Technology

Is this a joke, hyperbole? To build on your example, what if I wanted to find out “how to disable Windows 11 update prompts” into lemmy’s search. Do you think I would get the answer I’m looking for?

I’m not saying I don’t want to be rid of google and all they do. I would pay for 10 proton mail accounts a month if just one of googles data centers spontaneously burst into flames right now!

…

Well I’m willing to wait a while longer… I have not tried Kagi yet, but I will as soon as I get bored with Midjourney. Hopefully someday we can collectively slip the yoke, but I suspect googles results will get a lot worse first.

I've heard kids these days search tiktok instead of Google.

Kids are fucking stupid

Even the worst of Google searches pull up more relevant content than an empty Fediverse community.

There simply isn’t enough quality content yet.

What kind of fediverse search are you talking about? Provide a link. That would do much, much more than any explanations or testimonials possibly could.

You must not have hard problems to solve if fediverse content is able to replace a search engine.

Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.

Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.

Dude, search engines are still the lifeblood of the Internet, even if they're being poisoned. Your proposal to just grow the Fediverse into the place you search for info does nothing more than replace the HTML/hyperlink-based world with a Markdown/ActivityPub-based world. You'll still need a search engine to index and organize zottabytes of data.

If you think for a second that the Fediverse won't immediately be exploited, overrun, and ruined by advertisers the second it becomes large enough to be relevant, you haven't been on the internet very long. It's only a matter of time before one of the big instances sells out to some corporation all the users stay where they are because it's easier, and the process starts again.

This is a never ending battle that decentralization won't solve. Usenet, IRC, email, and early websites were all pretty well decentralized, and they were all overrun with ads, spam, and scams. Part of why so many services became centralized with big providers is that the constant escalation of protection vs. usability needs more resources than small time sysadmins can handle. They sell out, centralize, or shut down.

As far as Google and SEO, the current nightmare was originally Google trying to get SEO under control. Webmasters were learning to game the pagerank system, and the early SEO tools let them do that fairly. Then Google went public, bought DoubleClick and monetized the shit out of it, letting ads override their product, and here we are.

Edit, more:

Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to

No, you have a community to click onto. Or a whole-ass instance. Also, I can't just search my instance and get all the potential hits from instances that aren't federated.

no bs

Lol, what? A dozen bs replies for each useful reply, even in the good threads.

you get to hear about what's happening with WIndows 11 from different voices.

Which of those voices exactly is authoritative?

Simply having multiple voices doesn't imply more useful information if most of those voices are full of shit. (Also, it's only a matter of time before half those voices are ads, scams, and bots.)

Trash in/trash out. Small communities of experts can create quality content, but after becoming relevant enough astroturfing begins.

Search engines are good for what you might call "keyword searches" across websites. I'd say SEO spam has degraded quality of hits and made search results less reliable than even 5 years ago. There's a lot more chaff to winnow now in the main search services. You sorta need to discriminate on hits, and dig a bit deeper into the results to find that new nugget you didn't already see 3 or 4 times already in previous searches with similar, but different parameters.

I find the LLM AIs to be slightly better at turning up obscure info these days. The conversation sets some persistent context that's helpful when you need to dial in on obscure stiff like a driver issue, tuning problem or weird product spec. You still need to carefully vet your results, but the AIs understand technical jargon pretty well, and generally return some solid analysis for leas common scenarios.

They're also good for pick-and-shovel work in odd tech areas, but you really need to be careful with the results because they're confidently wrong in speculative conversation only slightly more often than they're confidently right.

That's just my opinion, but it's how I do search these days: use an AI to refine keywords, then use DDG or Google to find familiar sites with corollary content.

Just wait for the bots. Also, search engines have been playing cat and mouse with SEO for a while. I don’t know why it’s gotten so bad lately.

Perhaps we use search engines for different purposes... 🤔

I don't use Google, but I definitely use my preferred search engine numerous times daily.

I thought this post was going to be about ChatGPT. Instead it’s about how fediverse search is a replacement for the entire internet, which is utter nonsense.

This is only true if you need news or opinions. You can't really search Lemmy for technical questions or search for a specific site which are my main usages of a search engine.

Search engines don’t use search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is what people do to get their site to the top of a search engines results.

Guess this guy never has to look up syntax stuff.

Google is free, Im searching recipies, websites of companies I might invest in, the law in general and pop-culture crap 90% of the time

Seems like a waste of water and energy to ask a highpowered LLM about it. I heard each query on GPT uses 12L of fresh water, seems wastefull when I could just use a basic google

Edit: it is approx .5L of water for 5 to 50 prompts, thanks google!

Here is some info about the decline of truth on google search.
https://bbbhltz.codeberg.page/blog/2024/02/seoshenanigans/

I only find search engines somewhat irrelevant because I'm almost never searching for, like, a website. I'm searching for information or software that's compiled on 1 of 5 websites and I can usually use the search function on those specific sites.

Used to use search engines to find new websites. Back when Google was new and it was easier to find cool stuff with keywords rather than by adding .com to random words in the URL bar.

I'm not going to give the fediverse my address and ask it where the closest dentist/clinic/restaurant is. Also, even if I did, 見る人がほとんどわからないかも。

This is a relative hot take at this moment but as the search results get worse and the fediverse grows it might become true. Time will tell.

I wanted to add some extra context that I feel some commentators are missing and it could be my fault for not being as specific.

The reason I think search engines are becoming more irrelevant is because seo, it isn't like the year of 2010 where you would find more relevant resualts as easily.

If you read the title and the actual og post contents, you would find out i'm really just ranting about seo.

I did mention in the comments a few times that i'm not necessarily against search engines as they were originally intended to be used, but what seo has become for the modern search engine. Because of that, that is why search engines are becoming irrelevant to me.

So it isn't the issue with search engines at the surface, I do understand how they work, it's rather, what they had become on the inside behind the scenes with seo.

One thing Search engines are good for looking for stores like Aldi's, or Best buy and seeing the type of stuff they sell before you shop there. But if you're looking for anything opinionated, or from real people from *all backgrounds seach engines are becoming less and less of that as they use to be back in the 2008's-2013's