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Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more's later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn't. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
No. It's an arms race between content creators and spam.
Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
Huh? The top result for "float needle" in Google seems like a great description to me.
Doesn't Google provide search results based on your search history? It's algorithm probably worked against them or something. I've heard that anonymous searches usually get better results.
I have had similar experiences constantly.
I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:
In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it'll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG's and Bing's equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we'd need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
And in the first case, I wish they'd do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.
I tried this in chrome and in Firefox with hardening enabled and VPN. I got relevant resumes each time but pretty different from each other.
Entirely shopping links for parts on Firefox vs short videos on chrome.
Yeah if you Google "what is a float needle" the first result on a napa website has a great description
Just putting in "float needle" gets me only relevant results, those being a mix of what a float needle is, what it does, and a few shop results for places where I can buy one.
Since myself and others had no issues with your float needle example, mind sharing what you searched for, and what Google returned?
I've switched to Ecosia and while it's not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
I know it's a "secondary" search engine.
But the thing is that no, hundred times no, anyone who generates ad revenue has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Everyone else gets screwed.
Switching to Ecosia alone made me much more comfortable with using Web.
Ecosia's results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing's results are significantly worse than Google's, even accounting for Google's deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.
Worse for whom?
Did you read the paper this thread here is ultimately all about?
The paper - I have not, the article - yes.
I've looked through the paper diagonally now, and since it's a scanned PDF, I'll get back to it to read it patiently.
I still see that they chose one criterion which is maybe less relevant for things I look for, which are usually not very popular. There's probably a curve somewhere which is better for Bing, apparently, than for Google in that point.
Because it's my personal experience that I find things much faster with Ecosia than with Google.
Yeah. In fairness to Google entire industries have risen around the sole-purpose of manipulating their system for nefarious reasons. That's a hard thing to deal with.
I feel the future will be personal chat assistants, but that will also start spitting out ads in the future unless a foss version is used.
I'd really love if I could download the weight files and do the chat locally on my computer
As a result SEO optimised pages are so bloated that I truly hate them.