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
A new annoyance Google cooked up: Google can auto-translate a search result, and clicking on that can take you to a Google Translate of that page (also Google Translate may not work with webpages in non-Chrome browsers). One has to click this harder-to-see "view original" thing in the search result to avoid that. Google keeps going ever worse.
 
The biggest search degradation is actually YouTube. Doesn't matter what you search it will only show you what it thinks is relevant and trending at the moment and only for like, 3-5 results. The rest is completely random slop that has nothing to do with what you were searching for. I can't find old videos I know EXACT NAMES of anymore.
 
Google is just exploiting it's monopoly nowadays. Clearly they're bullying smaller engines into cooperating with them too behind the scenes (lawyers) because I guess the US state sees it as an OPSEC necessity now (OPSEC being censoring any info with the US/globalist cartel being criticised, especially in fields regarding technology, finance and medicine). This situation does nothing but worsen tech on all levels. Even your TVs are getting shitter so that they last only a year or so, in order for you to be forced to buy more and more TVs. They're trying to render older models completely unusable with HDMI now even. I've had several old LCDs and Plasmas been unable to use things like a firestick or chromecast. Anti-trust organizations, private and government, should intervene, but as you've seen with the JK Rowling shit, money buys the law nowadays.​
 
What annoys me is the AI Google has now. If I wanted that I would simply go to ChatGPT, it has no business being at the top of search results. Not to mention it's either wrong or spews nonsense half the time.

For now I've switched to startpage.com which is just a proxy of Google without the AI.
 
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Searched how to transfer funds by phone for a bank, and all results I saw were how to do so on an "app" on a "smartphone"... had to specify "-app" to finally get the answer.
 
> mojeek
Kiwifarms is the 3rd search result, blurb text is the kiwiflare page, half the other result are domain name park pages.

Search the last tech issue I did a duckduckgo search for, I only get results for iphones and chinkphones, while my first key word is 'w10'. If I correct the typo of using two X in 'max' I do get 2 relevant result before it goes into tablet screen protector and other chink products.

It does seems half decent at giving result from varied URLs, but because its 2025 it just means 2/3 of it are AI slop and SEO'd store page.
 
I end up using numerous search engines these days.
My main one is a custom private SearX instance, it works well for most searches but it can be quite slow to load, especially considering I have about 10 search engines enabled.
Startpage seems to be just as bad as Google. I do use it instead of Google proper
DuckDuckGo is sometimes useful, but I noticed the quality of searches fell off a cliff in the last 6 months - a year, so I don't use it much any more.
The state of search engines in 2025 is so bad I have to use Yandex to find what I'm looking for sometimes. Its the only one that will give me a straight answer, especially for stuff the American tech companies consider wrong in any way.
 
mxte said:
I can't find old videos I know EXACT NAMES of anymore.
Click to expand...
Even if you put it in quotes?

(It could also be from YT taking down any vids they think violates those overly censorious and broad "Community Guidelines" nowadays.)

BTW, found a way to block AI "answers" in Google.

ToroidalBoat said:
Found out in a Reddit thread that one can use uBlock to block that AI "answers" from appearing by adding this code to custom filters.

Code: 
! 2024-05-18 https://www.google.com Block A.I Search Results
www.google.com##.M8OgIe > div:nth-of-type(2) > div

However, even with those AI "answers" gone, Google can still put "answers" from sites like Quora at the top of search results anyway.
Click to expand...
 
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I think we're at the point now to where if someone uses Google as their sole search engine, we can safely assume that they're part of the niggercattle. That site, along with Bing for that matter, is simply terrible at searching for anything highly specific or anything that exists on the non-corpo web.
 
Merton J. Dingle said:
I think we're at the point now to where if someone uses Google as their sole search engine, we can safely assume that they're part of the niggercattle. That site, along with Bing for that matter, is simply terrible at searching for anything highly specific or anything that exists on the non-corpo web.
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Bing at least has a really good image search, same tier as Yandex in my experience.
Google is just all around terrible, but I do use it for finding local content to Australia since other search engines seem to only want to show American content which is annoying (looking at you DuckDuckGo and Startpage especially).
If you don't use multiple search engines, that's on you. Especially with how easy browsers make it these days to have shortcuts to many different search engines.
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Merton J. Dingle said:
I think we're at the point now to where if someone uses Google as their sole search engine, we can safely assume that they're part of the niggercattle. That site, along with Bing for that matter, is simply terrible at searching for anything highly specific or anything that exists on the non-corpo web.
Click to expand...
8051283db2c4957a7636317cacd72d0c-690975401.gif

Sorry its the scuffed PS2 version its the only screenshot/gif I could find.
 
mxte said:
The biggest search degradation is actually YouTube. Doesn't matter what you search it will only show you what it thinks is relevant and trending at the moment and only for like, 3-5 results. The rest is completely random slop that has nothing to do with what you were searching for. I can't find old videos I know EXACT NAMES of anymore.
Click to expand...
This x1000 it can be the most mundane thing or old video and you have to basically ensure you have extensions and blocks to NOT make it look like Tiktok. Clickbaity videos of the past used to be dumb shit like photoshopped movie edits to make it seem like a sequel to a movie was coming out or Rick Rolls. Now its stuff like "This person got pulled over and found out this cop wasn't playing nice" or political horseshit.
 
Tried searching for how long print media lasts -- as in how long it takes to fade or decay. Only results were how long the print industry is predicted to last. It also seems that the answer (or "answer") to just about every "how long does thing last" is 5 - 10 (or maybe 20) years, according to top search results. Like DVDs, colored pencils, etc.
 
Merton J. Dingle said:
I think we're at the point now to where if someone uses Google as their sole search engine, we can safely assume that they're part of the niggercattle. That site, along with Bing for that matter, is simply terrible at searching for anything highly specific or anything that exists on the non-corpo web.
Click to expand...
I'm actually using Twitter search to find memes now, that's how bad it is
 
Has anyone signed up for the new AI Mode Google added to their search bar? Tried it out for a few queries and it's honestly not bad. Of course if you're staunchly anti-Google, then Perplexity is exactly that but not-Google. Hard to say if this will be the "definitive" future of search, but unless you're specifically looking for websites or companies somehow fuck this up via ads or some stupid shit in the future, then AI Search is looking pretty good for asking specific questions and it giving you the answers upfront rather than sifting through countless Reddit threads just to find how to fix a broken faucet.
 
Colon capital V said:
Has anyone signed up for the new AI Mode Google added to their search bar? Tried it out for a few queries and it's honestly not bad. Of course if you're staunchly anti-Google, then Perplexity is exactly that but not-Google. Hard to say if this will be the "definitive" future of search, but unless you're specifically looking for websites or companies somehow fuck this up via ads or some stupid shit in the future, then AI Search is looking pretty good for asking specific questions and it giving you the answers upfront rather than sifting through countless Reddit threads just to find how to fix a broken faucet.
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How is it any different than just going to ChatGPT, CoPilot, or Perplexity like we've all been doing for the past 2 years?
 
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