troubleshoot, instead they'll sit there staring at their device until someone else steps in to sort their shit out. Imo the worst part of that is they won't see anything wrong with lacking that critical thinking, it's genuinely disturbing seeing someone just go blank in the face at simple errors that can be fixed in under 5 minutes, particularly if you know they've seen it before, they could fix it on their own, they just don't care enough to recall what to do
 
boards of canada said:
It's similar in spirit to that frowny face on the Windows BSOD.
When did we stop treating computer users as intelligent beings?
Are Windows users intelligent beings?
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The crazy thing is they tried to make BSODs easier to deal with by including the QR code and yet the only first party way to analyze crash dumps is with WinDbg. Normies will never be able to work out how to install WinDbg let alone figure out its straight out of 1995 interface.
 
me: "when did intelligent life first appear"

search: "herp derp here's articles on why this may be the first planet with intelligence"

me: "when were first sapient hominids"

search: "uhh duh do you mean when Homo sapiens first appeard?"

This may be somewhat frustrating...
 
  1. I thought that metasearch engines (search engines that combine multiple search engines) could make this issue better, but when when I used them I realized that whatever api they used to get access to the other search engine's results is cucked and only returns a few results.
    Example: site:therx.com "MillenniumSportsbook"
    Bing returns 133 results, while duckduckgo (which is basically Bing + DuckDuckBot + a few other specialized sources) only returned 24 results.
    This shit is really annoying. Now, instead of just needing to use one search engine, I need to use a dozen.
  2. Also, using the earlier example:
    Page 11 of Bing:
    1739568232407.png

    Page 12 of Bing
    1739568267942.png

    Where did the 482 other results go? This isn't just Bing, every search engine seems to do this.
  3. Using the same example as earlier, page 1 of Bing has 10 results while page 2-10 of Bing has 14 results. While this is annoying, it gets way worse with metasearch engines. Duckduckgo has 10 results on page one, 4 results on page two, 3 results on page 3, 3 results on page 4, 2 results on page 5, and 1 result on page 6. Why isn't consistant?
  4. Page 1 of Bing
    1739568936787.png

    Page 2 of Bing
    1739568957009.png

    what the fuck? The first page had 10 results. Where did 8 of the first pages results go?
    I don't run into this issue often. unlike the first 3, but I felt like complaining about it too.
Edit: why can't I search "+" or "-" or ":"? That is part of the phrase that I am looking up, not part of some textual search operator or whatever its called.
 
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More Science Misadventures!

me: "do protons interact with photons"

search results: "uhh duhh here's a Quora thread on what protons look like"

Quora thread: "can't see protons because they are smaller than wavelength"

Getting research done beyond basic stuff in Current Year can be the chore.
 
Anti Drug Cuban War Hero said:
Edit: why can't I search "+" or "-" or ":"?
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Stupidity: We know better than stupid normal people. They don't really want what they put in. We are smart and our smart algorithm will show them what they really wanted.

Malice: We can't just show people what they search for because they might search for the wrong things thinks.
 
Google seems to be making it intentionally difficult to find the link to their feature for sending feedback on search results. Searching "Google feedback" just brings up pages where they give you vague instructions on where to find it.
 
Ilikeoreos said:
Searching "Google feedback" just brings up pages where they give you vague instructions on where to find it.
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There's instructions on how to disable that stupid AI-generated "answer" from Google, but it says to "open Chrome", go to Google, and "look for a beaker icon" or something. I don't see it at all in Firefox, so I guess I have to see those derping "answers" whenever I search for something. And turning off JavaScript is not a solution either: now Google now no longer works JS-free at all now. If one has a major issue with Google BS, it's safe bet to assume there is no help available. Especially not customer service.
 
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