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:
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 isn't a solution either -- as Google now no longer works JS-free at all now. If one has a major issue with Google BS, it's safe to assume there is no help available at all. Especially not customer service.
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Just use Yandex. You can set it to search only for English results, in the search engine config for your browser you just add &lang=en to the end of the address.
 
Has anyone used Gigablast before it shut down, and what was it like?
Also, while some sites claim to be revivals of Gigablast, they are all fake. Even though it's open source, no one has tried to host another instance of it yet.
 
https://www.frogfind.com/
There’s an interesting reskin of duckduckgo called FrogFind aimed at people accessing the internet from ancient computers. That’s why it has no https unless forced to by your web browser and also tries to render the web pages in a way that looks better on older hardware, by taking the output of Firefox’s ”reader mode” version of the page, converting it into basic HTML, and showing you that.
035701F7-1BE8-4CED-BDF7-44E8BCE9809F.jpeg A7936147-1AA2-45C7-8F99-427DDA895686.jpeg
 
Elysian said:
https://www.frogfind.com/
There’s an interesting reskin of duckduckgo called FrogFind aimed at people accessing the internet from ancient computers. That’s why it has no https unless forced to by your web browser and also tries to render the web pages in a way that looks better on older hardware, by taking the output of Firefox’s ”reader mode” version of the page, converting it into basic HTML, and showing you that.
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The day AI learns to copy these funny little fella types of art styles it's over. I would die for FinderFrog.
 
Elysian said:
https://www.frogfind.com/
There’s an interesting reskin of duckduckgo called FrogFind aimed at people accessing the internet from ancient computers. That’s why it has no https unless forced to by your web browser and also tries to render the web pages in a way that looks better on older hardware, by taking the output of Firefox’s ”reader mode” version of the page, converting it into basic HTML, and showing you that.
View attachment 7057389View attachment 7057390
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I love these niche search engines
 
Often I have to get/use images related to x topic and as of the past few years I've found it far more difficult using Google as a source - not only did they remove the "original image" option but often only displayed cached low resolution results and prioritize low-desirability sources (ie. the same 5 MSM outlets posting the same photo, watermarked stock images) and even hide the image resolution in Lens, meaning most results are unusable as they are less than "retina" quality. I did find that Yandex actually lets you view the largest known size of an image (if it's been posted multiple times) and is far easier for finding high quality images in comparison. If only its searching algorithm keeps getting improved I would think it's a perfect replacement.
 
Kiska said:
Often I have to get/use images related to x topic and as of the past few years I've found it far more difficult using Google as a source - not only did they remove the "original image" option but often only displayed cached low resolution results and prioritize low-desirability sources (ie. the same 5 MSM outlets posting the same photo, watermarked stock images) and even hide the image resolution in Lens, meaning most results are unusable as they are less than "retina" quality. I did find that Yandex actually lets you view the largest known size of an image (if it's been posted multiple times) and is far easier for finding high quality images in comparison. If only its searching algorithm keeps getting improved I would think it's a perfect replacement.
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Google also promotes images from social media sites that require a login, higher than anything else, to force you into their ecosystem just to access a simple image file that their own search engine is returning. And once you go into those sites, make an account, and try to download the image you will find that most of those sites will make things like 'save as' as difficult as possible. And those sites will gets their blurry thumbnails promoted right to the top encouraging you to register the site to see the actual image.

And video is even worse. Probably 99% of sites promoted by Google from a video search will require things like custom browser extensions or an entire desktop program to be able to properly download and archive a video. Most social media sites and video hosting sites make it essentially impossible for the average user to actually save a file locally. And it's getting harder for even more advanced users to figure out ways to easily archive files because these sites are obsessed with locking down their (user generated) content.
 
Seems every Google search result now is either with a stupid AI "answer", or that stupid-looking ice-fishing yeti (can be seen if a wording used is just a little specific).
 
I know a few people that work at Google and it’s pretty common knowledge amongst the employees that they’ve fucked with their algo to maximize ad revenue. They even made the accuracy of their ad serving algo worse to give their advertisers more useless ad clicks. You’ll never see that analysis in writing, but it’s blatantly oblivious to employees what’s happening through internal tools or just from their familiarity with the products.

I’m trying a paid search engine right now. The results do seem better. A search engine needs to make money to maintain itself and I think the only good solution right now is to cut out the advertisers directly. And if it’s free to use, a search engine will inevitably degrade itself for ad revenue.
 
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Dopeypal said:
I’m trying a paid search engine right now. The results do seem a lot better. A search engine does need to make money to maintain itself and I think the only good solution right now is to cut out the advertisers directly. If it’s free to use, a search engine will inevitably degrade itself for ad revenue.
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Which one is it?
 
Dopeypal said:
I’m using the free trial for Kagi.

There’s some debate about what the service will turn into in the future, but I think the results and tools it offers currently are quite good. Users definitely have a lot more control over the results.
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I haven't tried that one specifically, but for me, metasearch engines in general have been really bad. If it works for you than it works for you, but in my experience the APIs they use only get a few results from each search engine and miss all of the stuff that is more than a couple of pages in.
 
Anti Drug Cuban War Hero said:
I haven't tried that one specifically, but for me, metasearch engines in general have been really bad. If it works for you than it works for you, but in my experience the APIs they use only get a few results from each search engine and miss all of the stuff that is more than a couple of pages in.
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Makes sense. I use search engines to find very specific information and less to explore the breadth of the internet. That’s probably why it works for me, but I also haven’t tried a lot of metasearch engines before. Google search results tend to be mostly clickbait or only gives me surface level information on what I’m looking for.
 
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Anti Drug Cuban War Hero said:
I haven't tried that one specifically, but for me, metasearch engines in general have been really bad. If it works for you than it works for you, but in my experience the APIs they use only get a few results from each search engine and miss all of the stuff that is more than a couple of pages in.
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Kagi isn't a metasearch engine, as far as I remember. It uses its own index.
 
I fucking hate how I can't even search for businesses in specific towns anymore. Search engines and websites like Yelp will only recommend places around the town I look up. How the fuck does this make any fucking sense?
 
Search engines are degrading because AI SEO spam has gotten so bad that all they can do is resort to "authoritative sources." I don't even blame them, finding things organically is nearly impossible. Trustless Internet is dead. You can see this throughout search, forums, and even hiring. You can't rely on automated quality filtering anymore, so we're all reverting back to trust-based systems. My colleagues and I don't even bother trying to use hiring sites anymore, we only hire friends of friends and people we know. Hiring from the general pool of people is literally impossible.
 
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