Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?
well…
a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It’s also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.
Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn’t a good alternative search engines remained relevant but we as users tolerated their direction.
Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it’s still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.
On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what’s happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is it cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that says something bad, or in favor of WIndows? It’s all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you so, or some, or none of them and move on with your day as it should be.
Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?
Guess this guy never has to look up syntax stuff.
Here is some info about the decline of truth on google search.
https://bbbhltz.codeberg.page/blog/2024/02/seoshenanigans/I’m not as worried about the decline of truth, but rather the decline of the open web. Google is favoring it’s search engine for a few. Sites such as Quara, Reddit, cnn always get top resualts. It’s never anyone else unless specifically searched for. If you don’t specifically search for them others never get heard on Google search.
I wanted to add some extra context that I feel some commentators are missing and it could be my fault for not being as specific.
The reason I think search engines are becoming more irrelevant is because seo, it isn’t like the year of 2010 where you would find more relevant resualts as easily.
If you read the title and the actual og post contents, you would find out i’m really just ranting about seo.
I did mention in the comments a few times that i’m not necessarily against search engines as they were originally intended to be used, but what seo has become for the modern search engine. Because of that, that is why search engines are becoming irrelevant to me.
So it isn’t the issue with search engines at the surface, I do understand how they work, it’s rather, what they had become on the inside behind the scenes with seo.
I only find search engines somewhat irrelevant because I’m almost never searching for, like, a website. I’m searching for information or software that’s compiled on 1 of 5 websites and I can usually use the search function on those specific sites.
Used to use search engines to find new websites. Back when Google was new and it was easier to find cool stuff with keywords rather than by adding .com to random words in the URL bar.
That is what we are missing. The Fediverse makes searching by keyword so simply easy, with it being decentralized, this feature will be preserved as long that people developing the Mastodon’s and the Lemmy’s keep supporting it. If they don’t you won’t ever actually lose that feature you would likely have to join another platform like Firefish, or Sharkey and search the Fediverse that way if something like this were to happen. This is why I still stand with the Fediverse being better for the longer term than Google as a search engine.
Perhaps we use search engines for different purposes… 🤔
I don’t use Google, but I definitely use my preferred search engine numerous times daily.
Maybe, care to elaborate your purposes.
Typically I might search for something specific like an answer to a question, and maybe or maybe not it shows up in a Google search. Or I might just search for a specific website which 9 times out of 10 it will show up.
The main problem I see with both Google and Duckduckgo is, Sometimes if I just search for information, some sites will show up and others just won’t. So because of this you may be missing out on helpful and relevant information that just isn’t seo friendly enough.
I’m not sure how abandoning search engines and only using specific Websites is supposed to help with this
By using say Mastodon, it is federated with other instances that focus on certian things and people posts about said things. You can search from Mastodon posts and even beyond Mastodon to other platforms that are using using Activity pub. and vice versa.
Because of this you will have more independent control rather than one company controlling the flow of everything. With Google everything goes by Google. With Duckduckgo everything goes by Bing and Duckduckgo. With Mastodon, whatever you see goes by various Mastodon server criteria.
But you’re still limited to the opinions of people who post on Lemmy, which, as someone who occasionally posts on Lemmy, is not a shining beacon of quality.
Even if I just went by what I get on the first page of a Google search, I’d expect I’d find what I need much faster using Google than I would using Lemmy based purely on the volume of info Google has access to. And that’s not even taking into account things like Google’s ability to search within other sites.
Unless Lemmy has gotten like 100 billions times better in the last week, this isn’t even a fair comparison.
Edit: lol, just realised you’re the same guy from the Nvidia thread.
This is a relative hot take at this moment but as the search results get worse and the fediverse grows it might become true. Time will tell.
I was thinking about the long term but I am open to seo getting better and being proven long.
Just wait for the bots. Also, search engines have been playing cat and mouse with SEO for a while. I don’t know why it’s gotten so bad lately.
Unlike on Google search, if you see a bot on Lemmy, or Mastodon, you can just block the bot and never see them again. Follow accounts/communities you trust to be reliable for finding info on various topics to eliminate the chances of running into the bots (since you more likely will be looking at your following feed.)
I wish seo would make the web more lively again but I just see them as a lost cause, and the Fediverse as the better future.
I’ve been blocking bots for 6 months now, it’s a neverending stream of new garbage.
That’s a price to pay to have a free internet.
If bots are an issue, and I believe it can be sometimes, you could try suggesting to Lemmy developers to invest into bot protection for the platform. Also, the instance maintainers themselves.
So one bot watches and another posts, possibly from an established account farmed with real human labor.
I thought this post was going to be about ChatGPT. Instead it’s about how fediverse search is a replacement for the entire internet, which is utter nonsense.
I’m not going to give the fediverse my address and ask it where the closest dentist/clinic/restaurant is. Also, even if I did, 見る人がほとんどわからないかも。
Use Google maps, or something like that. You wouldn’t need a search engine for that or even the Fediverse.
You think going on google maps to search for restaurants isn’t using a search engine?
The fuck
You must not have hard problems to solve if fediverse content is able to replace a search engine.
Search engines don’t use search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is what people do to get their site to the top of a search engines results.
The search engine basically looks for seo complying sites and pushes them to the top with their algorithm, so search engines do use it, and so do users to push their sites to the top of resualts.
That’s not how it works, like at all. SEO isn’t something to “comply” with. Their algorithm is what SEO is “optimizing” for.
This is only true if you need news or opinions. You can’t really search Lemmy for technical questions or search for a specific site which are my main usages of a search engine.
You are correct. I don’t mean to really replace the search engine in it’s entirety, i’m really just talking about the modern search engine and how tragic seo is for smaller sites and variety.
Searx would be an example of a good search engine, or metager possibly and others like those. So that’s really where I am coming from.
Dude, search engines are still the lifeblood of the Internet, even if they’re being poisoned. Your proposal to just grow the Fediverse into the place you search for info does nothing more than replace the HTML-based world with an ActivityPub based world. You’ll still need a search engine to index and organize zottabytes of data.
If you think for a second that the Fediverse won’t immediately be exploited, overrun, and ruined by advertisers the second it becomes large enough to be relevant, you haven’t been on the internet very long. It’s only a matter of time before one of the big instances sells out to some corporation all the users stay where they are because it’s easier, and the process starts again.
This is a never ending battle that decentralization won’t solve. Usenet, IRC, email, and early websites were all pretty well decentralized, and they were all overrun with ads, spam, and scams. Part of why so many services became centralized with big providers is that the constant escalation of protection vs. usability needs more resources than small time sysadmins can handle. They sell out, centralize, or shut down.
As far as Google and SEO, the current nightmare was originally Google trying to get SEO under control. Webmasters were learning to game the pagerank system, and the early SEO tools let them do that fairly. Then Google went public, bought DoubleClick and monetized the shit out of it, letting ads override their product, and here we are.
I understand that Google has a lot of data to shift through, and that maybe the Fediverse probably can’t do everything it does. When a user tries to search for certain things on a search engine it’s like Google goes out of it’s way to hide a lot of it.
I guess what I am trying to say is the Fediverse is best for finding discussion, and up to date topics, and opinions from more voices instead of the few that gain the seo system. When it comes to local stuff, I would probably use Google maps or something like that just so I can say I don’t need a search engine for that, but that’s just me when it comes to local searches.
If one server were to get too big and do ads and all that, guess what, it’s not like with Youtube for example where that’s your only option you can just switch your instance and you won’t be censored you just won’t show up on that corrupted instance. The fact that the Fediverse is decentralized and federated absolutely will prevent this from being as bad as it was with the og old internet.
The reason Facebook took over was essentially the fact that it was it’s own platform, and you couldn’t communicate with your friends from that old forum site from Facebook.
When one or 5 servers get to a certain size I would assume some instances would block some of the largest instances, but would still be usable as it could still federate with other instances. The Fediverse designed to combat this type of thing, while the old internet, really had no way to combat this. Sure it thought well for people it just wasn’t built to give people enough power to avoid bigger sites from controlling and censoring the entirety of what is said online and still have success and activity.
While email was federated, it was also commercial in most used cases. Actually email itself hasn’t really had any big take over or monopoly and emails seem to send even to this day from smaller email services to larger email services. So this seems to prove that federation can prevent what you seem to be claiming if people make the right steps with the tools they have.
You’re shifting your topics a bit from the relevance of search engines. You’ve gone from “Google is irrelevant it’s not 2010” to “Lemmy search is better for searching Lemmy.” Which, no argument there, I guess.
One thing Search engines are good for looking for stores like Aldi’s, or Best buy and seeing the type of stuff they sell before you shop there. But if you’re looking for anything opinionated, or from real people from *all backgrounds seach engines are becoming less and less of that as they use to be back in the 2008’s-2013’s
100% true, the quality of search results has plummeted. I’ve read lots of articles that propose a myriad of excuses, but at the end of the day Google could fix it if they wanted to. Google search has the quality of free popcorn. 
The difference is I can enjoy some popcorn, seo takes the enjoyment out of most of everything if not everything.
Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.
Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.
Good point. While Search Engines do have their place and uses. My issue isn’t with the idea of the search engine itself but with seo deciding what resualts show up or will never show up regardless of the quality of the source. A lot of it goes against the open internet.
Do you know what SEO stands for? It’s not SEO that is ranking results. SEO is the consequence of ranking results by relevance and quality.
What’s your alternative? Give supposedly relevant results randomly? That’d be even worse.
My alternative is to deliver what people are actually saying on the search engine based off of what a user searches. Not just a handful of special outlets that know they are hand picked and take advantage of their position.
You can take a lot of control by using search commands. Here is a list of commands for Google, for example: https://www.lifewire.com/advanced-google-search-3482174
By using commands like these you can narrow down your searches to the point that the impact of SEO is small. You give a much greater weight to the conditions that you have chosen.
It can be a bit of work to write a good search query, but the database that search engines search through is massive, so it makes sense that it would take some work to do this right.
