Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
People who haven't gotten into habit of googling stuff in the last 20 years might not get into it at all anymore because of how search engines are gamed with SEO spam tactics nowadays
Submitted 1 year ago by wiz@lemm.ee to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 1 year ago
DrMango@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
GARlactic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
Cenzorrll@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What’s worse is most of what comes up isn’t even a hands on review, it’s literally someone doing what I just did, which is type “vacuum cleaner” into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He’s the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it’s no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there’s a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don’t try to game the algorithm so they’re pretty deep in there.
Saneless@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
Shialac@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
Saneless@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I know. But I’ll use them as a last resort
MrSlicer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
Misconduct@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What’s been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
Captain_Shakespeare@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.
I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it’s a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where ‘using the computer’ is a minor task of one’s workday.
Natal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I agree so much. It feels like I “understand” how a computer talks and interacts as opposed to most people I work with just learn processes by heart and have no clue what to do once their process breaks.
_Sprite@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Reject Search engines, return to shoplifting For Dummies books from the local library
squirrel_bear@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
you should shoplift them from the book store instead
Puffymumpkins@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why would you shoplift from a library? That seems immoral
FiskFisk33@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts
slowjoe@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
ultimatespleen@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This is amazing. Thanks for that. Usually when I’m looking up a recipe I don’t want to scroll for miles about the history of the recipe, so this solves that nicely.
FiskFisk33@lemmy.world 1 year ago
oh, cool, thank you!
such_fifty_bucks@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Often you’ll find a ‘print recipe’ button somewhere near the top of the page. Click on that, it’ll take you to what you’re looking for without all of the crap nobody cares about.
Chocrates@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, I despise that every fucking recipe is a blog post. I don’t care that little Becky loved this soup, I just want to know how much salt I should add.
wiz@lemm.ee 1 year ago
bbcgoodfood.com is another good one I check often
Stubborn9867@lemmy.jnks.xyz 1 year ago
I’ve had good luck with whisk.com.
Octavio@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.
jettrscga@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Googling “dark star astronomy” comes up with plenty of info on it.
CoderKat@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Knowing how to do what you did is vital for using a search engine effectively. It’s not possible for a search engine to know what you want when a word has multiple meanings (well, not yet, anyway). It could have just as easily have been the other way around, where OP wanted to search for a niche band but all they could find is astronomy things.
Adding context like “band”, “astronomy”, etc is important if you’re googling anything non trivial. Sometimes you even need to identify different words to search. Eg, there’s a programming language called Go. But “go” is such a generic word that it’s hard to search for. Searching for “golang” tends to help a lot.
krzschlss@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s rather tragic that a tribute band called Dark Star gets priority over a scientific Dark Star. I don’t know if it’s because more people search for the band or because this search engine is trying to sell you albums by this band…
Soylentcolaispeople@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
To be fair, the band puts a lot of effort into marketing and keyword targeting, and scientific teams researching dark stars only publish for specific spaces towards other scientific people that are already looking at those places.
Voswi@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Did you use any search operators, like quotes or minus signs to get rid of the clutter?
ArcticCircleSystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
A lot of the time those don’t even work anymore. ~Cherri
ghariksforge@lemmy.world 1 year ago
wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.
daniskarma@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We need a Google successor.
Something non-profit.
Chocrates@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This could be interesting. The infrastructure required to scrape the internet though is going to be so daunting. Google got to build it up slowly as the internet got bigger. Bing is backed by a huge corporation that already has data centers. A new non profit player is going to take a huge coordinated effort.
SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 1 year ago
I know P2P had become a dead buzzword, but what if people dedicated a portion of their computers to assisting an open search engine.
I would wait 30s for accurate results. It could also piggyback on a search aggregator.
NettoHikari@social.fossware.space 1 year ago
That’s why I use Kagi. It’s a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
This whole thread reads like astroturfers
dsemy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Nobody ever likes anything
If you really don’t believe me, check out search.dsemy.com - my Searx instance which I stopped using because of Kagi.
dsemy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Kagi is actually awesome.
I just started using it this month and I’m blown away by the results.
twei@feddit.de 1 year ago
Do they already have their own index? Last time I used it (when it was still beta) it was quite okay, but it was basically yandex or whatever with a different front-end and site-pinning
ghashul@feddit.dk 1 year ago
I just started my trial, so far it’s looking good!
nitefox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s why I use brave search, it’s a free search engine and the results are actually really good
atyaz@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Even if it’s good, their long term goal will always be to appease their advertising customers, not you. Google has the ability more than anyone else to make the perfect search engine but they’re not spending their time and resources on that because that’s not what will increase their revenue. That model is just fundamentally broken.
Raglesnarf@lemmy.world 1 year ago
my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
berrodeguarana@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
2 months ago that was fine.
Now I don’t have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn’t open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.
Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(
galaxi@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Not that I’m recommending anyone give reddit any more traffic or leverage, but I’ve been using Stealth app at the recommendation of someone else on here. It’s downloadable through f-droid and specifically is meant to keep you anonymous and avoid any trackers and other trash normally found when opening reddit links. You can’t even log into an account. I use it on the rare moments I’m looking for stuff on there, it makes me feel a bit better about it.
pitl@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn’t work. It’s so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.
Artranjunk@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I use chat GPT 4 for a lot of things instead of Google now.
InternetUser2012@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
dingus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo. People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
rustyriffs@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Damn, I’ve gotten so many good alternatives lately. Thanks for posting that.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Littleborat@feddit.de 1 year ago
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
sparky678348@lemm.ee 1 year ago
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
BlueDwaggin@pawb.social 1 year ago
It really winds me up how results that match every search term aren’t prioritised any more. I often search for very specific pieces of hardware, and it’s been a nightmare since the late 2010s. You now have to pore over each result to check that it’s 100% what you’re are looking for.
SEO exacerbates the problem, but I’d say the root cause is the algorithm itself.
Natal@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Have you tried putting your search between " " ? It usually helps improve my results.
BlueDwaggin@pawb.social 1 year ago
That used to work, but these days seems to do little other than sightly change the order of the same useless results.
orbitz@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Thought I’d add for people that may not know, the quotes mean exact match for what’s between the quotes and only give results if it includes that term (unless I mixed something up). Whenever you click on Google’s ‘must include’ it puts quotes around the term. Can be handy or make things worse depending what you’re looking for. Worse is while programming and tracking a specific issue, unless they used the exact words you won’t get a result. Better for part numbers if they never get changed.
Been awhile since I went into the nitty gritty of the searching functions so if this is incorrect please reply with the correct info, been awhile since I really had to think about what quotes does behind the scenes.
Annoyed_Crabby@lemmy.world 1 year ago
When you searched something and the top10 answer is mostly copied homework without much variation, and then the best one is from reddit.
CaptionAdam@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you have avoided learing how to use the internet/search engines till now you probably couldn’t learn if you tryed
Arsenal4ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats
UnknownQuantity@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don’t think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.
The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn’t try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.
jemorgan@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.
It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.
What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.
But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.
xophos@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
SEO is an inevitable result of capitalism and the existence of search engines. If food and shelter for your family depends on it, you will become an asshat too.
forvirreth@lemmy.world 1 year ago
True, and it should be taught way better. There are so many nifty tricks when it comes to search engines that the average user don’t know about.
optissima@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sadly most of the tricks have been removed or are ignored these days 😔
Chocrates@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How do we find information these days? I still default to my search engine, which is often google. I moonlight over to DDG often, but usually an operating system upgrade gets me back on Google for a while.
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I used to just use Google but add reddit to the end of the search, and it’d usually pick up several relevant posts/conversations that would have the answer I wanted somewhere in the comments. I’ll still keep doing that for a while probably, but given how reddit has been going, and with people erasing their accounts, I doubt that will last long. I’m holding out hope for a good search functionality on lemmy, since reddits own search was pretty unusable.
ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I use DDG and think it does a great job, at least as good as google these days. There are certainly times that it falls short when compared with other search engines, but at that point I just use bangs and that effectively solves any problems I have had with it.
LonelyWendigo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Duckduckgo is basically just bing results. But, I still use it for the bangs and lessened tracking. Being able to search any engine from the same search bar is remarkably convenient.
spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
There’s actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different. All that to say this isn’t necessarily the end of the line.
Sarcastik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For certain questions/information, ChatGPT provides better summary information than standard search engines like Google/Bing
Vormadikter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What are “SEO spam tactics”? I would google, but am afraid of that now.
Decoy321@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If they haven’t gotten into this habit in the last 20 years anyways, I don’t think the SEO spam was that last straw. That ship has sailed.
FuckYourCar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I used to work for Google. Now I pay for Kagi.
Dingus93@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ignorance is bliss, give me some pls
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“We’ve ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here’s a bunch of pinterest and quora spam.”
Darkard@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“hey, is that a brand name? Here’s 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them”
S_204@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches… it’s great.