Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on "the best impact hammer" or "how to buy solar panels" without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.

Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.

The last couple of times I've had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.

If it keeps up this way, we're going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.

I haven't been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it's just stupid crap that isn't helpful. 'Here's 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.'

The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.

I've found that bad addons, spyware, and adware can immensely affect your Google results. Which is... Really alarming, but.... Its true.

This is not to say a lot of seo hasn't absolutely ruined search. Because it has.

If you know exactly what you want and the perfect key words you can usually get it to show up on the first page as long as you’re willing to scroll. Compared to its peak of “have a vague idea and we’ll find it” it’s really sad

Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn't restore your comments? They've been doing that to a bunch of people.

I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.

What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.

It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers

What were you searching?

I'm a beta tester for Google's Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it's easy to see that Google's focus on its AI seems to be search results.

PS: It's also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.

That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.

Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don't feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.

And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven't used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I'm going to a specialized information website, for buying things I'm looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I've grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I'm having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.

That's why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.

So what are we keeping them around for?

There are no better alternatives.

That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I'm willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit's only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that's how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).

Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.

I've got the Nitter equivalent that works just as well. Well, until Muskrat breaks it again, lol.

Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.

So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit's own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won't realise this.

I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I'm new) smacks of the "old Internet." I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.

I literally couldn't find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.

We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)

I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.

I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world's most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn't know I needed regarding how they all work.

To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.

i wonder if chatgpt will eventually replace reddit.

I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.

If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it's safe to assume chat GPT's training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.

Months? You mean weeks.

I actually think Google has a long term plan to buyout Reddit. Google Groups failed miserably several years ago, so Google would LOVE to own a mature social media platform.

The former, despised owner gets to cash out. And Forbes and WSJ will write glowing articles about how Google "saved" Reddit. (Narrator: what's left of Reddit will get unbelievably sh*tty. And then it will die, like Google Groups).

Dear God, i hope that's not true. Quora answer quality is probably worse than Yahoo answers; at least those were just shit posts, 90% of Quora answers are ads by the creator of some project in my experience

For real. Looks like speedrunning digging one owns grave is becoming hella popular in silicon valley as of late. Everyone wants to set a new record.

And TikTok. They've listed that one, too.

TikTok? Really Google?!

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This is fair. GameFAQs is still this if I look something up for a pre-2010 game a lot of the time.

A few weeks ago, when things started to get heated, I had the reflex of copying all the helpful posts I made amd putting them on my own knowledge base in case something goes wrong with reddit. I can always put them somewhere since I've secured that info on my own server.

I find DDG has the same garbage AI generated content as Google. Also, search operators have been broken on DDG for years

DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it's not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn't going to cut it.

Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.

Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.

I liked them well enough, but recently is it just me or it seems like every time I reload a search by simply going back to the page, the ranking of the results immediately changes?
That is supper annoying to me, as now I can't keep track of the results I opened easily

DDG mostly gets its results from bing

we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing

https://help.duckduckgo.com/...

I tried them last year, but I kept not getting what I wanted compared to Google. Will have to try again.

It’s useless for tech. But a much larger pool of users are using google to still search scores of games, YouTube and cat gifs.

How long until these huge websites pop?

Google used to punish sites that used more than 3.5% keyword density, but it seems that they stopped doing that at some point. It's interesting that with every update to their algorithm their results have become less reliable, yet more profitable for them. By interesting I mean frustrating.

Not necessarily by bots, but a lot of product-related articles - say, "What's the best washing machine?" or "What's the best hot wire cutter?" or anything like that - will have multiple near-identical articles across multiple websites with links for each product generating a kickback for the author. Whereas Reddit was just people talking.

Articles like that are probably starting to be written by AI for sure though. You could write an article on every type of product that way, and get kickbacks from all of them, all while depriving people of actual useful info. Woo, innovation!

How many meeting did it take? Meddeling managers with sparkly eyes and a powerpoint sending the business into a doom loop and giving themselves a POB and a payraise.

Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol

Are you logged in when searching? Probably reddit just has the best answers for your questions.

But for newly released games reddit is most often the best source in my experience.

Ai isn't going to fix the first page being all ads, that's a business decision.

If they wanted to return actual content they could do that without AI.

im adding "-youtube" to searches for a long time. The amount of Clickbaitvideos, no matter what you are searching for, is just crazy.

Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.

Knowing google they would buy it, release a big roadmap of plans for the website and then shut it down the next day.

remove the adds

lol, this is google we're talking about

This would low-key be a great way to have your very own sweet sweet human contributed ML-data pipeline, and a pretty high quality community moderated one at that. Give access to 3rd party devs and lock all competing ML techs out. [r word] is valued at $10 billion (fucking lol) but I bet that gutless scumbag sp*z would fold for less than 10% of that if he has more than two braincells to rub together.

Big part of me hopes Google's myopic corporatised ass never sees the opportunity and we rebuild the mf free internet from here on out.

Maybe, but like I and I'm sure many others think, not going back regardless. Kbin is it.

I hope the articles and us talking about it so much can get some scientist to do a study about this!

What immediately comes to mind: how long does enshittification take to progress through the stages typically? Is there any company owned platforms who managed to avoid enshittification? What percentage? Is practicing enshittification more profitable and thus pushing out companies who don‘t do it? If yes, how much more profitable?

I need some cold and hard facts cause there is still an amount of denial around even these parts, which perhaps scientific research could help with.

I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.

No, it was the Google that failed me.

I've noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.

Verbatim search is the only way to use it anymore. I changed that to the default when doing address bar searches.

Thank you for bringing up Kagi, I had never heard of it before. An intriguing idea for sure and I am not averse to paying for searches, but as a serial Google-fu practitioner $10/month for 1000 searches (1.5c per search after) seems quite steep to me. Some days I swear that would last me 24 hours at most. I need to start tracking that I think.

I do however applaud the seeming transparency on their website. It may or may not be for me, but if they really plan to operate how they lay out on their website, it truly is a breath of fresh air and I wish them luck.

which one you think would be the best for tech support ? :,(

I'm genuinely curious, what's the alternative? Google tries to rank the "best" results, so naturally people try to game that system. How do you design a search engine in such a way that you get the better results without manipulation?

This trick used to be common before embedded searches were actually decent. Wikipedia in particular took a long time before their search was even close to "site:wikipedia.org [search term]". I think the saddest part is that people seemed to forget about it for so long until realizing they could use it for Reddit too. So far the trick seems to work for lemmy if you point it at an arbitrary instance like lemmy.world, the content just isn't quite there yet.

I gave an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn't been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.

I don't like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it'll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I'm using from them and it's working out I'm kinda okay with that.

If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I'll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.

Better yet, add "fediverse".

Sadly, Google Search doesn't seem to index Lemmy instances the way it does Reddit.

Sure, you can add "site: lemmy.world" to your search strings, but that mostly returns links to community or user feeds that mention your search terms, not links to the actual posts. And it doesn't group the results together for convenience, the way it does for Reddit.

Hopefully, this will change as Lemmy becomes more popular. We could also outright ask Google to start treating Lemmy this way.

I would love it if they built an extensive profile on me and used that to serve results but they don't. Any time there is any commercial interest in what I am searching for it forgets everything and just spews out whatever bullshit the highest bidder wants me to see.

Most of the time you can just click the 3 dots at the side of the search result and then click the "Cached" button on the bottom of the popup.

Lemmy has one comm for Dev/Ops I think but not the convenience of having a place for network guys, sysadmins, and programmers all in different spots.

The obsession with giving people results directly in the search page was a huge mistake on their part. Content quality is just decreasing, people get wrong answers to questions they would have otherwise answered easily and accurately by reading an article on a website rather than a sentence taken out of context.

And for businesses to make it to the stupid Google box, they have to write articles formatted not for human eyes or cognition, but for SEO.

Thus Google is one of the main drives of quality decreasing online. Their unhealthy practices forces everyone to write dumb shit (like those Q&A or click bait articles) in order to have some kind of platform or presence.

If they did they'd probably just scuttle it after a few years. It's what they do.

Reddit wave +

To make googling a generic brand

Monopoly, there are many more search engines like that one but people only use it because it is the default one

What do you use? Bing? Yahoo?