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 mentioned this same exact thing several pages back: I fucking hate it when Google omits specific words I searched for, as that article points out...

google-is-gay.PNG
 
So I got the Brave Search invite yesterday. It's decent enough that I moved my device's browsers default search to it, but it still needs work. As someone else said, there is just one page of results right now. The layout reminds me of DDG:

bravesearch.png


Has a dark mode setting like DDG too. I would still like to see the ability to turn off 'news' at least on the results page and keep all of that in a separate tab. I haven't really heard others mention it, but I can't say I have ever been a fan of the side 'infobox' shit Google and others started a few years ago, since it relies on Wikipedia, hardly a reliable source, for it's information.

As far as censorship goes - typing 'nigger' or 'why are black people' and other old Google favorites from back in the day won't give you the fun suggestions we all fondly remember such as 'why are black people so loud'. With safe search off, it does not censor pornographic results (speaking for myself, this is maybe a form of censorship that doesn't bother me). I attempted some 'conspiratorial' searches and did not get a finger waging 'infobox' with a 'factcheck' from the coomer who runs snopes, which is a plus, but if Brave Search were to really take off I wonder how long it would last.
 
search: futurama 2nd episode airdate

results:

Futurama (season 2) - Wikipedia

Episodes — See also: List of Futurama episodes ... season, Title, Directed by, Written by, Original air date, Prod. ... Fry breaks up with Amy anyway upon returning to Earth, so she arranges another date that Fry is forced to attend.

List of Futurama episodes - Wikipedia

Season 2 (1999–2000) — Main article: Futurama (season 2). No. overall, No. in season, Title, Directed by, Written by, Original air date, Prod. code. 14, 1, "I Second That Emotion", Mark Ervin, Patric M. Verrone, November 21, 1999 ...

Futurama (a Titles & Air Dates Guide) - Epguides

2021/05/06 — A guide listing the titles AND air dates for episodes of the TV series Futurama. ... 2-9, 06 Feb 00, Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love. 19. 2-10, 13 Feb 00, Put Your Head on My Shoulder. 20. 2-11, 20 Feb 00, Lesser of Two ...

(and no answer at the top either like one may expect)
 
I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not asking for an explanation. I know about search bubbling, search filtering, webcrawlers, SEO and astroturfing, pagerank manipulation, regional results, metasearch etc. I'm just trying to get a decent sample of everyone's own subjective opinion.
I appreciate BOTH parts of the conversation

SSF2T Old User 's insites are appreciated​

As to the question, yes - subjectively, over the past 25 years I have found searches to become less satisfyingly useful for me - though expectations and use strategies have changed for me no doubt.
 
Brave Search beta is now live to the world! That means no more email invites for
early access. Just go to search.brave.com ( https://search.brave.com ) , and search
without a trace.
...
If you were one of the many to test drive Brave Search early access… Thank you!
Brave Search was always audacious. A private, independent, transparent search
engine… and a viable alternative to Google? We couldn’t have done it without you.
 
Ok, so I was scouring through the Youtubes for random shit to laugh at, and I found a really cringey SocJus BlueAnon Youtube channel that's so hilariously bad that it's like CollegeHumor. I nearly split my sides laughing at their woke videos, and I found something which raised an eyebrow (keep in mind this video was from 2018, and I remember Google search steadily declining since then):


The TL;DR is that Google's algorithm supposedly targets black people in inner cities negatively by giving them higher rates for insurance or hotels, or that it automatically removes job applications with black-sounding names. Remember, "allegedly" -- and they cite no sources nor give any proof of this.

And then this hilarious banger from 2019, which is so insanely retarded that it seems like a parody...


TL;DR - clueless negress Boomer doesn't know how cookies and targeted ads work, so must be the racist crakkkas oppressin' tha bruthas.

With that being said, it's definitely most likely that Alphabet kowtowed to the woke brigade to tweak their algorithms. Even though those aforementioned videos were from a fringe channel with barely any traction, it's probably just the tip of the iceberg, and no doubt plenty of other woketards lobbied to lobotomize Google. Also keep in mind that in the 1st video link, that genderqueer dyke with the nose ring announces herself as a representative for a local ACLU chapter -- thus it's highly plausible that the ACLU's commie tentacles have been strangling Google fairly recently.

EDIT - in regards to the negress Boomer in the 2nd video, I see plenty of "We have arrest records for [insert name]" Google ads when I search for literally any name, white-sounding or not.
 
I was sifting through the google graveyard when I found this
1997 - 2011

Google Specialized Search

Killed about 10 years ago, Google Specialized Search allowed users to search across a limited index of the web for specialised topics like Linux, Microsoft, and 'Uncle Sam.' It was over 13 years old.
I wonder how many would be chomping at the bit now for its return.
 
Been on Brave Search for a couple of weeks now. There's some hiccups here and there, but it's already much better than DuckDuckGo. With DDG I have to fall back to google somewhat frequently. With Brave, I haven't been on google in a week and haven't missed it.

I'm honestly baffled at how they did this. Maybe modern search really is that bad and it just took someone giving a shit.
 
Yeah, I've been using Brave search for awhile now and it's my main search. I don't want to overhype it because it has some flaws but I rarely turn to Google and ddg anymore and if I do it usually doesn't help. Their biggest weakness right now is it lacks the little quality of life stuff, like recognizing tracking numbers.
 
The thing I fear with Brave Search is that, uh, certain people, will get wise to it and demand the same kind of curation/patronizing notices that most other search engines have. But there is little discussion of the internals of the search and where they are going with it, so I just not sure where it is going to end up. Brave is probably the best shot we have at the moment though.
 
Yeah, I've been using Brave search for awhile now and it's my main search. I don't want to overhype it because it has some flaws but I rarely turn to Google and ddg anymore and if I do it usually doesn't help. Their biggest weakness right now is it lacks the little quality of life stuff, like recognizing tracking numbers.
While that would be annoying, there's a big difference between doing the bare minimum to not get your shit kicked in vs

1625887900230.png
 
Yeah, I've been using Brave search for awhile now and it's my main search. I don't want to overhype it because it has some flaws but I rarely turn to Google and ddg anymore and if I do it usually doesn't help. Their biggest weakness right now is it lacks the little quality of life stuff, like recognizing tracking numbers.
I'm hoping that Brave Search stays barebones. The zero-click stuff is where Google search started to go wrong in my mind. Once they started going down the road of "hey, we can put anything deemed relevant here" it stopped being about quality results.
 
Too late, Brave already has 'infoboxes' straight from the ever reliable Wikipedia, as well as having news results near the top (dear Brave - if I want news results, I will move to the 'news' tab). Even worse of course, are stupid 'safety' messages about having the right opinion about orange man or whatever is upsetting shitlibs on any given week, but thankfully they haven't done that so far.
 
I'm hoping that Brave Search stays barebones. The zero-click stuff is where Google search started to go wrong in my mind. Once they started going down the road of "hey, we can put anything deemed relevant here" it stopped being about quality results.
There's unfortunately a certain amount of that that normies want and I doubt any modern search engine will be successful without it. Eich understands that normies are the ones that actually bankroll stuff (as much as we hate it). All these "libertarian tech projects" usually cater to the fringe and they go up in flames as a result.

Zero-click, I think, was merely a symptom of google shifting to becoming an Oracle of Truth rather than a search engine. The real problem is that google operates on a whitelist of "trusted information" now and everything else gets shafted by default. I'm less concerned with what gets put in a blurb box at the top.

As far as election meddling with the blurbs, I very seriously doubt that Eich would do that intentionally. US politics is profoundly fucked anyway and nothing is going to make it better until complete collapse.
 
There's unfortunately a certain amount of that that normies want and I doubt any modern search engine will be successful without it. Eich understands that normies are the ones that actually bankroll stuff (as much as we hate it). All these "libertarian tech projects" usually cater to the fringe and they go up in flames as a result.

Zero-click, I think, was merely a symptom of google shifting to becoming an Oracle of Truth rather than a search engine. The real problem is that google operates on a whitelist of "trusted information" now and everything else gets shafted by default. I'm less concerned with what gets put in a blurb box at the top.

As far as election meddling with the blurbs, I very seriously doubt that Eich would do that intentionally. US politics is profoundly fucked anyway and nothing is going to make it better until complete collapse.
Yeah that's unfortunate to hear but not surprising. And you're right, Google very much is the frontend to the book of all knowledge for many people and it's become expected - Bing does the same thing in a very aggressive and annoying way from what I've seen.

At this stage Brave's results are still good, though, so I can only hope that they won't go down the route of blacking out search results for email addresses for flimsy "safety" reasons and generally stay hands-off.

Too late, Brave already has 'infoboxes' straight from the ever reliable Wikipedia, as well as having news results near the top (dear Brave - if I want news results, I will move to the 'news' tab). Even worse of course, are stupid 'safety' messages about having the right opinion about orange man or whatever is upsetting shitlibs on any given week, but thankfully they haven't done that so far.
Infoboxes do seem to be scraped entirely from Wikipedia in the right column. If it stays there my banner blindness kicks in.

I tested a few items I expected to be zero-clicks that could be parsed and answered without fuss - "first date of X", "how many X in Y", that sort of thing. I got mixed results for when Brave decided to pop up the zero-click answer at the top, and it does seem to be if the answer exists on Wikipedia in the infobox specifically (easy to scrape). "how many tablespoons in a quart" got me web results, "when was perl first released" got me the wrong answer in a zero-click.

So maybe they're looking to "improve" on this with more natural-language parsing, but hopefully not.
 
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