The absolute dank shenanigans I look up on Google.... I'm sure it's not gunna go... "you really want a Philips TV"
Be very specific and the robot can't not give you your search.... But I'll admit, a search tool is only good if you know what your searching for already
The thing is, 2-3 years ago you could be a lot more general and still get results. I search for something as simple as "xt60 triple parallel adapter" and I get fed results that are nothing but "roaring cannonfire" levels of subtlety that if I want that I"m gonna have to solder it together myself.
The weird thing is, that I know for a VERY sure fact that such a thing exists, which makes it all the more clear that google is being useless (potentially on purpose). IDK what changed about searching things, but it needs to be reverted, because even Bing is starting the same BS.
Oh, and I also think that the definition of a monopoly should be changed, it should no longer be "an absolute monopoly" in the anti-trust laws, it should be "No one company should have over 75% of the market share for any one product or service", and there should be at least three alternatives.
Because that's what has happened, Google has climbed to the top of the search provider market by doing nearly exactly the very same thing that Microsoft got yelled at for in the '90s when MS bundled Internet Explorer with it's OS. They tie you down to "can't use anything but Google" as best they can
Their goal is delivering ads, not enchanting and delighting you. As such, you get the search that's close to your original but delivers maximum ad spam. Kind of like how sanguine and sanguinary more or less mean the same thing, right?
I haven’t seen this. If I search a broad item such as children’s clothing it always 100% of the time shows me that thing close to me. ie. brick and mortar stores. If I search specific things then it starts to go outside that algorithm
Is be interested in a radical reinterpretation of useful search as a public good. Why can't we just expand the Post Office to cover this? Am I making sense? Or is my mind to internet poisoned?
Be glad you're not the one that has to deal with the US government. Besides, like I said, since it's an internet thing not a physical package thing, it's the FCC's job not the post office, and the FCC is getting enough funding for what it's been doing.
What needs to happen (and won't) is some form of official declaration by a US government agency that the internet, as a whole and in part, is a public space, and is therefore subject to the rules established for things like broadcast TV and newspapers, which would force some standard of integrity.
also, when was the last time you had to honestly google something, where you didn't know the answer, and there was no other service or app that could provide that answer?
*nods* Saw that yesterday. I switched to Bing (and subsequently to DDG) a year or three back, because results were becoming increasingly irrelevant, and useless. Now I know at least one reason why.
Isn't it that if you search for "children's clothing" the children's clothing retailers who pay for promotion to show up first in the rankings are on top? What you say sounds more like a conspiracy-theory.
That era ended probably 10 years ago? And even before that, they were doing Evil, without realising it. They were already trying to kill their competition by offering users 'free' products,or by simply buying and then assimilating or killing competitors. Innovation dies as a result.
Oh, I wasn’t making an excuse for them. I have no idea to what extend both of them really started as idealists. But “killing the competition” is kind of what VC funded Bay Area companies do. It’s the winner takes it all game.
Yeah, they killed a lot of things that were useful to users 😕. Remember when you were able to search in 'Discussions' specifically? Not profitable enough probably.
I'm glad I found a new search engine that offers this feature, called 'Lenses' 🙂:
Yes. Imo their intention wasn't evil, but their effect on the market was. I'm not sure how, and to what extent companies should be allowed to kill their competitors by 'price dumping' (in this case, 'free' products paid for by another division, Search).
But isn’t that the whole VC premise? Run a deficit to fund growth and customer acquisition until your competition runs out of money, once you own the market, flip the switch. I’m exaggerating a bit, but generally it’s the model.
I'm pretty sure it's not as cut and dried as that. Which is to say that it's way more fuzzy than a direct replacement. But yes, i have been increasingly disappointed with google search over the last, oh, 15 years.
Over the past few years it's felt increasingly difficult to find things in my work gmail, with more and more results that don't seem to match my search at all
I also feel like searching my inbox musky pulls up emails from companies I’ve bought stuff from in the past. Was searching for a billing statement today for a medical bill I needed to pay. Searched statement a found it after scrolling past all kinds of junk emails
Google has passed its peak. Half the page are ads, need to scroll before finding actual search results. Also, its biggest competitor is Amazon, people who want to buy smth go directly there for search. I think, for more specific search queries, many go to Reddit or other platforms.
Google Sponsored content, which is clearly marked as such ... and I never see as I filter it out
The rest is as requested, and it does not ignore quotes, minus and other search tools ..
Who at DuckDuckGo is paying you ?
I don't think it's possible for them to even make the product good without the ads anymore. Too much contemporary information has been lost to closed apps. It's one of the major reasons why the LLM pivot isn't likely to work. DDG doesn't have good results either, though it's less gross.
Huh, that's interesting. It used to be that Google was TOO good at giving catered results, meaning that eventually Google put you into an echo chamber.
But anyway, I haven't used Google in 5 or more years. I use DuckDuck Go.
You gotta love all the conditionals. "May", "likely" and so on. I gotta go with the user that mentioned the synonym substitution ("genetically modified organism" to "GMO" for instance). I think this is going into "brain in a vat" territory. Yes it's a possibility, but how would you know?
Back in the early days before google one had to use like 4,5 different search engines to find meaningful results. I can't believe we have come back around to that. Enshitification intensifies.
I think Bing is doing the same thing. It's the default search engine at work, and it keeps switching away from the search results to asking me if I want to chat with their AI. And the search results don't actually bring up what I'm looking for.
Taking this time to mention that if you have an android, you 100% need to install duckduckgo. Not just for their search engine, but for their tracking blocker (recently released into beta). It takes like 4 clicks to setup and blocks every third party data request. Here’s what mine looks like:
Almost all of that 400+ is instant answers with snippets from web pages. The only global search databases that are getting updated with new results are Google and Bing. everything else like Yandex, Baidu, and Yahoo! Japan are regional.
That's why I use a paid search engine. They are not incentivized to promote 'sponsored' search results. They are incentivized to make a better product for their customer, me 👍.
how can you be certain about that? just having one revenue stream is not really a blocker to developing additional parallel revenue streams. "good enough" is not exactly how capitalism works
The insanity of corporate greed attempting to track people fifty THOUSAND times over a week just to push the sale of some useless junk that will end up in the garbage shortly.
The Opera GX browser can also block trackers, and you can set the mobile browser to connect to your computer browser soyou have access to those tabs. I've got DuckDuckGo set as the search engine from my Opera browser.
I'm not a big Google fan, but to point out some things as a longtime, old school journalist:
1. The author is DDG executive
2. This Wired piece is an "OPINION" piece not vetted info, educated but heavily biased
3. The assertions can only be partly true (based on my work with SEO (PR)
yeah, Google definitely does synonym substitutions but that’s good (should a source be removed if it uses ‘genetically modified organism’ instead of ‘GMO’ in its page?)—also DDG is/used to be a Bing reskin so
I wish there was a setting to disable that kind of synonym substitution. My first reaction was “yes that page should be excluded if it doesn’t have the search term I typed”.
But then I realized not everybody grew up on having to craft scalpel-like search phrases.
I've heard friends at Google also saying that this is just flatly not true and based on a misreading of one slide. Friends *at Google*, to be sure — everyone has their own bias — but still, this piece needs to be distinguished from a piece like "Google acknowledges that it does X or Y."
Yes, but beyond that, common sense explains how this cannot be true in practice via SEO/SERP... If it were true, I'd be unable to do what I do regularly: Place every PR client of mine onto Page 1 of both Google News & Google Search using specific keywords w/i 4 hours of issuing a press release.
Between this and Amazon listing just a bunch of bullshit all the time now, online has become the suck. I better let Aaron Rogers and know that the Internet is screwing up all his research
This is also the reason why if you Google "how to start a union", Google will limit the actual response results. You won't find much helpful information. You're better off asking a non-incorporated search engine.
Duck duck go may not track, but it's a shit search engine. The results are scattered and sometimes really bizarre. There has to be a better solution than these 2. I wonder if ask jeeves is still around?
there is a "verbatim" setting (under "tools") that I guess is meant to include results with only your search terms, down to the verb form etc. But I don't know how it works really--the search algorithm is under their control ultimately.
On chrome if I type in "peach recipes" and it keeps giving me cobbler ones which I don't want, all I have to do it type "-cobbler" and it will omit those but if I type "women's skirt -temu" it will still show the fast fashion brand. There's no way to override it. duckduckgo is the same
I've always known that Google makes use of data and tends to prioritize search results so that advertising is more prevalent, however, I am curious as to some examples of what people are looking for that they have difficulty finding it.
I can't say that I've ever had trouble finding what I need.
the writer goes to great pains to imply but not directly assert that organic search results (ie not the sponsored ads) are being intentionally made less relevant because that somehow makes more money? and the article is apparently a poorly-labeled guest opinion piece?
it's incredible how google has become practically unusable in just the past 2 years unless you also put "reddit" at the end of whatever you're searching for.
Image searches seem particularly abbreviated all of a sudden. Instead of page after page of varied results, you get maybe 2-3, tops. It's like Google has given up entirely on what made it useful in the first place.
Comments
Be very specific and the robot can't not give you your search.... But I'll admit, a search tool is only good if you know what your searching for already
I'm probably not searching for profitable stuff?
😢
I'm glad I found a new search engine that offers this feature, called 'Lenses' 🙂:
Over the past few years it's felt increasingly difficult to find things in my work gmail, with more and more results that don't seem to match my search at all
The rest is as requested, and it does not ignore quotes, minus and other search tools ..
Who at DuckDuckGo is paying you ?
But anyway, I haven't used Google in 5 or more years. I use DuckDuck Go.
“children’s clothing -nickolai”
I search LTE band tables and Google tries to sell me phone service.
Perplexity literally gave me a table of EU and US LTE bands and the differing protocols in use (FDD dual band vs TDD single band)
I foolishly believed "don't be evil" meant something for far too long.
Dont be evil indeed (i sort of love that they couldnt even keep up the facade enough to keep that around)
asshats
Also, Chrome calls home all over the place so use another browser if u can
1. The author is DDG executive
2. This Wired piece is an "OPINION" piece not vetted info, educated but heavily biased
3. The assertions can only be partly true (based on my work with SEO (PR)
But then I realized not everybody grew up on having to craft scalpel-like search phrases.
I did not spend years studying the blade only to have Google be like "Here's a lawnmower store near you" 😡
(And it seemed like a pretty sketchy description that didn't make much sense.)
https://bsky.app/profile/colin-fraser.net/post/3kb6eqcjep22d
Even if this article is totally wrong, fuck those guys.
I can't say that I've ever had trouble finding what I need.
(i speak for no one.)