Yes. It varies by topic, but on many topics now it’s 100% useless.
Google has been useless for me for years now. I switched to DuckDuckGo like 5 years ago and every now and then if I accidentally even stray onto Google, I’m just scared by the results
I came here to say this. Partly due to behavioral changes on my part, DDG’s results have been closer to what I’m looking for. At school, they block DDG on the WiFi, so I use Google there and I have to flick past many ads and results that look good from the summary, but have nothing to do with what I’m looking for when load the page.
You’re saying Bing has better results than Google?
Not who you replied to, but I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years knowing it’s limitations and would occasionally use Google if I needed more specific search results, however, these days Google Search is about the same as DDG and (even as a fan) I have to admit DDG was never and is not a spectacular search engine. Honestly, the thing that surprises me most is that when I get inadequate results from DDG and try Google, the results are basically the same. Not a great look for Google.
Are you me?
Same thought. Try kagi search. Search is better, I believe they use their own indexing, and you’re their customer, not the product, so there’s incentive to providing good service to customer instead of being treated like cattle and it shows!
DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.
And yes, I would say it’s better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.
Yes. I’m using the same search methods I’ve always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I’ve noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn’t go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it’s totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn’t for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I’d probably be done with them entirely.
Use Ublock Origin to block all ads. Takes 20 seconds to install, and works on all browsers
Technically it takes a while to setup tho
No, it does not. I end up installing Firefox multiple times a week and it takes less than a minute to add uBlock origin ande enable all the extra filters that it offers
When I was new to using uBlock it took me a while to search and read what to do. It definitely took me more than a minute to watch the tutorial video that was linked from the Github. It just sucks when people share these unrealistic expectations with total newbies. I was on the receiving end, too. I just installed it without knowing how to set it up properly, and I kept on hearing “Hard Mode” without knowing that you can actually do it on mobile.
If you say that it takes 20 seconds to install and nothing more, you’re just encouraging someone to just install it and expect it to be the only thing you have to do. You’re not even telling them that you had to configure it to totally block social media trackers and ads on websites!
And ffs, this place is becoming like reddit. I’m being downvoted just because I said something that would’ve been realistic for someone who is new to uBlock, that it has to be set-up and it will take a while.
Bro, it works fine with the defaults, no need to make it hard
There is another comment that said their default settings still let an ad slip in. Same thing happened to me before enabling Dynamic Filtering, then found out some trackers and ad servers are persistent. Plus, hard mode allows you to block trackers more.
In 5 years and 5 devices, I’ve never changed the defaults
Well you’re missing out. Try reading:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Especially Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode.
Also switch to Firefox, it has built-in protections that Google Chrome (of course) doesn’t have
I am using Ublock Origin in Firefox, it still somehow slipped an ad in there.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Read Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode. You still have to manually block the ads, but you can block it across every website.
You can get a degoogled phone but they all seem under par with flagships.
I was looking at the fairphone5 but I’m on the fence. I might just stick with my current phone which is like 4 years old.
You should look into getting an unlocked pixel with graphene on it
it might be difficult here. I’m in Korea. ie the land of Samsung.
the only cenario i actually use google search for but only in very rare occasions is when i am curious why i don’t find more results in another search engine, i then sometimes want to validate “missing” results are also missing in other/minor search engines that could theoretically have hits instead of misses, but usually i don’t find in google what i was already missing elsewhere, so mostly no gain, only sort of validation.
Big time.
EVERYONE else.
It feels more like Bing every day. I end up using quotations until there are only 20 results left and none of them are the thing I’m looking for.
It’s worse: google.com has started to remove the “also available in English” button and defaults to the localized version based on IP geolocation on every call to the home page. Seriously, I wish that company every bad and rotten thing in the world.
Edit: For now, the only workaround I know is to append /en to the URL
Not that I could tell.
In general yes. I’m not going to pull exact numbers up but I think it started declining around 2018.
I’ve heard it said they switched to whatever was most profitable rather than what was actually useful or relevant. I still find good results when looking up niche tech issues, but if it’s more mainstream I get really weird results, so that might indeed be what’s happening.
Looking up niche stuff gets harder and harder it seems. It always seems to “translate” my very specific request into a very general search and giving me useless results. It highlights search terms in the results, which aren’t even in my original search query. Google just thinks it knows better and it never ever does.
Don’tBe Evil.
for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and “phrases”
Same.
Google is crap now.
So wait, the search operators don’t work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless
They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.
I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.
And if it limits the results too much they just ignore them to cram more ads in.
Can’t have the bottom of the page spelling gogle.
They still work but they search the entire page, not just what’s visible in your browser. A search for
"term"does not implicate you being able to findtermon the results’ rendered pages.So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?
A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it’s difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there’s likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.
It’s far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.
I think you can still use the operators if you select “verbatim” under “search tools.” On mobile, you need to scroll to the right past images/videos/news/etc
It was a necessary move to incorporate support for Google+ profiles. /s
No but only because I stopped using google search years ago.
It has been getting worse for the last decade.
When I’m on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I’m not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.
I stopped using it years ago because they were going downhill and still collecting your private information. I run my own SearXNG now. It proxies from multiple sources, no ads, no tracking. I really enjoy SearXNG as it’s mine.
Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.
I used searx a while ago but forgot if it has Bangs like ddg. Does it?
No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.
It does.
Public instances
I’d say site blocking is SearXNG’s main selling point. (I switched when it got recommended to me on Lemmy :-).) Blocking just a few annoyances (Amazon, Pinterest, etc) make the search results so much better and relevant.
Also, Google is plagued by censorship.
Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you’ll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO[…]
What does this mean in particular?
Search Engine Optimization. Not providing the best search result, but tricking the search engine into thinking you have the best result.
SEO (search engine “optimization”) is how a search engine ranks its results. The more webpages link to a certain result (as determined by a webcrawler), the higher it is displayed. That is why bloggers are often paid by bad actors to publish editorials that link to a scam, virus, or gambling website.
Google popularized the concept in its early years, back when SEO was an organic indicator of a result’s popularity. It made them the single best choice. Then, capitalism happened, and SEO became a resource to exploit.
Companies are better at getting their shitty product/spammy pages to the top of search results than Google is able to find high quality pages to show you.
IIRC Google penalizes sites if they are detected to be abusing the SEO system. Not sure how effective the detection is though.
Poor, if my google search results are anything to go by
It means if you search for anything, your first 3 pages of hits are the same useless websites that exist to push ads vaguely related to your search rather than real info. Trying to research a broken TV used to return things like AVForums or reddit threads or samsung support sites. Now it’s “TEN BEST TV’s IN 2024” that are nothing but sponsored content and affiliate links to tvs on amazon.
Google can’t figure out how to tell the difference between the former and the latter, and isn’t motivated to because they get paid for the ad clicks, and not for the forum clicks.
Oh they know, they just choose to shovel the shit for money.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.
Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google’s search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing ‘relevance’, ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.
This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.
People with mediocre content using SEO to get themselves higher in the search results than sites with actual information on them. That way when searching for something you need to dig through the shit to get to the nugget of actual useful info.
Search engines tried to rank pages based on how big the chance is the info the user is looking for is actually on that page. SEO makes it so that pages with a lower chance of containing the right info, are ranked before pages with a higher chance. This leads those pages to get more hits and thus marketing thinks it’s done their job. But in reality it just pisses off users, blaming the dumb sites that do this and more often the search engine. Search engines are trying to fight this, but SEO is big business, so they are losing the battle.
Now these days there are more issues, like search engines not having access to a lot of info in so called walled gardens. So more good info gets created in places where it can’t easily be found. Also search engines have become more and more advertisement machines instead of search engines and with this shift in priorities, the user experience deteriorates.
But yeah SEO sucks and has always sucked.
If google detected continuing searching after a page visit, then that page you looked at was probably not having the right answer, right?
SEO solution : make super long pages with the history of what you are looking for and adding mumbo jumbo stuff to bloat out the page so you stay there longer. Now google thinks you found what you looked for.
And a lot of other crap ofc.
Ahhh, that’s the goal behind those overly long explanations about how Jimbo Jimboson invented the spoon when I just want to look up soup recipies.
What incentive does Google have to even put up a fight? Worse results = more time searching = more “traffic” = more ad revenue. It’s not like they really have to worry about search engine competitors. Please do not try to recommend DDG to me. It is just a different flavor of garbage.
Google chose to ignore the SEO arms race. Winning it is trivial, if you detect anything even remotely grey-hat, blacklist the entire domain. Forever. Then SEO stops being a thing because no one wants to risk toeing the line.
It was bad before LLM spam became widespread, it’s just even worse now.
