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

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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.
  
  I wonder why it works on bing and not ddg. I've also noticed using operators on ddg is not effective
- 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.
  
  I'll check that out, my questions are mostly very specific technical ones unfortunately. But after I forbid myself from Reddit, I do feel like I could use some new info streams...I feel healthier using Lemmy, but there is a bias... a bias I tend to agree with, but you need multiple viewpoints to circle in on the actual truth
  Personally, I've been using language models. Not good for current streams, but for general, or even specific knowledge? Hugging faces hosts a ton of AI, if you find one trained for a specific purpose you can get pretty decent results directly.
  Your mileage may vary, obviously
- 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.
  
  EXTREMELY generous. In fact, almost SUSPICIOUSLY so 🤔

124 comments