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
I remember in years past I used to be able to search for just about anything, and I could get decent results for what I wanted. I could ask a question, and I'd get various sites with answers. Id look for images of something, and I'd get those images. These days its rarely ever the case. Consistently there are no answers to my questions, only slightly related articles that are useless to me. Even normal everyday shit like looking for information on a video game is difficult to clearly find. I end up having to just directly look on sites like gamefaqs in hopes of finding any answers, and that limits the scope of my search by quite a bit. Searches have gotten legitimately terrible as of late and they just seem to be getting worse and worse.
 
I respect the difference from how it was in the boolean days, but mashing whatever babble a customer said and getting the actual medical names they meant and asking random questions and getting results is pretty nice.
 
I wanted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zTXFOUvZiw

I was watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSWXvTjyoQ8 and in it they mentioned "16 hours", so I wanted to karaoke the music I wanted.

I searched:
  • it's been sixteen miles and I don't know here I'm going the fastest I can music
  • it's been sixteen miles and I don't know here I'm going the fastest I can music in weeds
  • "it's been sixteen miles and I don't know here I'm going but" music in weeds tv show
I finally had to do my own sleuthing and look through the sound track of Weeds. (I can't find a good website for this ether; one that lets you search musics played any episode.) It makes be feel like I'm going crazy when I remember things correctly and the broken-ass search engines can't figure it the fuck out. Just call me Winston Smith. Then I got to Youtube and I'm watching the music. There's this verse in the music that goes "So you better move fast", which sounds like "So you better get off your ass", which has a really cool psycho-linguistic closure effect. So I turn on auto-generated captions and Youtube has them in Mexican. I don't speak Mexicanese. This is fucked. The search engines are FUCKING garbage. I know I got the words wrong but the robots should be able to get it right anyway.

I've head how the Hovervilles in Palo Aluto are getting bad with all the 500 year-old viruses breeding in the villes. I sincerely hope that all of California dies of Syphilis. I think that would be a good enough punishment for them because Nigger-USA does not make bad employees kill themselves when they fuck up.
 
I kind of miss huge, categorized indexes like old Yahoo. Sometimes I just want a list of sites I can look through myself.
 
I was looking for information on an old book publishing company, and Duckduckgo beat out google on actually finding information about it. It was brief, but it was a niche publisher from the 90's that was absorbed years ago. It was just what I needed to know. All google could do was bring up google scholar pages about Egyptian Circumcision.
Michael Jacks0n said:
Alright, so just a little update here.

I gave Yandex a 2nd chance, and surprisingly it helped me find a Tinder girl was a catfish. A few days ago I saw a decently attractive blonde on my Tinder queue, but she had a blank bio. I wanted to swipe right, but her face looked kinda familiar, instead I took a screencap and uploaded it to Yandex. Sure enough, the first result was the Twitter of some pornstar I never heard of. The photo from the girl's Tinder bio was a selfie from the actual pornstar's Twitter, so it wasn't all over-the-top sexual or like a typical thot pose...rather it was just some cute blonde in a t-shirt. Figuring it was a fake bio, I swiped left, especially since the ages didn't match up (the girl on Tinder was listed as 30, and the pornstar is like 25).
Click to expand...
God bless literal Russian bots.
 
Definitely worse. Search engines - at least Google and YouTube - try to pass off "related" stuff if nothing can be found, and entering a phrase in quotes is no guarantee of finding it. Search engines in Current Year are as stupid and unreliable as porn site searches are known to be. It reminds me of the early internet when search results were clogged with advertising and gambling sites.

Ironically, this is after Big Tech pushed to make "smarter" search engines with "the power of the algorithm". I think they think they can make search engines "think like people", instead of being like the (more accurate) "dumb" computer database searches search engines used to be.

And of course, Google wants to "socially engineer" people with search results.
 
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Amazon has the worst search system on an online store. I have to go on google and type what I'm looking for plus amazon to find it.
 
Never Scored said:
I kind of miss huge, categorized indexes like old Yahoo. Sometimes I just want a list of sites I can look through myself.
Click to expand...
DMOZ was the other big web directory. It's dead too but at least an archive of it is still alive:

DMOZ

It's the Web, Organized.
dmoztools.net dmoztools.net
 
Searching for tech issues and errors is a nightmare now. You get a ton of shitty spam results and unhelpful guides that are pumped up due to SEO. I heard a lot of these are content farmed by indians writing articles for a few pennies. I end up resorting to narrowing results by sites I know have discussion boards.

Google has also fucked up their results by curating them. As others have mentioned, it now apparently tries to search for what your query "means," which makes it annoying to actually find things. Maybe it works better for normie searches, but trying to find specific things or look up error codes and tech stuff is a real pain. I also believe that Google is censoring a lot of results for news and political stuff now. This is really evident on Youtube if you manage to put a certain keyword in a search - you end up with a page of condescending CNN videos explaining the topic to you. Finding torrents and downloads is now impossible on Google but Yandex and some other searches are okay.

I still use Google at work since it still tends to be fairly efficient and I don't care about privacy. At home I usually switch between DDG and Startpage.
 
I have used not-google for search results for about ten years ago now. When I made the switch, Google was very obviously a superior product but I just didn't like them or their tracking, and refused to use them.

It's simply not the case anymore, and I might as well use any search engine for the value of results it gives me.
 
You know that old feeling you got when you were trying to get used to another search engine and you're like
"wellllllllllll I really need results for this so I'd better just go to google for this one"
I'm starting to feel that with google, but instead it's
"welllllllllll, I really need results for this and google is probably just gong to censor them, so I'll go with ddg"

Google has officially become my secondary for both work and play... Jesus christ look at this:

1612060299405.png

1612060314427.png
 
I do a lot of freelance writing.

I was trying to look up exactly when they changed the ammunition of the 5.56mm NATO and why between the Vietnam Era ammunition and the 80's ammo, mainly looking for the military testing that proved the fouling problem was the cordite type.

Google wasn't worth a shit. I ended up just going to FAS.org and having to comb through old pages for two hours.

Yay me?

Used to be I could find plenty of data on what I wanted pretty easily. Now I can't.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
I do a lot of freelance writing.

I was trying to look up exactly when they changed the ammunition of the 5.56mm NATO and why between the Vietnam Era ammunition and the 80's ammo, mainly looking for the military testing that proved the fouling problem was the cordite type.

Google wasn't worth a shit. I ended up just going to FAS.org and having to comb through old pages for two hours.

Yay me?

Used to be I could find plenty of data on what I wanted pretty easily. Now I can't.
Click to expand...
God yes, this is a perfect example of the kind of stuff I'm talking about. If I had to guess what was causing this, I would say it has to do with a shift in what their oracle is willing to give you back.

At one time, google would treat literally everything it could get it's hands on as one giant pool and would try to match for relevance. That lead to a lot of incoherent word vomit on screen sometimes, but you at least got leads as to what you were looking for. Actual problem content was put on a blacklist removed from results. Now they've moved to something that I can only naively call a "fuzzy whitelist".

In other words, all sites are assumed to be 'problematic' unless they already have significant traffic going to them without the glowies getting involved. This automatically buries and destroys a lot of those old mailing lists and obscure programming forums that I talked about before. It also cuts off stuff like archives that you reference in this post. These sites are perfectly fine, but since they are not frequently visited by normies, google just discards them outright.
 
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