While we are fixing things Google, can we also not have the first 20 results be YouTube videos that are 30 minutes long, when the answer I want is typically a sentence or two....?

I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.

If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…

Super interesting the trick we all thought was a secret, stopped working, and now executives from one of the worlds biggest companies are having trouble as a result lol

I've started using DDG as defacto since the last 3 months. Use Google search only for sports updates because they've good widgets for those.

It's amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we've built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn't, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. But if the niche communities die, that's a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

Google search has been pretty weak for awhile now. I/O spoke a lot of big talk about bring generative AI into search, but from my part of the world it still seems the same.

I wonder about the odds that Google would buy reddit. Not saying it's a good thing, but it could be a strategic play for them.

That was one of the first things that I thought about. People can't affix "Reddit" to their Google searches in good faith anymore, so what is the next most reliable community?

Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can't get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.

The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I'm aware that it could years and that's only if the fediverse picks up well enough.