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.
In contrast to all the other comments here, Google has worked perfectly fine for me in the past, and still continues to give me the results I want. I have uBlock Origin to avoid sponsored results and live in the EU, so maybe that helps. So far I haven’t felt the need to switch search engines because Google works perfectly fine.
Now that every website has a search function, Google has slowly turned into “I’ll show you to the website and let them take it from there”. It’s absolute dog shit. I think the AI has already taken over, and it’s progressing really slowly so we aren’t aware of the change. It’s already too late to pull the plug, the AI knows we’re all driven by greed for attention and occasionally money, and it turns out those are both easily created and distributed in the modern age of the Internet, and very very unregulated.
for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and “phrases”
It was a necessary move to incorporate support for Google+ profiles. /s
So wait, the search operators don’t work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
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.
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.
To be clear, we’re talking about the actual search results themselves and not labelled advertisements or any of google’s godawful widgets that take up half the first page?
Do you have an example of a search that returns excluded keywords?
Not trying to be confrontational lol I’m genuinely curious. There was an article I think last year where they demonstrated that everything was still working, but pages essentially just embedded thousands of keywords which effectively ruined the system
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.
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
Same.
Google is crap now.
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.
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.
100% the page ranking system is too easy to abuse. So a lot of garbage gets to the top of results.
But the internet is just too big to do proper index searches like the old days.
Google sometimes tells me there were only 4 results (and none of them are the thing I’m searching). It’s super annoying when it’s something I know is online.
It’s super annoying when it’s something I know is online.
That may also simply no longer be true. Things do disappear from the internet; quite often actually.
What’s the thing you were looking for? I want to try whether Kagi can dig it up.
Yes, I know things are taken down but that’s not what I’m talking about at all. By “something I know is online” I mean that literally.
For example, cases where I was trying to use google to get straight to it instead of navigating multiple menus on a website.
Or a website I was at the previous day but I don’t want to wade through my search history to get back there.
Then when google fails I go and navigate to it myself and it is still there.
Google has twice told me this.
But I got the page by searching browser history. The page refreshed too (not cached).
Not that I could tell.
It’s garbage full of seo spam and malicious links
YouTube as well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3dSkkEr-wk
This has been so annoying. I look up a video on disk provisioning and get a video of a goose wearing a tiny sun hat that I favorited in 2018. And then get the disk provisioning video three levels down…
Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there’s a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.Huh. I hate advertising and think it’s brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.
Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.
So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.
You can’t create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.
No but only because I stopped using google search years ago.
It has been getting worse for the last decade.
Not significantly because I’m always stupid specific with my searches, but I do notice that roughly every 5 results they put something in that has nothing to do with what I searched.
I recently tried switching to DDG for my browsers default searches… Instead of Google. It’s wasted so much time.
The others are significantly worse. Even using very specific search terms for threads and content I’ve already gone to.
Bing was nice for porn for a while… Not so much anymore.
