I love science, like experimentally observed science or at least practical theoretical science, but Youtube tries to shove every crackpot nonsense they can at me. I watch one political thing and now they try and shove every conservative propaganda they can at me. It feels like when I was young, the internet was too much for conservitives to understand and control…not anymore. What’s the one true power conservatives have? Money. Now they’re ether buying up social companies or their CEOs left right and center - or at least bringing tech leadership into the ultra-rich fold. Where they are winning without exception, is in isolating the majority of their voters. Now, there’s no longer a shared reality and the divide seems to wide to close. Conservatives wanted brainwashed cult followers and did everything they could to make it happen. Now Idiocy seems far more real on the right with each passing year.
Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
Submitted 9 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Comments
Jeredin@lemm.ee 9 months ago
maness300@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There’s some theory on this and it goes beyond conservatives.
Once, the internet was small enough that whatever happened on it could be seen by most users. Now, things can go viral in one ‘part’ of the internet and people in other ‘parts’ would have no idea what was going on.
The solution to this is to recognize that the internet should be treated as more of a local place, where we interact with the communities and people we want while ignoring the ones we don’t.
We can’t expect “the internet” to share any overarching views because there are too many people from too many places online now.
Jeredin@lemm.ee 9 months ago
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Here’s my theory… Google wants to artificially fuck up it’s search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it’s going to be doing that by giving it’s own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that’s my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Or they just cannot complete with literal millions of people dedicated to optimize their webpages for discovery using Google.
Mkengine@feddit.de 9 months ago
If other services like kagi can offer better results they should be able as well, right?
FoxBJK@midwest.social 9 months ago
And AI is just making it worse. Entire websites of SEO-optimized content can be generated in seconds now. No one will be able to keep up with all that!
skarlow181@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s much simpler than that. Google is an ad company, not a search company. SEO spam gives them ad clicks just the same as quality content, if not more so. As long as they don’t became bad enough that everybody switches to the competition, they simply don’t have to care.
HessiaNerd@lemmy.world 9 months ago
SEO spam gives them ad clicks
It does? I thought the point of SEO was to show up in search results without having to pay for keyword placement.
northendtrooper@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
I’m finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I’ll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.
Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn’t really exist anymore.
chaogomu@kbin.social 9 months ago
The problem is, you can't trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.
And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can't trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that's a coin flip.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 9 months ago
OTOH, you also can’t trust humans not to lie to you.
Lmaydev@programming.dev 9 months ago
The newer ones search the internet and generate from the results not their training and provide sources.
So that’s not such a worry now.
Anyone who used ChatGPT for information and not text generation was always using it wrong.
_number8_@lemmy.world 9 months ago
plus search engines don’t lecture me as much for typing naughty sex words
notapantsday@feddit.de 9 months ago
However, I find it much easier to check if the given answer is correct, instead of having to find the answer myself.
LWD@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I hear it’ll be $20 a month soon for the privilege of a glorified search engine distilled into a chatbot.
Odelay42@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How much do you think should it cost to use?
Landless2029@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Oddly I prefer Bing because it’ll cite the source!
centof@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Perplexity is great for this. It gives like 5 links in addition to the text answer so it is imo the best of both worlds.
doublejay1999@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Search engine are pretty much over. I use a GPT if I need information.
sighofannoyance@lemmy.world 9 months ago
SEO destroyed the search providers, and now that search is useless, seo has become useless.
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
It’s almost like greed/the need to step on others to get ahead ruins everything or something.
dunz@feddit.nu 9 months ago
I use Qwant for my searches. I find the results better than DDG.
rdri@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Thanks for your visit
Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country.And no way to set my country.
affiliate@lemmy.world 9 months ago
you could set your country with a vpn 😎
iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They also don’t allow country/located results but then in English. Hell, English is one of the legally accepted languages of this country :(
Got_Bent@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Whoa. I did a search that would inevitably bring nothing but sponsored bullshit on Google - “best tires”
My results were cartalk, consumer reports, cnet, and the consumer insider.
Nary a national chain trying to sell me something in sight.
slumberlust@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Aren’t all of those sites just more adverts masquerading as information?
baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 9 months ago
I think they got removed from privacy guide unfortunately.
github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/…/342
I want to support a European based service, but unfortunately I have to stick with DDG for now.
maness300@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I wonder why Firefox isn’t listed in their mobile web browsers.
Toldry@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“DDG” refers to DuckDuckGo
just writing this for others who might’ve been confused like i was before looking it up
sinokon@feddit.de 9 months ago
I’m surprised in most posts I’ve read about this there wasn’t a mention of Yacy which is a P2P distributed indexer / search engine. It heavily focuses on privacy. I’ve used it in the past and it worked great for my use cases to bypass censorship. It’s still actively developed after all the years. Would definitely recommend it or try it out as an replacement. The installation and usage is fairy simply.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 9 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
No, it’s not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded.
After pouring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google’s declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted.
Along with that, the researchers determined that all three search engines are prone to being gamed by large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns, and their efforts to subvert such manipulation through algorithm updates have, at best, “a temporary positive effect.”
Google even claimed in 2022 that it was updating its algorithm to prioritize “people-first content,” but as the researchers found, those efforts have been in vain as SEO experts and spam factories have simply figured out how to game the newest tweaks to the system.
Janek Bevendorff, research assistant at Leipzig University and an author on the paper, told The Register that it’s hard to say whether there’s an easy way out of the current online search predicament in which we find ourselves.
“Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now,” Bevendorff said, but noted that “banning it entirely is probably not a solution,” as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream.
The original article contains 748 words, the summary contains 242 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
lntl@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
FCC should impose regulations on search providers to make searching with Google’s competition more cumbersome and less useful. You know, ‘level the playing field’
ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
I think it would be enough if other search providers would be required to give a portion of their profit from each search to Google.
lntl@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
sometimes i think I’m smarter than i am… you’re a goddamn genius
Kraiden@kbin.social 9 months ago
What is everyone else using instead?
ElcaineVolta@kbin.social 9 months ago
I use DuckDuckGo, you can configure it as your default search engine in Firefox.
Z3k3@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I find myself hitting the same issues with ddg as with Google. The 1st page trys to sell me the thing I want info on
Kraiden@kbin.social 9 months ago
I use DDG when coding and generally find it to be a bit nicer, but from the article it sounds like they're prone to the same issues. Anecdotally, I have noticed non-code queries do seem to be similarly crap
gullible@kbin.social 9 months ago
Searx. That it doesn’t ignore operators legitimately arouses me slightly.
AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 9 months ago
If I ever can’t find something I’m looking for using a Searx instance, I switch to something like StartPage temporarily.
As great as Searx is, on very rare occasion I find myself having to switch to a different engine.
Steve@communick.news 9 months ago
cozy_agent@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I use DDG like others have mentioned, but I also like Perplexity, because it’s not a chat like ChatGPT, it just answers queries without trying too hard to chat to you.
z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
I use DuckDuckGo Lite in Librewolf with Ublock and NoScript (amongst other addons). That combination used with ddg’s !bangs got me covered. No ads, not even image search (just go to ddg directly foe that), just content.
I’ve used searx through a docker container, and it’s a strong 2nd choice, but ddg lite is just easier to set up and gives better results imho.
All said, an LLM like a local Llama and ChatGPT, can fill the gaps for very specific searches. Sadly, the modern internet takes a lot of savvy to navigate quickly and effectively.
There’s a very good reason so many are typing in “reddit” at the ends of their searches, and that’s if their not using Change GPT to just get them to the answer faster, and using much more computational resources to do so…it’s a big cluster fuck.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I really like Ecosia. Someone told me it’s just bing, but I still like it.
TeamDman@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Bing has done well for me
maness300@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Startpage.
squid_slime@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ask Jeeves
kubica@kbin.social 9 months ago
Patience and giving up.
pai_zosima@lemmy.eco.br 9 months ago
Safoda o Google
FlavoredButtHair@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I thought it was normal for Google search results to suck.
GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I haven’t used Google for awhile now. It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.
Kbobabob@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Do people not have ad blockers anymore?
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s not what we’re talking about. Ad blockers don’t do anything to fix the Google’s search algorithm
Steve@communick.news 9 months ago
That’s why I like Kagi. I do almost anything to avoid ads
LWD@lemm.ee 9 months ago
For people who are interested in using a search engine that
I’d recommend checking out a community-supported SearX instance instead!
LWD@lemm.ee 9 months ago