tumblr @lemmy.world

1y ago

In days of old when knights were bold and wizards stayed up late

124 comments

Even the basic - operator so rarely works as intended in any search bar anymore. I used to be able to ferret out anything from mountains of results that way. Now it just ignores the operator.
- Something something you are the product.
  
  They sell clicks, so uh yes
- Quote marks to search for a specific phrase in order doesn't work either. I remember in high school in the very early aughts being taught these operators. Fucking shameful.
  
  It ain't the innovation capitalists promised us, is it? Handicap the search engine so that people spend more time seeing ads, why not.
  
  Quotation marks work well for me, still, after all these years, as their 2022 blog post claims.
  They’ll find “him. But” when you search “him but”.
  They’ll find “is not” when you search “isn’t”.
  Saw them work in a singular and unscientific test a week ago.
  One search to try on your favorite engine:
  “they had spent all day waiting outside the double doors”
  
  Google, Yandex, and Bing all pull it off. DuckDuckGo fails.
  Ah, maybe you’re referring to this: on mobile, you have to ignore Google results below the DMCA removal notice. On desktop - none of those spammy “tiles” with video content and the like. On mobile - yes, after the 100% exact results, you get their attempts at hooking you into staying on the site.
- There was this sweet spot where you could both ask it a question in almost natural language, but also use very simple operators to fine tune your results massively.
  Then SEO became an offshoot of marketing, and it started to get worse and worse, until 90% of it was sponsored content of some sort
  Now, I have no idea what's going on. It's like search engines have collectively decided "hey, remember that thing when we helped people find information they were looking for? What if we just didn't do that anymore?"
  
  I just go to Wikipedia now, fuck them search engines.
  Actually, their current events section is a great way to get the gist of things without giving clicks to corpo fearmongers.
- My guess is that it's trying to be helpful -- that if you (for example) type in a search for lucy and wardrobe and cordial it doesn't limit it to all of those things, but shows you everything.
  Which is fine if you are new to the web, but if you do know what you want and are looking for the exact thing, then ten thousand results.....
  I can see what they were doing ignoring the operators, but yeah -- it blows.
  
  That's a very generous interpretation.

The top search results from Google always being reddit links is a fairly recent phenomenon(I would say in the last year or so?), in no small part due to Google's targeted advertisements and SEO ruining the Internet, and LLMs has made blogspam much easier than ever before.
Despite its multiple flaws(the biggest one would have to be the inability to search for comments), reddit is one of the only places on the English speaking Internet where you can find genuine, relatively high quality dialogue between real people, good or bad, without any paywalls, which is also why I think reddit has always had an disproportionate influence on Internet discourse relative to its size.
I would say if reddit was competent, they would be trying to foster this aspect of its community that would take the function from Google and make it the best place to search for answer to everything, because in the end, all search on the Internet boils down to finding real people to willingly help other people in public, and there is no better marketing than genuine word-of-mouth. But, reddit seemed to be keen on rereading the steps to what ruined Google in the first place, the priority of targeted advertisment over people.
- On a mobile browser, Reddit isn't very usable. Tons of nagging about using the app. I guess you could say it's app-walled or spyware-walled.
- Can posts and comment here in Lemmy be found in Google (or generally any search engine)? That would be a massive downside.
  
  Of course they can, as a public forum, Lemmy is search engine crawlable as any other webpage on the public Internet.
  I'm not sure why that would be a downside though.
  
  Can posts and comment here in Lemmy be found in Google (or generally any search engine)?
  Of course they can. Lemmy is a clearnet site as are all Fediverse platforms.
- I'm honestly surprised Discord hasn't stepped up to do something like this. So many forums and communities have moved to discord that, if it had a powerful search, it could probably eat some of Big G's lunch
- Spoken like a true insider
- Google started doing the reddit thing because there google search is such shit that people started typing out in search "reddit what oil should I use for a 2009 Ford focus?" Because Google results give convoluted and shit results, but commentary in reddit already likely have a post about your exact question in their mechanicadvice sub that says you should use X oil in that vehicle.
- Reddit's fetish for constantly banning its users over nothing is the main reason why I hate it.
- It's very difficult to find reliable recommendations for things outside of reddit.

God it is so annoying how bloated Google feels these days - it's becoming more and more frequent for me just to use Bing because it actually gives me what I'm asking for rather than burying it in everything "similar" to it
- Bing is not better. That's how sad it all is.
  
  Exactly, it isn't even better, it just actually does what you ask. That's how low the bar is
  
  Yeah. I use Bing now. And edge. Because when I setup my new PC I couldn't be arsed to change it. Bing sucks, it's just that Google now sucks just as much.
- I've changed over to DuckDuckGo completely now. Rarely use Google, only if it's something DDG can't find for whatever reason (usually local Irish stuff).
- Never once has bing given me what I've searched for. Not once.

SEO is what is killing Google. Companies designing shit websites designed to highjack search results is a huge issue.
- It's also because they search for something different than your query in order to combat seo in certain cases, and to help people who don't know how to use Google: https://moz.com/blog/google-modifying-searches
  But it seems like this behavior tends to break down when the user knows what they're doing and Google does something different because it thinks it knows better search terms...
  
  This article illustrates that google understands the intent of a search well enough to consistently show relevant results to the end user. For as long as I've used google, I think I've "fought" the engine to find a specific result like three times ever. Just today, I used it to figure out what I mistyped on my keyboard when taking notes by putting it into google and letting it autocorrect. This article does not demonstrate a problem with google that has degraded the quality of search results. It shows the opposite, actually.

Is putting "reddit" after everything using Google competently?
- Not anymore 😞
  
  "In order to see this page, you need to install the APP!"
  
  =(
- Whoah there, pardner!
- If it works...
- The thing is that the internet changed, most people are creating content or new information as video and behind apps like TikTok or Instagram. Just until recently google didn't show on their result content from TikTok until TikTok itself allowed them to.

Google is absolute garbage now. Nothing but paid results.
- Or AI generated bullshit. So many AI images
- Most adblockers remove them now. And there isn't much of an alternative. Most of them have extraordinarily bad results coming up with things nowhere close to what you want. It's sad that there isn't a true competitor, but ultimately there is nothing else.
- Drugs.com
  
  Relevance please?

I keep reading this, but Google still limits itself to your search terms 100% if you put them in quotation marks separately.
And you can exclude specific terms completely with a minus and quotation marks.
undefined

"searchterm1" "searchterm2" -"excluderesultswiththisterm"
If you want results containing just one of your terms, put OR between them.
I haven't found another (free) search engine that respects these limits completely.
If your results still suck using this trick, it's because the internet as a whole sucks a lot more now. Forums are dead, blog posts are written by AI and heavily optimized to push them up in the search results, and all interesting info written by humans is in chat apps now.
- The fact that I have to put every word in quotes feels like getting on my knees and pleading for the search I actually want.
- The fact that results are worse because the Internet is worse is certainly a talking point Google is currently pushing hard. It's nonsense of course. The Internet was absolute, abysmal garbage when Google was created, mostly filled with junk Web sites made by conmen, narcissists and high school kids. In short, it was no different from today. Google pulled up the tiny portion of value from the dredges, and it did so for years even as people kept churning out junk. The fact that they could filter through the immense pile of junk was, until recently, a key feature they marketed about themselves. What has changed recently isn't the proportion of junk on the Internet. It's how Google ranks its searches and the fact that now Google gets a large portion of its revenue selling ads on sites, sites it lists in its search results.

Didn't really feel this way until last night
Neighbors dog got out and attacked some sheep, apparently they were getting flamed online for it
Could not for the fucking life of me find the Facebook posts about it even after logging in.
I DID find that my neighbor raped someone under 16 10 years ago, though, so thanks Google?

You used to be able to use google to skim free music from peoples unprotected online storage. But thats not a thing anymore both because google is worthless as a search engine, and because companies and scam artists figured out how to appear as these directories in the lists.
- Filepursuit.com
- I miss the days of getting movies like that.

I switched to Kagi. Sure I've to pay acouple of bucks, but I realized my time is worth more than trying to find stuff while trying not to fall into the seo rabbit hole or Pinterest hellscape.
- More than a couple, the cheapest option is $5 a month. Is it really that much better?
  
  You can try it for 100 searches for free. I think it is worth it. Included is a fastGPT thingy to help you with searches and development is transparent.
  
  I guess Google is still usable with adblock, but since Kagi I used Google search like twice.
  Thanks to Kagi I actually found interesing blogs as well. It also has FastGPT, which is like ChatGPT-lite. Smallweb search and a lot more.
  For people who search a lot, and/or like to read interesting stuff, I think its worth it, albeit being pretty expensive at the moment.
- I'm also very happy using Kagi. Feels like it is as good or better than Google used to be.

In days of old, when men were bold, and condoms weren't invented; they'd put a sock, upon their cock, and babies were prevented.
- Take out the comma after sock and it's a wonderful limerick.

I find duckduckgo works pretty well. Use to I'd have to swap between it and Google depending on what I was looking for, but now I haven't had to swap in so long, that when I am forced to use Google at work, I actually get irritated with it because all the answers are buried under a mountain of ads.
- In the new era where every search engine is garbage because of all the search term bait websites with no real content, at least DuckDuckGo still respects you as a person
- I use duckduckgo by default but still need to switch back to Google to search for local stuff. Even if I share my location and search in my native language, duckduckgo's results are still US-centered.
- Between Duck Duck Go and Brave's search, I never really need Google. At work I was able to switch to those also. I'm still stuck using Chrome or Edge at work (they won't let us use Firefox for whatever reason, which is weird for what should be a high security industry).
  
  Firefox makes it difficult for IT to manage it through Active Directory and Group rules. Where I work, if it weren't for the fact that we produce a web app as our primary product, we'd be locked down to only Edge.
- My favorite bangs on DuckDuckGo:
  !g Google
  !gi Google Images
  !gm Google Maps
  !yt YouTube
  !wiki Wikipedia
  I'm sure there's a lot of others. Basically, you shove that at the end of your query and you make a query to the other thing instead. I found it made my transition to DDG easier.
  Example: test!g Googles test.

I had been using Duckduckgo but I've been dissatisfied with tweaking the results. For instance, turning off the localization in the settings did not remove (commercial) results in my native language even when searching keywords in english.
I switched to SearxNG; I found a local instance. Very satisfied for the moment, I recommend testing it!
- Seems to work pretty good for me too. https://search.ononoki.org/
- this is a great search engine, thanks for sharing the info on it! I found a Firefox extension to replace the built in browser search with SearxNG, the only downside is I'm not sure how to add different instances using the extension.
  
  You're welcome! Know that it's possible to replace the default search engine in both Firefox Android and desktop without an extension too.

I switched to Kagi for everyday usage, yandex for piracy and Google Maps for finding places on the map. There really is no one option.
- Do you find kagi to be worth the price?
  
  Absolutely! I'm not the person you asked, but that's my answer. I've been using it for about 5 months now, and my sanity is greatly preserved. Google, Bing, and all the others were driving me crazy with how worthless the results were, and how every search somehow pushed a product or news site.
  
  It won't be worth it for everyone tho, I am a heavy search user, I search many times a day for work and just cause I like reading about everything. Someone who searches once or twice a day might not find value.
  
  Yes. For me Kagi is like Jackett (a selfhosted website to search torrents). I can tell it which websites I like to see results from. Or I can block websites entirely.
  If Google also adds ability to block specific websites I will go back to it. Many people say Google's results are bad, for me it's bad because I keep seeing websites I hate in their search results.

Every time people say that google search results "just don't work anymore" I can almost never get anyone to share a specific example of a search not working on their end. The few times people did give a specific example, google gave me exactly the result they claimed it wouldn't give, and on the first try. I genuinely don't experience this grand breakdown of google everyone else claims to be struggling against.
There are genuine issues (like ai images overtaking specific search results), but overwhelmingly google finds me what I'm looking for even when I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for. The few times it falls short, I try duckduckgo like everyone recommends, but the results are always worse.
I can't possibly be the only one whose search results still work great.
- Trying to find anything related to fixing a computer issue based on an error message is nearly impossible without massaging the query by adding a domain name in the query like spiceworks.com, reddit.com, or microsoft.com (though the initial reply from the Microsoft person is always a the same install updates, sfc /scannow, etc) . There are so many worthless sites that all have the same or very similar content that are followed up with a sales pitch for registry cleaners and other worthless software to automatically fix your problem.
  
  I never once saw a thread on Microsoft forums marked answered by an official Microsoft account. It is always an angry user with some obscure fix in regedit. Most of the time the solutions Microsoft offers don't even seem relevant to the question being asked. I don't know why they bother.
  It's a low key fun time for me trying to fix a problem via Microsoft forums because I get excited in reading people's responses to their generic solutions.
  
  With these issues I'm having luck with duckduckgo.
- Well I mean, I'm not gonna keep a list of all the examples, but I do know that I struggle a lot more with finding stuff than I used to, because I remember the feeling and frustration of not being able to find the thing I know exists (or has to exist) that I want to find.
  Also the front page is often full of garbage, sponsored shit, or straight up ads or scams.
- There's a million different posts on Reddit if people giving specific examples of results being irrelevant, and search operators not working, especially the negative operator. Google has stripped their search of all the tools that used to make it useful, all so you have to search more, see more ads, and still end up only seeing whatever is profitable to them.
- I can give you an example. I was looking to run FFXIV on Linux WITHOUT Steam. Because I never bought the Steam version and have been on it for 8 years. When I changed distros (from Unbuntu to Cinnamon Lime) I had to find it again.
  Luckily I know where to go with previous experience. But that is one example. Also I was recently searching for any medical findings from Norway or Sweden regarding schizophrenia and the findings from 10 years ago. They just give modern equivalents and need to refine your search.
  I find something weekly that I need to go find using Firefox. Because of the Reddit and shopping spam. Granted most of the time I am looking for something to buy and the shopping is convenient, I wish exclusion was easier.
  
  My first result for "FFXIV linux" is a reddit discussion talking about FFXIVLauncher which is absolutely the best way to run FFXIV on Linux...
- For me it's not about specific examples, rather the overall quality of searches. I get a lot more results non exactly pertaining to what I wanted
- I usually find what I'm looking for, but after 5 pages of AI generated filler content filled with adds. Quite often I'll need to search 3 of those pages to actually find one that goes into enough detail to provide the help I need. ea when im stuck on a quest in a game.
- Still works great for me too. Came to this thread puzzled why some people think it doesn't anymore...
- Results are often filled with low-effort, low-value content designed primarily for advertising. Listicles, recipes that would be 20 pages if printed and each page containing ads, content that's just copied from some other site with more ads added, etc. I think Google could fix or alleviate these issues, but they choose not to because a lot of the ads are probably being served by Google's own ad network. Kagi, for instance, alleviates some of these issues with an obviously much smaller budget than Google.
- There are millions of us
- It's definitely noticeably WORSE but yeah not unworkable. The thing you were looking for used to always be the first result but it's still on the first page for me now 95% of the time. So worse? Yes. Broken? Not YET
- I have a fairly unique use case. There used to be a site that tracked the prices of a chocolate bar vs their weighted scoring system.
  If you try to find that, you get pages of listicles. Same thing for looking for a specific feature I'm looking for in a wireless earbud or mouse for example
  If I want a product review, I add Reddit to the end
- Still works great for me too.
- People just love to hate on Google just because. I've never had trouble finding something quickly.

Google's gotten worse, but some people are still asking it questions in natural language and have absolutely no idea how quotes work.
- "Will quotes work this time?" is the question I have since it seems hit or miss now. When they removed the ability to minus keywords it insisted you intended that were unrelated, everything went to shit.
- You can click on of the nearly invisible link buttons, I believe called Tools, and select "verbatim". I only use it as a last resort.

I use Duckduckgo for the vast majority of my searches but when I need to find something too specific I've lately been using Bing Chat. Aside from any privacy concerns I find it works surprisingly well.

"Puts something in quotes to search for exact phrase"
Search results:
"Fifty quotes to make you laugh for exactly a lifetime!"

It has been si ingtaned into us that such services online will cost nothing but your data, so I was hesitant to pay for one
But kagis been really good for 2 months or so, I only use something else sometimes to crossreference results but even thats rare

Just use DuckDuckGo, it DOESN'T censor your search results, yes Google does that.... If it's not "in line with the current thing", "make corporations look bad", or "may promote piracy". Google will cut it from your search results

Thankfully google isn't the only search engine anymore.

I wish I could find the rest of the poem that this headline is from
- "Now listen to my story, yes listen while I sing Of days of old in England, when Arthur was the king, Of Merlin the magician, and Guinevere the queen, And Lancelot, the bravest knight the world has ever seen.
  In days of old, when knights were bold, this story’s told Of Lancelot.
  He rode the wilds of England, adventures for to seek, To rescue maidens in distress and help the poor and weak. If anyone oppressed you, he'd be your champion. He fought a million battles, though he never lost a one.
  In days of old, when knights were bold, This story’s told of Lancelot. In days of old, when knights were bold, this story’s told Of Lancelot."
  From an old TV show, you can listen to it here.
  No idea whether that's the origin of the line, but it's the oldest occurrence I managed to find.
- Doubtful that it's the original, but my mom taught me: In the days of old when knights were bold and toilet paper wasn't invented, they'd wipe their ass with a piece of grass and walk away contented.
  It never occurred to me until this post that there might be another version, but I would indeed be interested in seeing it.
- It looks kinda like "gypsies in the palace" but i don't remember any wizards
  
  Trout Fishing in America also used it in their song Proper Cup of Coffee.
  https://youtu.be/w-ia13f72-4?t=52

124 comments