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Is anyone using Google search less than before?

I ask because I've been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I've been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?

Edit: In no particular order, some recommended alternatives to Google
SearXNG
Whoogle
Ecosia
Brave
Dogpile
DuckDuckGo
Kagi
Swiss Cows
Qwant
Bing

89 comments

  • Yeah there is definitely something going wrong with Google. I noticed that the search results got much worse in the last weeks. Either it's full of SEO Blog Spam, or it straight out doesn't find anything. Especially for technical error messages it stopped finding results. I have to directly look on Github or Stackoverflow now.

    • The SEO spamming-the-Internet-with-AI-generated-websites crowd has been pulling ahead in the arms race with Google, I think. They've been making up more and more of the results.

  • Google Search has been accusing me of being a robot a lot lately, making me solve a bajillion captchas. So I've stopped using search engines entirely. I've bookmarked a lot of the sites I regularly visit and have realized I don't really need Google, apart from for getting the correct links to said websites because I can't remember their .orgs and .coms.

  • I think Google search hitched their wagon to Reddit (whether involuntary or not is up for debate) and now it's coming around and biting them in the ass. The "hack" of sticking Reddit or using the tag "site:reddit.com" to the end of whatever your search query was has long been figured out by the masses and I can't help but think the search algorithm has been trained to look there more often by default as a lazy way of doing SEO.

    Now that Reddit is rotting from the inside, Google is really having to scramble to do something and fix their SEO spam issues and build trust in their results. What is already a not so great product at the moment in Google Search will soon turn into a bad one if they aren't careful. I think they have coasted for so long as being the default since there was no one else that could challenge them. But with ChatGPT and other LLMs quickly improving, Google has a real danger of losing their biggest cash cow in Seach. Hell if they aren't careful, they could even find their way to non-existence since so much of their revenue comes from serving ads and search listings.

    They're really at a turning point and need to be extremely careful in how they move from here. With their recent track record and what they've shown with things like the current Search debacle they're in, Bard, how they've managed Android hardware and software the last decade, etc., I'm not so sure they can do it.

  • I stopped using Google when I became more aware of privacy concerns.
    Also first page is horrible, mostly sponsored/ads related links.

    • That second point is a good enough reason in itself. Like it almost doesn't matter what I search for, everytime it's just links to stores.

  • For about the last year and a half Google results have been less useful - so yes it's fairly recent(-ish).

    Especially for tech stuff. We used to have Reddit to turn to as an alternative, but now that's not working.

    https://www.dexerto.com/tech/google-admits-reddit-blackout-tanked-search-results-2191128/ - e.g. the Senior VP for searching in Google even admits that Google is not as good anymore, somewhat as a result of the Reddit issue but that was only propping up the problem that Google itself caused, by allowing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank predatory webpages over real ones with actual content.

    I don't know of any solutions to this. I was thinking to search on places individually - like SlackOverflow, but now that company too is having a strike from its volunteer workforce just like Reddit. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Slackoverflow, they all are having MAJOR issues right now, as a result of not wanting to pay their workers and get something for nothing.

    So they are turning to AI to solve their problems. AI doesn't understand shit, and in its current form simply parrots the answers that it gets elsewhere, without proper context or anything, or even acknowledging at all where the original content came from. So now as the sources of true content are drying up, and the well having been poisoned, true information is suddenly much more rare and precious than it ever was, yet harder to find than ever before as it is mixed in with all the sewage of people vomiting up their emotions, and actively upvoting things like snarky answers or memes rather than "real" ones.

    The information age seems to be over, and in this Late Stage Capitalism we are now entering a new era, whatever it's called (maybe disinformation age?).

    • I've heard people mention disinformation age and I wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years this time period is called that. I imagine it's at least going to get a bit worse before it gets better.

      • Disinformation sounds like an intentionality behind it, which in some cases is very much true (Russian sources proven in some cases in order to sow discord).

        While the terms late stage capitalism and/or enshittification of the internet may capture how it is oftentimes rather a byproduct of a profit seeking motive - i.e. the disinformation was not the point, it is simply what resulted from the process of chasing profits at all costs not just to be responsible and keep the company going but to make enormous bloated kickbacks to executives and stockholders (at the expense of rather than while feeding forward the product).

        It is ironic how the two forms of dis-/misinformation look remarkably similar to one another. Both are forms of destruction and decay, and both result from selfishness and greed, the only difference is whether it comes from an external or internal source, the former wanting to actively destroy while the latter is an even greater degree of malice in not even caring or possibly even noticing the fact that destruction is taking place. Like a zombie apocalypse where they eat and are not even sated as an animal eating would have been, and simply move on to eat again and again and still yet again, entirely unnaturally, according to a level of greed not even physically possible in the past (bc of constraints on stomach size, even if some animals can expand that like a python, yet they still have a limit whereas corporations do not?).

        And then you have the whole "who rather than what you know" crowd for whom facts do not even matter so much, being too lazy to consume them personally. Humans are very much herd animals (sheeple) it just is a fact. These will consume the ads, and do not care really what info is fed to them, hence why should a corporation be interested in feeding them high quality info when low quality stuff is received better actually, as well as being significantly cheaper? In fact the users would outright complain if only high quality material were available, bc it is too difficult for them to read. This is an interesting tangent to explore bc it shows how it is not the greed of corporations forcing the misinformation down their users' throats unwilling, but rather corporations properly fulfilling their duties to both shareholders and a majority of users simultaneously, giving their customers precisely what they wanted, asked for, and demanded as in they go to whoever offers that. Who is really in charge here, if not you and I making decisions - Google or Bing or DDG - every single time we do a search?

        Here is an interesting article touching upon some of these thoughts: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/113196/An-older-article-that-is-taking-on-new-significance-considering.

  • Google search has been going down gradually year by year for the last decade for me. My searches have now devolved to just having google search Reddit, like most people now. I recently started using Brave and I liked that it was recapping information for me. DuckDuckGo has been hit or Miss. I’ve started seeing people me toon SearX, which I need to try.

    I wish there were a search engine that prioritized searching through places like Reddit, stack exchange, Quora, etc. vs the random clickbait websites trying to sell Amazon links.

  • Yeah - as someone who mindlessly would google code syntax all day while working, ChatGPT has taken over that duty (and is doing a much better job at it)

  • I use Ecosia, not sure if it's the best for privacy but I think that it's better than Google on that regard. They also plant trees so that's nice.

  • I haven’t used it as my main search engine in years. VERY rarely I escape hatch to google search for weird queries. That used to sometimes work, now it never seems to work (or my queries have gotten more niche over time hah)

  • When I have specific questions that I want to have expanded on, I use GPT4 and then do some reference checking on Google

  • I've been using it less because I constantly get challenged with captchas when trying to use it with my VPN. I like DDG's privacy, but I'm not fond of it as a search engine. I heard good things about Brave search. I've been using their browser for about a year, so I may as well give their search engine a try.

  • This may be confirmation bias, but I was thinking much the same thing before seeing your post, over the same time frame (last few weeks/days). Could be people are getting better at manipulating Google's algorithm, could be something else. But I've stopped going to Google as my first choice, getting much better results with Duck Duck Go (which is Bing I think).

  • Switched to DuckDuckGo years ago. Using Google only occasionally. Recently I have been distancing myself from both, using a combination of search.brave.com (works at least as good as DDG) and SearXNG.

  • My primary search engine is rarely Big G. More often than not, if I can't find what I'm looking for by SERP 4 on DDG(Bing), I'll figure out what the missing keyword was, and edit the query. I've also been using Brave search some, but their connection to crypto bugs me enough that I don't want to rely on them.

    If I really do need Google, I use Millionshort, with the full million excluded.

  • Google has been on a steady downward trend for several years now, to the point where it's getting nearly unusable.

    It still works relatively well in English, but have you tried searching in other languages?? It's hot garbage. Google does not know the difference between Japanese and Chinese even in 2023.

  • I haven't been using Google anyway since Bing got its redesign. It's just so much more useful now than Google.

  • DuckDuckGo with bangs! It's been pretty good as I am able to narrow down my searches by service which is more necessary than I'd like it to be.

89 comments