11mo ago

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find

tech.slashdot.org /story/24/01/16/2137200/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find

291 comments

At some point in the last two years I completely stopped using Google search in browser and just use Google maps to find businesses or ddg for searches. Actual Google search just has too many sponsored or promotional links
- I just searched local restaurants near me and tried to sort by distance and the first option was 800 miles away, the second was 600 miles away. It's not just Google search getting worse.
  
  Google has really been dropping the ball a lot more publicly lately
  
  Here's the thing, Google has changed. Over time, they've restructured themselves, initially purposefully, but now they're facing the consequences of that.
  Google genuinely does still have amazing programmers and engineers.
  The trouble is that their expertise is in crafting systems that harvest personal information; expertise in other areas has been left to rot because there's no point in improving them.
  Gmail is already entrenched, as is search, YouTube, maps, android, etc.
  They aren't going to attract a significant amount more customers, so their main avenue for continued growth has been to become better at harvesting and processing data.
  For a while that was fine, but now that this expertise has been lost, Google can't make good products. They don't have the ability to do so, it's not that they don't want people to use their software and think "wow this is actually pretty great", it's that they genuinely can't do it anymore. Not unless the product you want is a telemetry system, in which case I doubt you'll find anybody that can do such a stellar job.
  It's a part of why Google starts then kills so many projects. They want to expand to collect more data, but they don't have the ability to create good services anymore, so it just ends up being an advanced data collector with a sub-par app/website on top of it. The company just isn't structured to make things in any other way.
- Pretty soon the internet will be almost completely ruined. Within a few years. AI bots will have spammed everything. Searches and web pages will be entirely faked bs. Reddit and Lemmy will have enough ai Bots commenting and pushing agendas/products that no one will have a clue who's a real person. Information that's true will be almost impossible to verify online.
  In short, if you think the web has gotten bad now, you ain't seen nothin yet.
  
  I agree with the sentiment, but lack of AI has not stopped SEO hacking in the past. Sure it will help them go farther, but there are already tons of garbage websites hacking the top 1-5 results of any search
  
  I am more optimistic on that one. AI provides a pretty clear way out of this, since it allows you to automatically detect the bullshit. Meaning either the bullshit has to raise so much in quality that it is indistinguishable from good content, in which case it would not be bullshit anymore, or it will get filtered. AI can also transform bad websites into good ones, like a super-powered ReaderMode, AdBlock and more all rolled into one, so a lot of the "lets plaster everything with ads" will lose effectiveness.
  The problem over the last decade was that Google completely lost interest in being a search engine, they are just an ad company and as long as search leads you to more ads, they are quite happy. So the user experience went down the toilet.
  The real problem with AI is that it will remove the incentive for the authors. Content producers want to get paid, with AI you can just extract the information from an article without ever viewing the article or the ads around it.
- I think this is part of why Google holds on to youtube despite it not making them money. Without that Google would just be the map and email company. They would completely lose the appearance of "owning" any part of the internet.

"Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures."
Click bait headline. I see they're good at SEO themselves.
- Yeah, DDG skips all the sponsored links but I generally find what I'm looking for faster on Google if I just skip half the page rather than trying to find the right incantation to bring up what I'm looking for on DDG.
  
  I've tried, many times over the years, to use DDG and you are 100% spot-on. I find it damn-near impossible to find what I need without some deep voodoo magic to somehow craft the perfect query. It's been a decade+ since I've gone to page 2 of a Google search. Using DDG I can be 3 or 4 pages deep before maybe finding the answer. There is SOOO much irrelevant stuff to filter through.
  It sucks, I don't want to use Google, but there doesn't seem to be a great alternative.
  
  Would you be able to give an example of what you couldn't find with DDG that was simpler to find with the help of Google? Sounds interesting to me, as I use DDG pretty much exclusively.
- I honestly think there's something wrong with Google's individual customization. They're leaning in a little too hard on things you're likely to be searching for rather than what you're actually searching for.
  DDG gives me better results for random searches on things I'm not usually looking for. When I was looking for Godot exercises yesterday every hit on DuckDuckGo for ages was just exactly what I wanted. When I went over to search Google there was a lot of more varied topics. Now, hands down if I need what time a certain store closes at a certain location Google will give me exactly what I'm looking for. Likewise if I need to know what's near something else Google is absolutely superior to DDG. Google's image search is also far more accurate and useful.
  But then I come back and look for a medical condition for my cat that I've never heard of before, You passed by the sponsors and they've got a couple of random pages about it maybe a Reddit article or two that's now blocked, but it quickly devolves to adjacent searches.
  But if I go and search for any of my usual suspects, The rankings come back pretty decent.
  
  I've run into that, I recently started playing The Finals (which I recommend), and Google searches have a hard time not changing my searches to American football, even if I put "video game" in the search
- Yeah, the paper shows a startling lead for Google, more than I would have expected.
  I try to swap to DDG every so often (usually once a year, giving it about a month), but every time search ends up being frustrating enough so I don't stick around. Nevermind their boneheaded decision of using Apple Maps over something that actually wants to be useful like OpenStreetMap. But what I didn't expect was just how big the difference between the two is when analyzed, damn.

This is what happens when everyone does 'SEO,'
It really seems like nowadays that internet search is just people trying to game the system for clicks. But it has made everything superficial and fake. Not to mention, utterly useless.
I don't know what the solution is really. It's easy to say 'dont do SEO' but people will just find some way to game that system too. It was great when Reddit wasn't complete shit, because the subreddits dedicated to a particular topic had great insights into whatever topic you wanted to know about. But now that it's a cesspool, and Lemmy is tiny in comparison, id say get used to the Internet being like this for a while.
- IMO It's not just optimization or monetization. It's the abandonment of the open internet (blogs, forums, etc) in favor of walled garden apps that are closed off and operate like a black box. SEO itself is just metadata and helps find things during search nothing malicious about it, but the problem is due to web abandonment, the things there are to find are so low effort you stick to big tent apps like reddit instead of sifting through blog spam
  
  I agree. So much of the web now functionally happens on the socials which are not indexed/accessible to crawlers.
- Especially if you somehow tryout some popular program, for example wordpress. The most search results are just different best of xy plugins lists. Even if you search for issues. Its like you are suddenly in a whole different bubble of the internet and everything is broken.
- Lemmy is tiny in comparison
  Try asking Lemmy a question. I was fiddling with FF earlier and thought "I wonder what the best FF addons are atm". Instead of Googling and getting a bunch of 3-10yo irrelevant blog posts I just posted in Ask Lemmy for peoples opinions. Lemmy may be small, but people like helping. Not only do you get your answer but you help Lemmy grow!
  It's a cliche but it's perfect right now - Lemmy is at the perfect moment for you to "be the change you want to see in the world"

What I find is that Google is now still better for what I usually search (a mix of programming, gaming and random factoids) compared to Bing or DDG, but no longer by such a wide margin as it used to.
Best as I can tell, it's because in the past Google constantly tweaked the parameters of their scrapers and models, in turn leading to SEO constantly having to re- and re-optimize, and making it difficult to artificially push your spam and crap content high. They must have stopped doing this, leading to this steady rise of generated spammy content, and now Google feels a lot like other search engines in that i have to very actively discard 80%+ of the results including the whole first page.
(edit)
I recommend reading the actual paper. Interesting though Google has gotten worse, it's results are still massively superior to the competition. 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. Damn. That's still a huge difference, shit as nearly-10%-spam is. I would however say its increased percentage of social media results (11% vs 6% respectively 5%) is bad, but eh, I guess there are users to genuinely want to see those results. 🤷
- Per your edit, there might be a blind spot in the study. Consider when you've searched for a recipe, and the top result you find always starts with "My cousins showed up one day and I had to scramble to make something . . . ". A big story you don't care about before you can get to what you want. That's happening because Google is giving those kind of recipe posts a higher rank. Ironically, adding this human story to the post is there for the sake of robots, not people.
  I wouldn't classify posts like that as spam, exactly. I still find the recipe I want. But they do make the experience worse.

Amazon's no longer any good at shipping, and Google's no longer any good at searching. What a terrible year to be a tech nerd.
- Amazon's not good at shipping?
  I don't like a lot of their business practices, but holy shit do they get stuff to my house fast and reliably. Most of the time, same or next day.
  
  Yeah same, they're absolutely unmatched, and by a huge margin. Faster, cheaper, and more consistently arriving both on time and undamaged.
  I hate them. They do however easily outperform the competition, that's sadly also something I have to acknowledge.
  
  I think the key is not good at shipping compared to themselves in the past. Same with Google.
  They're still better than the alternatives, but they've gotten much worse in quality all around, and they squeezed out competitors years ago so there's no viable alternatives that aren't WAY worse.
  
  Nah last several times I ordered, I saw one date expected before I order. The next day the expected date changes and it takes a week to turn up. They've been trash for a while.
  
  That's because of their contracts with couriers which is undermining employee and road safety
- don't forget about every single device collecting as much information as possible.
  
  It's been that way for quite some time.
- They quit innovating so what tech?

Anecdotally, I recently had an issue with my printer and used Google to search for the exact error message (something like ' "error 4308e ink absorber pad is full" Brother JW539DW ') and the first three pages of results were random garbage about other things. If other search engines are worse, we are doomed.
- Other search engines are better. Subjectively mostly, but to the point where I think I van almost day objectively. I used DuckDuckGo for 5 years now, and it's crazy to see the difference.
  I'm a Linux user too and there it's the dame thing. I look at windows users and just wonder why people put up with all that shit while o have this super nice, legally free, stable system that doesn't fuck around with me.
  It feels like people are crazy but obviously it's not that. It's just that people don't know any better. You search? That's Google. The company got their brand and logo cemented in so many people's brains that they'll never fail, no matter how bad they get
  
  Microsoft office... Only thing keeping me on windows...and vr games...
  
  Linux has been anything but stable in my experience, while windows has been exceptionally stable in the last decade
- It used to be great for answering very specific, sometimes niche, questions. Now it just brings up irrelevant answers, outdated forums and Amazon ads.

It’s kind of shocking how bad it has gotten. I never thought SEO would win in the end, but they did and now Google is fairly useless. Like if AI doesn’t work out long-term what are they left with? A bunch of inferior products people don’t trust anymore or have better/comparable alternatives. GCP sucks compared to AWS and Azure, Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience. Google Search is now about even with Bing and otherwise privacy focused Search Engines have improved to the point of being viable for most cases. Gmail has let in more spam than ever and there’s a lot of alternatives now as well with bo meaningful improvements coming to it. Maps is still probably the market leader there, but more competition in this space too. Google harvests your data to an extreme amount and consumers are privacy aware than previous generations which adds to the distrust of a target demographic. Lastly Youtube is making the user experience worse with every update. While there is no real alternative right now given the overhead required, there is at least a desire for a good alternative should one ever come about.
Feels like Google is losing on every front and bet the farm that AI will save them. We’ll see I guess.
- I agree with most, but android has better UI than IOS by a mile. And I don't really see a maps competitor coming close, maybe Apple maps.
  
  Yeah, I agree about Android. I'd never switch to ios, and Android is very polished these days.
- Android has more freedom than iOS but feels developmentally behind on most fronts in terms of end user experience
  That's the one point I strongly disagree with you: Android, for all it's flaws, has free and open source spin-offs (LineageOS, for one), that are the ONLY chance you have as an end user to own your phone / privacy (barring hardware backdoors or installing stupid apps)
  
  Lineage is cool. It’s an edge case though, and while relevant for folks on Lemmy, it is probably less than 1% of Android users and not really a selling point for the argument that Google is going in the right direction, main point of the post. I do love the project and ran it as my daily for several years, hope it gets more traction.
- It doesn't feel like there's any real alternative to Google search. Most of the privacy based search websites are really just Google or Bing on the backend. The only other index is Yandex the Russian one, which, yeah. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but the internet search space is approaching peak enshittification, and it doesn't look like anyone is stepping up to meaningfully change anything. No private companies seem willing to actually square up with Google, considering the investment it would take. Honestly I don't see things getting better anytime soon. This is just another symptom of the erosion of the social contract in the US and the rampant greed that's driving it. Nothing we can do can't be enshittified by bad actors in this environment. Not to be too US centric, most of the big tech companies are based here so our garbage culture fucks over everyone.
  
  Brave has their own index as well. And if you want Google results in not-enshittified, try Kagi.
  That aside, the biggest frustrating in the search space is the complete lack of innovation. All those search engines and their alternatives do the same thing and look the same. There haven't been new features or new sources of information in about a decade. The whole space has been extremely stagnant.
  The only new thing we got recently was ChatGPT, but as search engine replacement it really doesn't cut it right now, it can enter Wikipedia-style general knowledge question ok'ish, but completely falls apart on anything even mildly obscure (e.g. summaries of lesser known movies are completely wrong). I hope that something good comes from all the AI development, but BingChat so far is a really lack luster and ham-fisted attempt at integrating search with AI, often performing much worse than plain ChatGPT instead of better.
- tell us you've never used Android without telling is you've never used Android lmao.
  
  Apple's UI looks better but Android feels better, maybe they're talking about user experience
  
  Literally used it for a decade plus until it got so shitty I had to switch.
- The vast majority of Google's revenue comes from advertising, which will remain relevant even if search more or less dies. They put ads in almost every other one of their products, not to mention the ad space they buy and then resell on other sites.

Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.)
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
- This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.
  "Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟
  According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery."
  Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:
  https://www.realself.com/question/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-after-fess-surgery https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia
  
  That is really good to know! Thanks so much for the heads up on this! Never knew this was a thing.
- Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we've all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get........ literally the exact same results. It's infuriating.
  
  Yep. Unless you’re looking for direct info like- what actor was in that one movie- type of thing….
- For me the specific question remains unanswered. There are a lot of results about the health effects on respiration, but none about specifically after a sinus surgery. Might be a question so specific that the internet at large has no answer to it.
  What I do not get (on Google, search from Germany) is what you describe, my results are all relevant on the first 3 pages barring 2 results about the surgery instead of the fireplace.
  
  Yep. It might just be a really weird ask. Like… no one has ever considered it. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here without a fire.
- What about DuckDuckGo?
  
  DDG uses Bing's results. Bing has deteriorated less than Google but it's also becoming worse every day.
- I don't the answers section very very hit or miss
  Often it will link you to a highlighted section with noting relevant.

RE: potential astroturfing (my comment last time); from my comment downthread that one:
Anytime [paid search engines] are mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say…SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
Update on Grasp:
We will be back soon and will open-source our code.
Neat, wonder if SearXNG x Grasp would be synergistic.
- I am also using SearcXNG and the search results are usually good even though sometimes on the light side and I still have to resort to other search engines.
  
  I've been finding it very useful on various SearXNG instances to change the "language" from "auto" to "en" (English) for most of my searches, or to a specific language if I'm searching for something local or something that's likely to be written about in that specific language. The search results change drastically!
  
  Make sure to enable more engines in the settings

We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, "how long should you microwave a baked potato for?"
"In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O'Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He'd go on to...."
These scammy useless sites are numbing - they pad a thousand plus empty, filler words on either side of the buried wrong, weak answer you would have just glanced by in the past. They are so formulaic and obvious, that an AI could probably identify them as such 10 times out of 10 without an effort.
Google chooses not to fix things like this. Because fuck you.
- We need a google that uses AI/ML to hunt and de-rank the 1800 word essay web pages that answer the question, “how long should you microwave a baked potato for?”
  “In 1863, county cork in Ireland, Shamus O’Toole created the world first commercial potato farm. He’d go on to…”
  Exactly what it feels like if I'm asked to "write an 700-word article" somehow. Most of it is just filler material, really.
- It's funny because those essays are a symptom of SEO ranking. We'd better be certain that any automation we try to employ to fix this doesn't lead to a worse problem.
- Seamus.
  
  And his potatoes.

One thing I have noticed is any search is more likely to pop up a news article with that word vs a good article on it. Look up say a band and I will get a lot of articles about some recent things they did vs the website for the band or an indepth look at the band. I really don't need twenty versions of the same article from news networks all copying each other. It feels like it is favoring new stuff first and can't see that it is repeating itself.
Duck duck go still works better.
- Seconded. Looking up a past event on a subject (like a band) that has had a more recent, especially "viral" event happen to it, is like wrestling a shaved bear.
  Nevermind that all of the recent shit is just articles quoting eachother, adding virtually nothing of value except noise.
  
  Human: Hey Google can you tell me how this band got started and the significance of their first album?
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Human: oh that's sad, I hope they get the help they need but about my questions--
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!
  Google: the lead singer was just admitted to rehab and you won't believe what happens next!

Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I'm looking for.
Gotta try Kagi sometime.
- I hear this a lot, but I changed from google to DDG about a year ago and haven't even considered looking back. I can find everything I need quite easily and can only think of maybe a handful of times that I have had to resort to using a bang to try and find something using another search engine. I'm very curious what the difference is between my experience and that of others who have problems DDG.
  
  I recently switched aswell and am surprised how well it works. I thought it didn't worked good enough but I never failed to find what I was looking for so far. Very nice.
  
  On technical stuff, I find DDG better than google since I don't have to wade through their sponsored ad and results. Google is getting unusable that way. I try it every few months when I can't get an answer on DDG and it doesn't work any better.
  
  TBH I didn't even notice that I was using DDG when switching to librewolf other than the icon on the top bar. I have found everything I have needed, though I usually use "site:lemmy.world" (for example) anyways.
  
  Yeah I can't actually notice the difference. Granted I'm not paying much attention, but that means most of the times I'm finding satisfying results with ddg.
- Anecdotal evidence, but I swapped out Google for DDG about 5-6 years back and haven't missed it. I do use Google sometimes but it's once in 4-5 months when DDG fails me, which is acceptable to me.
  
  Yeah I'm the same. I've got DDG set as my default search, if the results aren't useful then I go to google as backup.
  
  Same here, I can usually find everything within the first 3-4 entries unless it's a bit too abstract than it ends up at the bottom of the 1st page. I don't understand people complaining about it so much as I depend on search engines for day to day and work related stuff so literally several times everyday. Although it's possible I got used to how it works but if so then I would have had to swap between ddg and google alot if the quality actually was that low.
  
  DDG just kinda sucks for basic information. When I took up a business, google gives me the location, phone number and some relevant information about the business. DDG gives me their website.
- Personally I'm noticing the opposite.
  I tend to do a lot of technical-related searches. I'm finding I'm getting consistently better results from DuckDuckGo / Bing -- what I'm looking for is usually available on the first page without having to faff around.
  With Google however, it was drawing parallels to what I'm looking for but not what I explicitly queried. I had to either enable verbose search, or manipulate the search to look for specific words. Even then what I was looking for was in the 3-4 page.
  
  On google, I started seeing too many of the first results tagged as "ad". It became even more concerning when those tag dissapeared but the same websites showed up.
  I used to able to trouble shoot nearly anything I needed to, but now I come across completely unrelated posts more than I come across solutions.
  I was iffy about bing, I still kind of am, but at least I find what I'm looking for most of the time. I'm personally going to wait a bit before trying out other browsers, when there's a bit less risk of them selling. I remember a good android launcher that used to be trusted before they sold to another company
- It'll be a frigid day in hell before I pay some company to store my search history keyed to my CC for the inevitable sellout day. I'll get by with DDG, which frankly works better than a search engine that doesn't track your clicks has any right to.
- I don't know much my opinion matters: but the unique features in kagi honestly really help me find what I need. I can lower domains, or raise other ones, it can search archives and has a general set of features that make digesting and finding relevant results easier. It's like a breath of fresh air, I can search and find not just endlessly search.
- idk about bing, but duckduckgo either seems to be missing the index itself, or only works when you give it specific queries instead of generic keywords like Google.
- I need to try kagi, in my usage I've found brave is best of the alternatives, and I'd put qwant after brave, though I might be biased by how nice qwant looks 😅
- Try a Searxng instance. It's a meta search that pulls form multiple engines (incl. Google).
  Instances here: https://searx.space/

The AI questions and answers that almost never seem to be answering the question in my search.
Q: Best tool for removing a nail
A: The most common tool used to take out nails is a hammer!
No, Google. I fucking know what hammers are. I'm asking you for NAIL PULLERS. JESUS CHRIST.
- Jesus Christ would have wanted a decent nail puller.
  
  Only according to John. In the Letters and the others Gospels he was tied to the cross, so he would have wanted a good pair of scissors.
  
  He'd have had to grip it in his teeth though, probably would have been a bit tricky really.
- Though in your particular example I'm reasonably confident that the tool most people use to remove nails is indeed the claw on the back of their hammer. Where it fucked up was that you asked for the best, not the most common.
  
  Yes, true. But the point is it never actually seems to read what I'm actually asking. The generated question will be what I want, but then the result it reveals may practically be the opposite.
  What happened to all those random blog posts by tool needs listing the most useful demolition tools? I know they're out there. Somewhere...
- You know what the claw end of the hammer is for right?
  Actually 2 hammers are really good to take out a nail sometimes. You use one hammer to tap the claw of the other one under the nail.
  Honestly I have a cat paw type nail puller but 9/10 hammer is the answer.
  
  I was demoing at the time, and framing nails can be a removed and a half to get out, plus they were quite well sunk. Hammer claw wasn't cutting it.

I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!
- Interestingly according to the linked paper, DDG (and naturally Bing) are significantly performing worse than Google, even in the face of Google having gotten worse.
  I always had a gut feeling about that when using DDG, but interesting to see the numerical difference. (31% vs 23% vs 9% spam)
  
  DDG is worse, at least anecdotally. But kagi is much better. Looks like the researchers didn’t study that one though so no “proof”, but anecdotally I completely stopped using Google for search.
  
  That is still just one specific measure. They will also have a specific definition of what they consider spam. What I have found, admittedly anecdotally, is that the results just don't answer the search anymore. The results aren't spam they just aren't good.
  DDG did have better results in one major instance for me in figuring out an error message that Google gave me literally no results. DDG has several appropriate answers that LED me to a solution. I don't think that will stay the case overall but Google does need to do better.
  
  Other search engines can be worse, but if we keep using google and allowing them to have the monopoly, no search engine will ever get better.
- I keep hearing about Kagi, are they reputable? I moved from Google to DDG and I do a fair bit of searching so I would be interested, but I guess there's a bit of a one-company-knowing-my-search-history going on (totally unironically).
  
  I haven't done extensive research, but as it's a paid product, they have the user's interest in mind, instead of ad revenue.

Google has literally killed itself. Maps, Google.com, YouTube.... It's all garbage now.
- They annoyed me to no end when they genocided iGoogle pages in favor of Google+, which ended up getting purged too.
  Its like, all the Google's products are Stalin's ministers and no one knows who is going to get offed and why.
  
  btw i hate how google+ used plus sign for tagging people, they even changed YouTube to use them (even though YouTube comments were very loosely coupled wot g+)
- Yeah ok maybe it's all garbage now but they're making more money than ever.
  
  Google is ripe to be supplanted, but all mega corps that could disrupt them are stale and stagnant and smell like investor class rot.

It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.
- I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Here in the Netherlands, DuckDuckGo results are poor for anything local. I fall back to Google relatively frequently, although for day to day stuff it's quite okay. I do often head straight to Wikipedia....

LMGTFYWNMGSN
Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now

My wife and I were looking up a specific calendar. The search query wasn't particularly complicated and very clear. In Google, the first result was a 2023 version of the calendar, and the rest of the results were completely useless. In Duck Duck Go, the calendar we wanted was the top result. I can't imagine what it's like to use Google for a search that's actually complicated.
- Idk, I use DDG as my default, but I find myself adding !g to many queries after checking out the first page of results; so much so that my brain has made such a strong connection to "!g -> better results" that I often find myself automatically typing it in Google as well when my results are unsatisfactory.
  
  I had that same habit a few years back, but have not had that problem for some time. DDG seems to generally provide the results I seek.
  
  Does !g cause DuckDuckGo to search through Google's search results - and if so does DDG do a better job of prioritizing the relevant ones? I've used DDG for a couple years but I didn't know that syntax.
- And yet the very link you're saying this under is essentially about how much better Google is than DDG or Bing. 😅 Just saying, the headline is garbage, while Google got worse, DDG and Bing (both also analyzed) got worser, faster, harder.

It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more's later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn't. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
- It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators
  No. It's an arms race between content creators and spam.
  Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
  10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.
  Huh? The top result for "float needle" in Google seems like a great description to me.
  
  Doesn't Google provide search results based on your search history? It's algorithm probably worked against them or something. I've heard that anonymous searches usually get better results.
  
  Since myself and others had no issues with your float needle example, mind sharing what you searched for, and what Google returned?
  
  Yeah if you Google "what is a float needle" the first result on a napa website has a great description
  
  Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
  I've switched to Ecosia and while it's not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
  I know it's a "secondary" search engine.
  But the thing is that no, hundred times no, anyone who generates ad revenue has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Everyone else gets screwed.
  Switching to Ecosia alone made me much more comfortable with using Web.
- Yeah. In fairness to Google entire industries have risen around the sole-purpose of manipulating their system for nefarious reasons. That's a hard thing to deal with.
- I feel the future will be personal chat assistants, but that will also start spitting out ads in the future unless a foss version is used.
  
  I'd really love if I could download the weight files and do the chat locally on my computer
- As a result SEO optimised pages are so bloated that I truly hate them.

Google Maps as well. Very inaccurate at times.
- Yeah but I'm on there taking a piss against my work van so I'm prepared to forgive it a lot.
  
  Latitude and Longitude or it didn’t happen
  
  Good effort, hope it's not identifying
- Google Maps is always dead on for me. I regularly drive very long distances across the US. The time estimates are within minutes of accurate even when there are sudden or extreme backups like in Los Angeles. There's plenty to criticize Google for, but it isn't Google maps for me.

Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type 'thbnks'?

It would be helpful if google actually responded and actioned on reports. i see malicious websites on search every day that I have reported numerous times.
- They did for ~20yrs and probs still do to an extent but it's an arms race[1]. Every time Google implement anti-spam features, SEO companies adapt. The problem is the webmaster guidelines Google published openly are often the backbone of any decent SEO.
  I've been a web dev since I left uni in 2005 and worked for several SEO companies and even founded one. IN that time they've successfully destroyed multiple SEO/marketing agencies with their tweaks. They've decimated entire industries with their monopolistic practices (flight information, shopping comparison, mapping, etc).
  I don't wanna get into the blame game between Google vs SEO companies except to say: Google are cunts and you should vote by leaving them. They are not a benevolent company. They are the Micro$oft of the web and have ruined businesses[2] worldwide. They're just very good at PR and keep a lot of the bullshit they do out of the public eye.
  [1] Matt Cutts was a fascinating guy and was at the forefront of Google's spam fight and communicated regularly with web devs/marketers.
  [2] In addition to the mentioned flight information and price comparison monopolising. They fucked smaller e-commerce companies effectively handing business to big players like Amazon and eBay by forcing PAID usage of their shopping comparison and Adwords service.
  Recommended Alternative Search Engines
  You.com - has AI chatbot as well as standard search using Bing
  Searxng - a meta search engine with multiple independent & tweaked instances. E.g. https://searx.be
  DuckDuckGo - uses Bing and Yandex but also has "nag operators" to quick private search other engines.

Is this entirety Google's fault, or is it due to the different people who send me ten emails a week saying "Good day to you dear sir. I have been checking your website and I see that you have a good ranking but I am an SEO specialist and I can make your website rank higher "
removed please I'm a lazy cunt, I don't want the work 😂
- SEO grifters have definitely gamed the system so much so that even if you have a junkyard dog mentality about SEO, you're competing with every Tom, Dick, and Harriet that ever picked up Wordpress For Dummies. For your average user just trying to search for a local business or news article, you're hit with ads and competitors trying to outbid each other on adwords. What a mess.

Yeah, Google search is useless now. I've switched to ddg , and it's much better. Just not having all those sponsored links helps a lot .
Maybe a searx instance would be even better, but I haven't found one that works consistently for me.
- Since you say DDG is better, what's your take on the link we're discussing here, then? After all, the paper they talk about shows that DDG (and Bing, which is the vast majority of DDG's input) is signficantly worse than Google.
  Or, to quote from the page instead of having to go into the paper:
  Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures.
  
  If I'm reading correctly, they're saying that google is much better that filtering out SEO spam. I'm no expert, but maybe some of the supposed "spam" may have some actual relevant content, and that they are just good at gaming SEO. However, this doesn't excuse google from blatantly placing advertised links as top search results, even if they aren't relevant at all.
  I'm okay with ads, but I find it misleading when they appear as the top search results. I'd be okay with them if they were placed after the top 3 actual relevant results. Even better if ads were on a side bar area.
  So far, for most of the random things I search, ddg has given me more relevant and useful results than google (just casual testing over a month), even if they are better at filtering out SEO spam. I may check out google again for some searches, but so far, ddg has been working well for me.
- DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I'm much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of "does a DDG search return good results", it's largely the same as Bing.
  
  dang, I didn't know that. But like someone in the above comments has said, maybe the use a different index?

Kagi is paid service, but the results are so good!
edit: fix typo
- it's decent, but I've stopped using it because I'm not fond of the decisions they've been making https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611
  
  I nearly left them after reading through all that, but I kinda reached the conclusion that they have open discussion about it on the company portal with users, they've given their justifications, and they are listening. Who knows though, maybe they're just funnelling through brave to save money, and it's got nothing to do with search results.
  To me, it's an icecream with a smell of dogshit, rather than an icecream topped with dogshit. It's not completely perfect, but it's a struggle to find any service that's 100% agreeable nowadays.
- I recently switched to it, and it's night and day, it saves me a lot of time when I find exactly what I'm looking for right away. I love it!
  
  Well your comments sure don't sound like astroturfing

Google has gotten really bad with the sponsored links. Not only are they only identified with a small "ad sponsored" disclaimer that is easy to miss on a phone screen but I've run into sponsored results that are blatant scams that I've had to report to google. Seemingly no effort on their part to screen these before they let them get posted.
I've also had to resort to altering my search engine results to always filter out quora and pinterest because they have gamed SEO so badly that they choke my results with garbage. Both demand you open accounts to see much (nope) and quora is a cesspool of bad answers and trolls.
Looking for product reviews is a real struggle. I'll see the same review plastered across a bunch of sketchy websites at the top of my results. They look like they only exist for manufacturers to post paid reviews.
- https://librey.devol.it/
  
  What's this?

While Web search has gotten worse, Youtube has gotten pretty good at finding niche content with a few dozens views. In general it seems most user generated content these days is on Youtube as video, not on the Web as text. The typical Web SOC spam doesn't really exist on Youtube outside of a few crypto scams here and there.
- I hadn't thought about this, but you may be on to something. I had a car issue, googled it, found nothing but crap and generic articles. I searched the same on YouTube and found a couple videos about fixing the exact issue on my type of car.
  Really interesting observation.
  
  The trouble with that is that videos are much harder to reference than text. If someone slaps a [citation needed] on a claim I'm making, I may have to track down the video, find the right time stamp, and link that. And then they will probably say that YouTube isn't a valid source, even if it comes from a relatively reputable creator (I've had people say this for a Tom Scott video where he was interviewing a subject matter expert in the topic).
  This is all so much easier with blogs. Even if people should be a little more skeptical of blogs, at least a blog can link its own sources more easily than YouTube to get to something more reputable.

As long as they keep getting money out of it. and with record numbers year over year. they have no incentive to change course. Google has a monopoly over search engine that affords them the unique position of not giving a dime about user satisfaction. the users are trapped anyway!

SearX because Kagi is hailcorporate
- Can you elaborate? I've just started using Kagi for several weeks and I love it, seriously reminds me of 2012 Google
  
  They're talking about the open source privacy search engine SearXNG and saying hailcorporate prob cuz Kagi charges and there are a ton of people in this thread advertising it
- kagi is pretty good tho

I used to be an enthusiastic gargler of Google's balls but they enshittified just like everything else.
- Takes a big person to admit a change like that.

Not related to the article, totally anecdotal, and n=1, but it seems Google Maps has really dropped the ball as well.
- As in? For me, Google search is a joke, but Google maps and mail at least still work reasonably well.
- Cannot confirm.
  I use google maps regularly, and it mostly works fine.
  However, google search engine (and youtube recommendations) have gone on a steeply downhill rollercoaster ride. Nowadays, I have difficulty researching even the most basic topics on Google, because it is so clustered with ads that I cannot tell anymore whether any website is genuine or trying to scam me.
  
  YouTube ads for me has collapsed. I either get recommendations for things I already have and it makes no sense to get another one of or militant rightwing crap from Hillsdale "college", or Epoch Times.
- How so? Genuinely curious.
- I don't get why it just doesn't work in some browsers.
  
  The fact that it doesn't work the same in every browser sounds a lot like anti-competitive fuckery.
- Not related to anything but I showered this morning and my feet already smell of sweaty feet.

I’ve been using brave search since their early days. They used to suck, but I pushed my feelings aside and just kept trying. Now, brave out performs google on a lot of search results. Sometimes, you have to add a bit more context to your query, but it is worth staying private and not dealing with all the SEO garbage. If the results don’t fit your need, just leave feedback and it will probably be addressed soon.
- You were downvoted - presumably by people that don't like some of the things Brave does but surely they don't think Google isnt far, far worse.
  Personally, I use Kagi, but still.
  
  lol. Everyone has the right to their own opinion. It is funny how search engines have become much like sports teams where people are very strong in their usage and opinions of one over the other. I will have to look into Kagi. I considered running my own searx instance on a raspberry pi, but have yet to try it out.
- What are the pros/cons of brave (what is it even)? Are they actually a search engine, or just re-skinning Bing or something like DDG does?
  
  According to it's Wikipedia entry, it's a genuinely separate index.
  I did not know that. Damn. It's a small index, sure (so you might not get very many results for some queries) but they say they do that to avoid spam on it.
  That might be a trade-off that is necessary in the future. Such a huge portion of the web has become crap that trying to index the entire web naturally makes the index you build crap, too.

On a semi-related note, I used to know a friend that worked at a small tech company (won't say whom, since the company's still around and they still work there) that, if memory serves, worked directly with Google to provide clients higher search results for their services/webpages. While I know this isn't the exact cause of the enshittification, it certainly helps.
Take this with a grain of salt though, I don't remember exactly what they said, and that was quite some years ago.
- "Worked directly with Google" yeah, I don't think they did. Google doesn't need partners for adwords or SEO. They're really the only game in town, and SEO companies are notorious for misrepresenting themselves as "subsidiaries of Google" in order to make sales.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Ecosia! I did try Kagi, and honestly did not understand the appeal.
- Ecosia is just Bing, and as the link shows Bing got shittier faster than Google and is producing worse results.
  
  Goddamnit, we can’t win.

I switched to using startpage.com recently based on a comment I read on Lemmy and I've been generally pretty pleased with the results. Just one more google service I can stop relying on.
- Just note that startpage uses google search results. It just proxies your queries so your searches are anonymous to google.
- Startpage is owned by an ad company. Always been a bit sketched out by that.
  
  Same, that's why I only use Google now
- So you use Google.

SEO, people trying to game SEO in a hundred different ways, and garbage scammy websites with no clear purpose have pretty much ruined search results. I remember the ancient days of Google when search brought you maybe 3 or 4 pages of results. This is why AI has become necessary, to winnow through the garbage and give you direct, and hopefully correct, answers.
- They are great at sifting throught the garbage and giving you direct garbage.
  
  I've played with Bard a little, asking it for details in public-domain novels I've read, and 3/4 of the time it is just making shit up. But it's great at solving quadratic equations.

They need to come up with a better algorithm
- Oh, wow. Very insightful there.

Who gives a shit. I have been all search engines like startpage, swisscow, ecosia, brave etc Never noticed if google results were going to shits.
- This will shock you but... most search engines derive results either directly from google results or from a few other providers which generate results in very similar ways.
  
  I know but I don't care as I use all the search engines out there.

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