Technology

Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.

That's not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don't like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it's an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.

I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there's so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that's why they don't see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on.. So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far.. and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they've been worse than competitors for years.

It's going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.

Google's got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now...can't find shit. And it's about half its own fault.

I'll put right around half of the blame on "platformization." Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn't get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what's there. Twitter is slightly more open...but not really.

The other half of the problem is Google's own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.

That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they've gotten in the habit of appending "reddit" to google search strings because a. that's where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit's own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn't work so well.

So what are we keeping them around for?

It's pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.

It's amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we've built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn't, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. But if the niche communities die, that's a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

Of course they are. Adding "Reddit" at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).

Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error

It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google

As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I'll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.

They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google's retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn't satisfy it's ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.

While we are fixing things Google, can we also not have the first 20 results be YouTube videos that are 30 minutes long, when the answer I want is typically a sentence or two....?

I didn't realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It's just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.

I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you'd eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I'm grateful.

I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.

If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…

It would be cheaper for google to just buy reddit, remove the adds and open the api's again.

Having relevent search results is priceless.

This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.

It is astounding how reliant some mega corporations are on what people do for free. If people coordinated they could do serious harm to Google bottom line.

Imagine an encyclopedia.

Now imagine I own the encyclopedia, and Walmart offers me money.

So i paste Walmart's Xmas catalogue pages in between the useful information in the encyclopedia. You ask about frog facts, you get frog pajamas. You try to look up cultural information and get travel ticket prices. You never planned on purchasing anything, and you are too poor too anyway. But somehow I and Walmart make money off of your displeasure.

This is ad revenue. This is the modern economy. Its a sham. Its an infinite money go brrrttt machine for billionaires.

Enshitification.

Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can't get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.

The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I'm aware that it could years and that's only if the fediverse picks up well enough.

Google Perspectives will highlight results from Quora? That's the last thing I want.

I've started using DDG as defacto since the last 3 months. Use Google search only for sports updates because they've good widgets for those.

Google search is a pain from a year ago.

When searching for something on Google, you should include terms like “Reddit”, “superuser”, “Stack Overflow”, etc., to get better results. Because if you don't include them, the first page of Google looks like a bot-generated page. Of course, Google are ‘not quite happy’.

Google search has been pretty weak for awhile now. I/O spoke a lot of big talk about bring generative AI into search, but from my part of the world it still seems the same.

Yep now Google is 99% useless. Bunch of AI written nonsense

Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.

I've stopped using it. I now bounce around alternatives but Kagi is the best and my go to now. Here are some alternatives to consider:

• DuckDuckGo
• Brave Search
• Ecosia (A bit spammy, but a passive praxis.)
• https://www.perplexity.ai/
• https://www.phind.com/
• https://kagi.com/
• https://search.marginalia.nu/ (very cool!)
• https://www.wolframalpha.com/
• https://knaben.eu/ (torrents)

DuckDuckGo has great results IMO

The natural degredation of google just comes down to the incredibly stupid levels of search engine optimization and ads. Most articles in particular are so terrible, I'm convinced a lot of them are just written by bots. What I want are answers actually written by humans on discussion boards with a rating system. That's what made me add "reddit" to the end of everything. Genuine humans, NOT people being paid to write articles or ads.