I always bookmark sites I know I will use frequently. I didn't realize people didn't do that anymore lol
What happened to the search engines? They always seem to work fine for me
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.
My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.
Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.
For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.
It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.
My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.
Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.
As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.
What do you consider advanced googling?
“Advanced” Site:google.com filetype:pdf -“consider” etc etc.
Using targeted operators to refine your search.
Plenty of resources on it by searching “Google operators”
Well yes, but also just any use of https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Oh wow, they made it easier and people still didn’t use it
That's been there for decades. We were taught to use it in middle school (~2003 for me). There used to be a fairly prominent link to the advanced search page from the main Google homepage.
For a while, regular google searches were good enough to find everything you needed, so the skill became less common/important. My guess is that public knowledge of it has just atrophied over time.
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
But also just anything from this page:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1
AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.
The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.
I never stopped bookmarking. Type a word and usually the browser will find that long lost page from the bookmarks.
Bring back personal homepages and webrings!
Geocities!
Neocities is the successor! It's pretty cool
And visitor counters
The only reason I don't bookmark much, is because I'm actively hoarding 517 tabs.
I never use bookmarks. Not because of search engines but because of browser history.
I already bookmarked but with this whole enshitification I began hoarding data. All those txts, images, videos, songs that I bookmarked? Am downloading and categorizing all of it
The keywords for bookmarks in Firefox are amazing. I type the thing my brain thinks of when I think of a website and boom I'm there.
Sounds like someone has been searching YouTube on google every time they wanted to watch YT
I've never let go of bookmarks and RSS. Still the best systems around.
Offline AI is a better search engine now. Even at 20% fake or made up references, it is better than a search engine.
The reverse is likely true. Search engines suck because they are actively trying to edge out the AI competition as the products that will emerge from AI will soon make search engines unprofitable for peripheral data mining through stalking people.
Google has been so bad it's making bing better. No seriously, bing is better than Google.
People stopped bookmarking?
Wtf? Yall have been using Search Engines to go to websites you've been to before? Why even, just type the url in...
"ne" presses enter for netflix.com
"l" presses enter for lemmy.world
Auto completing urls are so fast.
Even better, save specific search engines with shortcut codes: type 'w' + , start typing to search on Wikipedia.
Truth, but it's three more key presses when I can just click the bookmark under the address bar instead of clicking the address bar. Takes you three times longer!
Idk dude, I feel like there is more wrist movement involved in mouse control than typing.
I fucking hate the death of keyboard shortcuts and not being able to reliably tab through fields. Particularly in UIs designed for data entry.
All our patient care reporting software has gone to a touch-screen centric UI ... when half the fields still require typing information in.
bring back del.icio.us cowards
What's that?
old social bookmarking site that pretty much popularized the concept of tagging