You’re Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people’s lived experience—says different.
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…Fuck using quotes or a negative search still won’t get you what you want. I’ve had it still pull up results with the negative words in it.
It’s the same on YouTube. One time I added a negative term and I ONLY got that term in the results. I don’t understand how you can break such an important part of search.
I’ve used terms like “ItemA”+“ItemB”
And still get results which have the disclaimer “Missing: ItemB | Show results with: ItemB”
I ALREADY TOLD YOU TO
Query: “list of item locations in game”
Results:
- YouTube
- YouTube
- YouTube
- List of item locations in other game of the series
- YouTube
- YouTube
- IGN (their article is a just bunch of videos)
- Irrelevant SEO bait
That website was so jam packed with crap popping up that it wasn’t worth reading
If you use Firefox, the reader view works great when you want to look at just the article and nothing else.
Or Safari.
So far, I’ve moved to Kagi.
I like kagi, too. The small subscription fee is worth it to me because I get decent search results and they don’t track you or bubble you…
If you’re interested in an engine that pulls from different sources, doesn’t tie you to an account, doesn’t fund a sketchy man who runs a sketchy company, and doesn’t cost money… Those exist too!
Well fuck. I want nothing to do with kagi now.
TBH if they dropped Brave or made it opt-in (ie disabled, not enabled, by default) I’d get on Kagi.
It’s frustrating. But not surprising. Indexing the internet ain’t cheap.
I’m so technologically illiterate I couldn’t figure out how to access the sears.space website. All I can find is versions and instances and a GitHub page
Every site on the leftmost column is a SearX instance. e.g. https://searxng.site/
It’s like… Lemmy, actually.
That’s not an engine, it’s a metaengine. The results are still tied to the engines used, which means if they are trash, you get trash. Kagi uses a mix of google/yandex/brave etc. and then elaborates them as well, in addition to have their own scraper for things like the small web (which is great to surface personal blogs).
They are not comparable. Also, kagi’s privacy policy is exemplar and the account can be paid in crypto now (if you don’t want to use CC).
Besides, there is no such thing as free hosting, similarly to Lemmy, it’s just someone paying.
That’s not an engine, it’s a metaengine
Really strange nitpick to bring up as a first point. If Kagi is a meta-engine, then SearX is too. Maybe you simply haven’t tried it, because it cites multiple sources per search.
And Brave has ties back to using Google data:
Brave’s search is optimized against Google search results. Ever since its Cliqz ancestry, documented on the Cliqz blog, it optimizes its ranking algorithm to match Google ranking as closely as possible. Brave’s search discovery project uses clicks on Google’s results in the Brave browser to discover new sites. In other words, it’s not sufficiently different from Google to really diversify the search results.
there is no such thing as free hosting, similarly to Lemmy
People who host Lemmy and SearchX instances are doing it charitably. And SearX does not pay any big company back, AFAICT.
Kagi is a for-profit corporation that postures as not being one, even talking about “fundraisers” and “humanizing the web.”
Big difference.
Kagi is an engine, searx is a meta-engine. That’s what I meant. Which means kagi does not simply collate results from multiple source (like searx does), but implements its own logic. This means that - for example - it deranks website with many trackers, or can implement various features on top of the results. So it’s not a nitpick, it’s a substantial difference between an engine (kagi) and a metaengine (searx), which is essentially a proxy + aggregation of other engines.
It’s a known fact that brave optimizes result based on google data, and the kagi guys themselves in fact added that - with it being cheaper than google API - it could be a vector to eventually reduce cost for google API without impacting results.
That said, AFAIK kagi does not pose as a nonprofit, I think they make extremely clear that running searches (scraping, paying API, etc.) cost money and that they need to be profitable. Their stance is that by using a subscription model, their business interests align with user’s interests of providing good searches, rather than results that benefit advertisers, which is completely reasonable. This is literally written in their “why pay for searches” article that is presented when they show the pricing.
Of course it is a big difference, and you can argue for pros and cons of both options. I personally think the internet should not be based either on megacorp nor on free labor. Would I prefer kagi being a co-op? Sure. But it’s not like relying solely on free labor is free from any moral implication either (sure, you can donate, and I do to Lemmy for example, but only a minority does).
I picked up from their response that they’re just using the public API, not in any kind of partnership?
I seriously can’t recommend Kagi enough! Make an account and do a hundred searches (FREE) that aren’t monetized and/or used to advertise to you or steal your data. It’s incredible what a difference it makes.
I was reluctant to jump on the Kagi bandwagon, but I’m now a week in and genuinely enjoying it.
Before, I’d have to search things across Google/Bing/AskJeeves a few times to finally arrive at an answer - I’ve yet to leave Kagi this last week.
The different AI engines you can also use and the customization for styling are pretty darn good, too. I’m now using it as my dedicated search on all my android phones, my laptop, and my desktop. Time will tell if things hold up, but so far so good.
Only con so far is that it’s sometimes slow to provide results. It isn’t devastating, but it’s like a 5 second delay which “feels” slow, but it’s whatever.
+1
Also, I wish we’d have a kagi community for Lemmy
Because I’m too lazy to do my own research; does someone have actual good experience with something else?
I’m using Brave search and it’s good for most things if I add an extra keyword, but not good for local results.
Thanks in advance for all the Brave downvotes.
DuckDuckGo finds some things. I’m no expert.
Yeah but those are just privacy protective Bing results, right?
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
I’ve heard people say that the answer is no, but in looking into it just now myself it looks like rather it is sometimes yes as well.
Basically the best way to describe it seems to be that it is “NOT Google, and MOSTLY does not want to be FULLY Bing (but still is somewhat, they’re wanting to work on it, but to be clear they do have embedded Microsoft trackers that they are forced to leave in due to their licensing agreement)”.
I would NOT use it for shopping, I tried that recently and got a ton of really sketchy looking sites with way too cheap products that had no internet presence before this month. This might be more pronounced if you search specific product model numbers like I was rather than general terms.
I’ve had it be mostly okay on other stuff. I use it over Google but mostly because I don’t want to pay for a search engine.
Tbf, do those sketchy sites also show up with Google?
I’d have to repeat the search to check again, but I don’t remember seeing the same sites when I repeated the search on Google, at least not on the first page in the top few spots the way it was on DDG.
So maybe that’s the genius of DDG - you skip right past the predatory SEO-optimized sites straight away to the predatory sketchy ones:-D.
LOL! Yeah I’m paranoid enough about buying from strange sites that it’s not a problem, and frankly I expect the AI generated SEO optimized spam to be more likely to be riddled with malware.
Hrm, maybe Google screens those, so they are more purely a waste of your time rather than something that can be actually reported to a federal agency? :-P Or perhaps it is just a better scam, to keep a site up there for longer = more clickbait dollars, with less risk of angering someone so much that they track the scammers down and send them a “package” of explosive fun!:-D (the easiest profits come when the harmed party does not even realize that they have lost anything)
I’m giving searx a try. There’s a list of public instances here: https://searx.space/
Https://qwant.com , a french privacy first search engine that has alright search results but great privacy control
Duckduckgo has turned into to a google clone at this point i’ve found - you get pretty much identical results with the added aggravation you can’t exclude keywords.
I use Duck Duck Go. It seems okay to me, but I admit that I haven’t tried anything else.
I’m disappointed with the number of brave downvotes you are receiving. Recommend you stop supporting Brave. Kagi has been really great, I’ve never looked back. I value ux, search, and privacy enough to feel it’s worth the price.
i was wondering what would it take to make a free/open/noncommercial search solution maintained by a collective (like wikipedia or something). search is too important to be ruined for everyone by corporations.
Like searx? https://searx.be/search
Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it’s still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don’t see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.
I think it’s related to paid search and SEO tactics. All my browser have adblocks for years and I think it helps. By my own experience I don’t think it’s worse, and to be honest I still think it’s unmatched. I’ve been using duckduckgo sometimes and it’s alright and all but it’s definitely not better.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline.
That’s according to a new study by a team of researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, first reported by 404 Media Tuesday.
According to the study, those efforts aren’t working, but “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.” These changes often lead to a “temporary positive effect,” but the spammers just find new loopholes.
Just last week, Gizmodo covered a bizarre situation that saw Google turning up what looked like a child’s homework assignment for a search about former president John F. Kennedy’s stance on the death penalty.
It’s gotten so hard to find authentic, useful results that people have started adding the word “Reddit” to search terms to turn up content written by someone who actually cares, instead of someone just trying to make money.
In 2023, a Gizmodo investigation found the tech news outlet CNET deleted thousands of articles because its team felt that would aid in the site’s performance on Google Search.
The original article contains 1,257 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
My problem seems to stem from the fact that my searches are often obscure and commercial interests probably wish I was searching for something else.
For most of my usual search any search engine does the job. For the rest :
I don’t need a study to know that.
I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago, never looked back
By coincidence, yesterday I had to use my Virtual windows machine to test some windows software with a a scanner (my own machine is Linux). So i go to the browser in there, search for the brand and model for the driver and lo and behold, all the results were sponsored or incorrect. Correct the browser configuration to DuckDuckGo, retry, and there is the first result!
Now I know, DuckDuckGo is now apparently just Microsoft Bing, and I hate Microsoft, but at least this works. I know that DuckDuckGo is also getting worse and I’m about to look into self hosted open source alternatives, see what that gets me…
