11mo ago

Has Google’s search results drastically declined for anyone else?

200 comments

for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and "phrases"
- It was a necessary move to incorporate support for Google+ profiles. /s
- So wait, the search operators don't work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
  
  They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless
  
  They still work but they search the entire page, not just what's visible in your browser. A search for "term" does not implicate you being able to find term on the results' rendered pages.
  
  I think you can still use the operators if you select "verbatim" under "search tools." On mobile, you need to scroll to the right past images/videos/news/etc
- Same.
  Google is crap now.

Google is no longer a search engine.
It's a storefront.
- Yes. And your consciousness is the product.

Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you'll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
- Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO[...]
  What does this mean in particular?
  
  Companies are better at getting their shitty product/spammy pages to the top of search results than Google is able to find high quality pages to show you.
  Google has to create algorithms to judge pages based on their content and get good results , companies only have to fine tune their pages to match the algorithm.
  
  People with mediocre content using SEO to get themselves higher in the search results than sites with actual information on them. That way when searching for something you need to dig through the shit to get to the nugget of actual useful info.
  Search engines tried to rank pages based on how big the chance is the info the user is looking for is actually on that page. SEO makes it so that pages with a lower chance of containing the right info, are ranked before pages with a higher chance. This leads those pages to get more hits and thus marketing thinks it's done their job. But in reality it just pisses off users, blaming the dumb sites that do this and more often the search engine. Search engines are trying to fight this, but SEO is big business, so they are losing the battle.
  Now these days there are more issues, like search engines not having access to a lot of info in so called walled gardens. So more good info gets created in places where it can't easily be found. Also search engines have become more and more advertisement machines instead of search engines and with this shift in priorities, the user experience deteriorates.
  But yeah SEO sucks and has always sucked.
  
  Search Engine Optimization. Not providing the best search result, but tricking the search engine into thinking you have the best result.
  
  It means if you search for anything, your first 3 pages of hits are the same useless websites that exist to push ads vaguely related to your search rather than real info. Trying to research a broken TV used to return things like AVForums or reddit threads or samsung support sites. Now it's "TEN BEST TV's IN 2024" that are nothing but sponsored content and affiliate links to tvs on amazon.
  Google can't figure out how to tell the difference between the former and the latter, and isn't motivated to because they get paid for the ad clicks, and not for the forum clicks.
  
  If google detected continuing searching after a page visit, then that page you looked at was probably not having the right answer, right?
  SEO solution : make super long pages with the history of what you are looking for and adding mumbo jumbo stuff to bloat out the page so you stay there longer. Now google thinks you found what you looked for.
  And a lot of other crap ofc.
  
  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
  The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.
  Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google's search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing 'relevance', ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.
  This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.
  
  SEO (search engine "optimization") is how a search engine ranks its results. The more webpages link to a certain result (as determined by a webcrawler), the higher it is displayed. That is why bloggers are often paid by bad actors to publish editorials that link to a scam, virus, or gambling website.
  Google popularized the concept in its early years, back when SEO was an organic indicator of a result's popularity. It made them the single best choice. Then, capitalism happened, and SEO became a resource to exploit.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bARSNVobUk
- Google chose to ignore the SEO arms race. Winning it is trivial, if you detect anything even remotely grey-hat, blacklist the entire domain. Forever. Then SEO stops being a thing because no one wants to risk toeing the line.
- What incentive does Google have to even put up a fight? Worse results = more time searching = more "traffic" = more ad revenue. It's not like they really have to worry about search engine competitors. Please do not try to recommend DDG to me. It is just a different flavor of garbage.
- It was bad before LLM spam became widespread, it's just even worse now.
  
  Yes, there's a great article I read a while back about how and why recipe web sites became so bad and frustrating. Basically, a good website would show you the recipe, you would read it and leave. However, since you didn't spend much time on the site, google would rank it much lower.
  On the other hand, if you encountered a long rambling story that you had to read through and scroll through ads, before getting to the useful information, then google would rank the site higher because you spent more time on it. That's why there are so many memes about how bad recipe website are.
  And of course, even before LLMs, it was trivial to implement a copy paste bot to create a massive number of web sites.

I live in central Canada.
I am reading the comments, and I am noticing that other people's experiences are very different than mine.
For me, Google Search has reached the point where it will not even give me results for my search terms. I say this without an iota of hyperbole.
It's so coincidental that this conversation comes up, but I actually sat there yesterday agog, looking at my desktop Firefox browser window... Scrolling through the entire search results page and realizing that not a single thing was even close to what I searched
It is noteworthy because I have been observing a steady decline, but it was the very first time I could make use of literally nothing that they gave back. In an unsettling way, the gravity of it hit me emotionally right there.
- imo deserved for being a Saskatchewaner. Can't be helped
  
  Don't associate ME with those banjo-pickin' inbreds.
  edit: I had referred to the people of Saskatchewan as a bunch of banjo-pickin’ inbreds. I was wrong to make such a statement, and I’d like to apologize. The vast majority of the people in Saskatchewan have no idea how to play the banjo.
- Canada doesn't exist in Google...It is a the proverbial happy tone/hue couple...sorry, if I that wasn't oblique enough
  Canada is trying to de-google itself by "Search Engine Optimization" death by inviting a Nazi.
  Google any image for happy >tone/hue< couple
  
  Google (Kinda) Apologizes After Woke AI Gemini Exposed As Anti-White Racist
  
  This reads like an incoherent AI-generated rambling. I'm sorry if you actually have a point you're trying to make, but all I see is broken English, lack of direction, and an unrelated link at the end. If you are in fact not a bot, then please slow down and quality check before posting.

Google search was so legendary when it came out, it was able to find me perfect results when I would even type in almost gibberish, it somehow predicted what I actually meant. Over time the results were worse and worse, then nothing but products would show in the results a few years ago. Buy this, buy what,etc. no more research, just trash products in the search results. Google greed killed itself.
- The Search Engine became a small part of Googles operations, and then Google became a small part of Alphabets operations.
  Turns out advertising is where the money is.
  
  Sales.

Ars had an article about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
It's not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
They're also not particularly motivated to try harder. They don't have a lot of competition, and they make a lot of money this way. And their leadership are idiots.
- They also can't. The algorithm is a black box to them, so figuring out why a given SEO tactic works is a fool's errand.
  It's a cat and mouse game, where a working tactic will rapidly proliferate.

Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there's a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.
- Huh. I hate advertising and think it's brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.
  Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.
  So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.
  You can't create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.
- Rip INTERWEBZ 2023 just preserve it how it was before it got sick

I don't say this to be dismissive, but Google's search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they're still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google's quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn't care about their search quality, or that it's simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
- The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.
  I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in... And then it just... Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to "crawled but not indexed" for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.
  I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising... I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn't even care to explain themselves.
  I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for... Its dead. Killed by capitalism.
  Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.
  
  Thats so sad, especially as someone who regularly tries to find small forums like that. But i always have such a hard time finding them unless i already know the site name :(
  Its so hard now for a regular person to find content made by other people without it being tarnished by the profit motive. Forums are all pretty much on reddit or dead. Even a good blog that isnt just seo trash is hard to find now days. Social media sites are mostly influencers trying to sell products and attract followers.
  I just wanna see the cool stuff other humans are doing and thinking without ads and low effort garbage 🥺
  
  That's heartbreaking but not an uncommon story - it does seem like Google has the power of life and death over websites and it seems very fickle and opaque.
  Have you thought about restarting it on the Fediverse?
- Yeah, it's not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they're covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I'm not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
  Google got outsmarted. I feel like there's maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
- What is a good search engine these days? I use DuckDuckGo but I don't find it's very sensitive to local content, like if I'm looking up an obituary I end up switching to Google. Any more precise and privacy oriented search engines?
  
  I just started using this one today: https://docs.searxng.org/ and it did a great job for what i needed. I never heard of it before, but found the link on an old Lemmy post.
  I don't know how it would work for other people with other needs, but i needed to find graphic designers to help me with a project. DuckDuckGo kept giving me hundreds of results from a handful of big companies, but i wanted small companies and individuals. Found exactly what i needed on the first search using this engine.
  
  I'm a big fan of Kagi.

The entire internet has drastically declined for me.

Not just Google. Duck duck go was good for awhile but now also getting worse. Assume this is Ai and other tools screwing with how their web crawlers collect data. Expect it to get worse before it gets better.
- DDG recently started to exclude terms from my search query and returns more random garbage and a "search only ..." link. So often I search, find nothing, then realize DDG messed up again. Really not sure why it's doing that.
- General intelligence slowly taking over, curating everything to the point we won't be able to tell that it needs to be unplugged when the time comes.
  But I enjoy the content it gives me about the content I don't like being incorrect. And I'll be damned if I ever say I wish I was born 30 years earlier.

In general yes. I'm not going to pull exact numbers up but I think it started declining around 2018.
I've heard it said they switched to whatever was most profitable rather than what was actually useful or relevant. I still find good results when looking up niche tech issues, but if it's more mainstream I get really weird results, so that might indeed be what's happening.
- Looking up niche stuff gets harder and harder it seems. It always seems to "translate" my very specific request into a very general search and giving me useless results. It highlights search terms in the results, which aren't even in my original search query. Google just thinks it knows better and it never ever does.
- ~~Don't~~ Be Evil.

Also, google images sucks now. Try googling for anything specific, like "sand in pc" or "red carb on plate" - all AI generated
- How can you tell? Do you think it's on purpose, or just the result of so much AI art being pumped into the interwebs for the last year?
  
  I have absolutely no idea. But I’ve found out that, the more specific of an image you search for, the higher the chance of it being AI-generated.

Yes. I'm using the same search methods I've always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I've noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn't go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it's totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn't for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I'd probably be done with them entirely.
- Use Ublock Origin to block all ads. Takes 20 seconds to install, and works on all browsers
  
  Also switch to Firefox, it has built-in protections that Google Chrome (of course) doesn't have
  
  I am using Ublock Origin in Firefox, it still somehow slipped an ad in there.
  
  Technically it takes a while to setup tho
- You can get a degoogled phone but they all seem under par with flagships.
  I was looking at the fairphone5 but I'm on the fence. I might just stick with my current phone which is like 4 years old.
  
  it might be difficult here. I'm in Korea. ie the land of Samsung.
  
  You should look into getting an unlocked pixel with graphene on it

I stopped using it years ago because they were going downhill and still collecting your private information. I run my own SearXNG now. It proxies from multiple sources, no ads, no tracking. I really enjoy SearXNG as it's mine.
- Public instances
  https://searx.space/
- I'd say site blocking is SearXNG's main selling point. (I switched when it got recommended to me on Lemmy :-).) Blocking just a few annoyances (Amazon, Pinterest, etc) make the search results so much better and relevant.
  Also, Google is plagued by censorship.
- Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.
  
  I used searx a while ago but forgot if it has Bangs like ddg. Does it?

Don’t miss this article (Lemmy discussion) from an air purifier review site for an in-depth look at how trusted publishers have been downsizing, then outsourcing generation of affiliate listicles. Drowns out sites who actually buy & test products.

alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers "dotdash meredith"” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content
- I only really use NYT Wirecutter for any kind of site that tests and reviews products.
  They list their methodology regarding how they choose which ones to test, who is testing, how the test is being conducted, what the results are based on, etc etc
  Is it the best one? No idea, give me your recs because I’d love to have multiple sites to go to. If I can’t find anything on Wirecutter, I’ll break down and see if Reddit has anything good.
  Truly shameful how useless so many once great tools now are, and it’s all in the name of greed.
  Edit: Just finished the article you linked - great read, thanks. Looks like Wirecutter is still good along with Tech Gear Lab and of course the site that wrote the article, HouseFresh.
  I have 3 sites to try now! :)
  
  General - Wirecutter
  Tech - rtings
  General incl. cars - Consumer Reports
  Air purifiers apparently - House Fresh
  Elsewhere there’s so much fraud I’ve been tempted towards crazy. Like, start a company where I personally meet people who want to review stuff and scan their IDs and take their SSNs before publishing any of their experiences/recommendations. Try to suss out if they have family connections to any products, any possible financial compensation…
  For restaurants I’ve wanted to sit outside locations and ask diners who are leaving “ay this any good btw?”, given that’s hard to fake.
  It blows my mind we haven’t solved review fraud!
  
  alt-text: shoutout the local library for free Consumer Reports access; screenshot of their laptop comparison table with no ads, no SEO spam, no BS

Yea, turns out that without competition companies are lazy as fuck.

Yes it has. And it's talked about all over Lemmy. Is there a circle jerk community on Lemmy?
- Bump me if anyone finds one. That shit was hilarious back in the day.
  
  https://lemmy.world/c/searchengines
  !searchengines@lemmy.world
  Of course dead, even not showing up on my instance
- ... A metaphoric one, you mean? Because ... um ... nevermind.
- It is getting tiresome. It seems the main lemmy communities are worse hiveminded than reddit.
  
  It takes less effort to poison a smaller well.

For literal months now because of ChatGPT and reddit, if you google "countries in Africa that start with the letter K" for the first two results Google will say that none exist.
So yes, I would say Google search results are getting worse.
- wowwwww
- Holy shit a deez nuts joke broke google?
- I think this is because of how transformer style LLMs tokenizers work, the models don’t really understand the spelling of the words when asked like that. Karpathy has a great learning video on the GPT2 tokenizer that just came out.

On the flipside for advertisers, prices for ad clicks have never been higher. Its so outrageously high now, making Google such an obscene amount of money, that its unlikely to get better, I'd expect it to get much worse.

Yeah, they've been getting progressively less useful. UBlock Origin helps but I feel like Google Search was much better in the past.
I saw an article on a technology Lemmy the other day that showed how Google was pretty much helping to make sure you get shitty results. I'll have to see if I can find it and link it.

I stopped using Google as my primary search engine all together. I now just use bing or duck duck go. Google is the last place I try searching.

100% the page ranking system is too easy to abuse. So a lot of garbage gets to the top of results.
But the internet is just too big to do proper index searches like the old days.
- Google sometimes tells me there were only 4 results (and none of them are the thing I'm searching). It's super annoying when it's something I know is online.
  
  It’s super annoying when it’s something I know is online.
  That may also simply no longer be true. Things do disappear from the internet; quite often actually.
  What's the thing you were looking for? I want to try whether Kagi can dig it up.

I don't mean this mean I'm genuinely curious. Do you not use the front page or only really occasionally use lemmy world?
I'm just so curious how you don't see this every day on the feeds. Again I'm not meaning this like, GO USE A SEARCH ENGINE! it's just that this is such a prevalent topic here, and lemmy is so niche, how you've avoided an answer up until this post?!
- He probably googled it and got an LLM telling him Google search is still amazing and it's all his imagination

Google has been useless for me for years now. I switched to DuckDuckGo like 5 years ago and every now and then if I accidentally even stray onto Google, I'm just scared by the results
- You're saying Bing has better results than Google?
  
  Not who you replied to, but I've been using DuckDuckGo for years knowing it's limitations and would occasionally use Google if I needed more specific search results, however, these days Google Search is about the same as DDG and (even as a fan) I have to admit DDG was never and is not a spectacular search engine. Honestly, the thing that surprises me most is that when I get inadequate results from DDG and try Google, the results are basically the same. Not a great look for Google.
  
  DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.
  And yes, I would say it's better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.
- I came here to say this. Partly due to behavioral changes on my part, DDG's results have been closer to what I'm looking for. At school, they block DDG on the WiFi, so I use Google there and I have to flick past many ads and results that look good from the summary, but have nothing to do with what I'm looking for when load the page.
  
  Excuse me? Why would DDG be banned from a wifi network?

I use perplexity.ai
Hoping that one day it takes my job and I am okay with it. I already hate my job
- What do you do? Maybe we're can hate it in solidarity
- cool who owns this particular ai

I was just talking to some people about this. I use to be the guy who researched everything now I feel stupid AF because finding what I'm looking for feels impossible at times. Hell there's times where I search something and Google even says "there's nothing to find".
- append reddit and if that still brings up garbage like reddit says... Articles
  Use site:reddit.com it'll only show from reddit.com and nothing else.

Yes, and that's why I switched to Kagi
- I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi's 100 free searches, and decided that it's worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.
  I don't blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.
- Kagi
  Does it personalise the result based on your tastes, pages you visit and previous searches?
  I tried duck duck go but I don't like how u personal are the results. This last month I switched to bing and it was better. Some years ago I wouldn't belive that bing could be better than Google.
  
  It does not. It doesn’t even keep track of your past searches. They may make this possible in the future, but already have it set as off by default, should it ever happen. It’s honestly, really, really good!
  ETA - you can indicate what sources should filter up higher in your results if you want
- It's paid though? Hmm.

It's garbage full of seo spam and malicious links

When I'm on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I'm not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.

Yes.

I use Google with modifiers like plus and minus, quotation marks and most importantly with uBlocklist. This way I can hide seo bullshit with a single click
- The modifiers haven't seemed to work for a long time.
  
  Most modifiers were nuked and removed. Few remain.
- You *think you use Google with modifiers, but now your modifiers are even modified or nulled by Google
- If you like modifiers, privacy and no ads in your search, try out Kagi. Since you don't pay with your data, you do pay with your money however, but I find it worth it.

I recently tried switching to DDG for my browsers default searches... Instead of Google. It's wasted so much time.
The others are significantly worse. Even using very specific search terms for threads and content I've already gone to.
Bing was nice for porn for a while... Not so much anymore.

Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results

Yes. It varies by topic, but on many topics now it's 100% useless.

Yeah, here's a fantastic recent article about it:
The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results - Reddit's dominance and the downsides of that https://detailed.com/forum-serps/

Big time.

What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
- I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
  That definitely seems to be the way to go. A human-curated (likely bot-assissted) collection of links with a range of ways to find content wouldn't return as many results but how many do we actually need?
  I remember when Google launched and the idea of getting 10 million search results seemed very impressive but, for most searches, we aren't even going to the second page of results and we may not bother scrolling down beyond the first handful.
  We need quality not quantity. The early search engines' pitch was that humans couldn't possibly index the web and we all went along with this. However, it's now clear that, partly because of the influence of Google and the desire to game the system no matter the outcome, the Internet is increasingly shit - it's content generated by machines to fool other machines into showing it to humans.

I think this video is relevant

It is rather terrible.

If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.
- Man all this positivity for Kagi feels astroturfed. No offense if you're actually not a paid shill, but everywhere I go it seems too flowery to believe.
  
  I mean they give you 100 searches to try before asking you to pay so the opportunity cost to find out is pretty low.
  
  I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.
  
  +1 to what others have said ... Plus I think lemmy is still way too small for "paid shills" in any case. It's okay to like a product you've spent money on, presumably that's why you're spending the money 🤷‍♂️
  Edit: Granted, the original commenter does have a very small lemmy comment history (at least as seen from my instance ... maybe larger if you take the time to load their profile on their home instance)
  
  It feels like it but it's really not. We're actual users who genuinely like the product because it's catered to nerds like us.
  If you too are a nerd, I can highly recommend just giving it a try. If you look for it, you'll immediately notice many things that Kagi just simply gets so damn right.
  
  Just try The free version is not enough in the long term but should be fine to evaluate.
  What bothers me is that using it in incognito is cumbersome at best and almost impossible sometimes.
  
  Also, i would love to try other payed search as wel. Its just that the Google problem to me seems to comes from the fact that the need to earn money on things I don't want them to. So out of principle, paying for search (as long as I can afford it) seems to me the right thing.
  Als kagi is better then DDG, brave and bing on the axis where Google is stil best so basically almost as good. And on the points of OP it is much better than today's Google So all in all my experience is that contrary to ddg I never needed to go back to Google since I started using kagi. That's quite an achievement.
  
  Just try it? You’ll get a free trial, use a fake email, no payment details or use info needed as far as I can remember.
  I believe also https://kagi.com/fastgpt is free to use.
  
  Well, I just went for the 100 search free trial, liked what I got, and am now a paying customer. I rarely switch back to Google for specific local stuff, but for 99% of my searches, I prefer what I get on Kagi , and even more what they offer me besides that: privacy and no ads.
  Believe what you want, but I'd say give it a try and see for yourself.
  
  Some positivity is certainly genuine.
  The volume does seem suspect.
  Shoutout to them for not censoring it, at least!
  
  alt-text: screenshot of the paid search engine in question, using their free trial to search for brand name mentions + “astroturfing”, filtered by fediverse sites
  PS: I’ve spent like an hour digging into comment histories of people who mention paid search. Best believe though companies are gonna be PROS at seeding comment histories by now.
- I was just looking at it. I'll have to try it out. Starting out, I feel it's too expensive but I'll try it and see if my opinion changes.
  
  That was my initial thought as well. You may or may not find it worth it for you. Time will tell I guess.

It feels more like Bing every day. I end up using quotations until there are only 20 results left and none of them are the thing I'm looking for.

Yep, and now you have to scroll through ads and the AI bs. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago. It's mostly good, my biggest issue is that Firefox on Android always takes several seconds before loading the page. Gotta do what ya gotta do for uBlock Origin though.

I haven't used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months

Yes, google has been badly managed for years and the business model doesn’t make sense for users. I’ve moved to Kagi and am paying for my search (yes, I’ve tried searx and others).

YouTube as well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3dSkkEr-wk
- This has been so annoying. I look up a video on disk provisioning and get a video of a goose wearing a tiny sun hat that I favorited in 2018. And then get the disk provisioning video three levels down...

Now that every website has a search function, Google has slowly turned into "I'll show you to the website and let them take it from there". It's absolute dog shit. I think the AI has already taken over, and it's progressing really slowly so we aren't aware of the change. It's already too late to pull the plug, the AI knows we're all driven by greed for attention and occasionally money, and it turns out those are both easily created and distributed in the modern age of the Internet, and very very unregulated.

EVERYONE else.

Yes, search results are terrible these days. I switched to DDG and Bing

In this article, we will certainly discuss why the results from Google search engine are declining. But before continuing, it is important to first outline what search engines are and how they present results….

Yes. Bring back blogrolls!

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