It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can’t find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?
It’s been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they’ve continued to “optimize” their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I’d say these past few months, it’s become borderline unusable for finding actual information.
This is the thing. It really has become unusable. Trying to find obscure information is insane no matter the keywords. It’s always the same results and, ugh, YouTube videos. You can’t find parts for older stuff easily, simple answers are gone.
Amazon is similar. Change the keywords all you like you still will get the same ‘amazon choice’ products and recommended alternatives for whatever you searched for lead to the same list. But i have to agree it really got worse unreasonably fast last few months.
Someone posted it on here, it works soooo much better and no ad bullshit
Thank you for posting this mate.
Oh wow i just now saw this reply (thanks boost!) Seems very cool, many thanks!
Thanks for this. Trying it out now.
Enshittification
Define “sudden”.
This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It’s far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results
I disagree, Google has encouraged and profited massively off of SEO, they could’ve maintained the integrity of result but instead they bent over backwards to make sure SEO methods worked as long as folks were paying Google
Can you explain a little what you mean by “a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results”? I’ve never heard of that before and it sounds alarming to say the least
I’m guessing they meant SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. It’s much more complex than this, but essentially finding high volume search terms and writing website content based around those terms so your page shows up higher organically.
It’s why recipe pages or simple how to guides have paragraphs semi related text that sounds like it was written by committee. The content needs to be human readable, otherwise Google flags it as spammy, but at the same time it only serves to drive up clicks based on those search terms.
I’m assuming they’re talking about SEO(search engine optimization). There’s companies that offer it as a service to boost websites rankings so they are closer to the top.
Google has really gone down hill to the point I can no longer find obscure searches anymore. Even youtube searches sorting by new has gone downhill to the point that most of the results are youtube shorts with half of them having multiple hashtags in the title.
I REALLY wish there was a way to exclude shorts from YouTube results entirely.
I’ve found myself using DDG and Bing (fucking BING!) more than google lately.
deleted by creator
Search operators for YouTube might help with that
It’s because of money. Google is a place where you can find the least irrelevant ad for your search query.
I wonder if their CIA money has dried up, maybe funds are tight and they’re forcing the algorithm for all it’s worth. Sorta like how spez is burning reddit to the ground trying to maximize the metrics for the ipo or whatever.
It depends on which bit you’re talking about.
ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.
The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.
If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)
DuckDuckGo has some of the same problems too. It is mainly just a proxy for Bing search results. But they are less full of ads and crappy personalisation indeed. Also search.brave.com is worth a try.
Don’t use anything by brave
ComSci here. Lately Google for tech searches, and especially low level shit, gives a few relevant results on top with the bottom of the first page always being scam sites that my corp firewall blocks. Always sites with just random letters
My guess would be that it’s increasingly using AI/ML and natural language over search terms to sort the results, which results in much shittier results. Power users are used to specifying the search term precisely and it no longer does anything about it.
It tries way too hard to also return news articles and blog posts instead of forum posts and other types of user-generated content. If it can find a plain “well written” english blog it’ll return that over a 10 year old forum post that’s super detailed but full of grammar mistakes. It’s gone full corporate and strongly favors corporate interests and pushes commercial offerings more.
It used that ads were clearly labeled ads but it wouldn’t surprise me now regular results gets quietly prioritized based on some sort of financial incentives.
I think you’re right (and I recall Google engineers have been open about using AI in past press releases.)
I suspect that Google is on the bleeding edge of what happens when a bunch of AIs try to convince other AIs to pick their schlop over the next schlop over. Very few of the involved parties are still focused on helping people (it’s hard to get an AI to focus on anything) and it’s starting to show.
All of a sudden? It’s been terrible for at least 10 years now. I have about 5 or 6 FireFox extensions just to make Google not suck.
Funny how much better google is when you block any Pinterest answer
Are you sure it’s true? I tried googling it and didn’t find anything…
Yeah… Cant provide an answer why probably ads. I had very good search terms and it should be the first hit but it just resulted in crap. Currently using duckduckgo and i got the first link that i was searching for correctly. Not looking back anymore.
Do a search on mobile and you need to scroll through an ENTIRE SCREEN full of ads (4-5) to get to the first result. And even that might be SEO’d. That’s the current sad state of affairs.
Maybe all the deleted and edited Reddit posts and comments are finally syncing up.
I’ve mostly been using DuckDuckGo for the last few years so I haven’t noticed. I mostly only use Google for Google Translate & YouTube.
deepl is even better than gtranslate, IMHO
I still mainly use deepl, but Google translate has made some impressive progress in the past few years and I’d say they’re pretty even now.
I’ve read somewhere that the Reddit debacle has something to do with it.
