It showed up for me about a month ago. I put up with it for about a week and then broke down and finally switched all my browser search engines to duckduckgo.
The funny thing is, I tried making this same switch a couple years ago. I legitimately had a harder time getting the results I needed and ended up switching back to Google.
I was looking up some tips for Baldurs Gate missions and these fking AI generated pieces of shit with hallucinated fake playthroughs ruined the whole experience.
There has been something similar for years: a page that basically says “Yeah, nah, we don’t have any information for that, but you might be interested in a totally irrelevant something else”, but phrased in a way that gets it high in the results. What’s astonishing is that Google doesn’t punish those pages.
Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are “popular results”, first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.
If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I’d prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I’ve seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg’s results.
If you’re going through that route, SearX beats everything and it’s not even close. It’s self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, … Rn I’m mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck. Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it’s pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I’m lazy or I’m searching for something too obscure for searx.
I’ve used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google’s (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.
I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it’s the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I’ll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.
i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don’t have many users, so they couldn’t rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn’t optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI
read the official docs, and don’t use google anymore, seriously, any technical question duckduckgo/ecosia can answer better because they use bing search engine
It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Not the one you replied to but they’re probably talking about Kagi. I crunched the numbers a while back and the higher tiers were kind of hard to make worthwhile, however iirc they simplified the pricing slightly since then.
I’ve been using it for a few months. It’s good. I get the official docs for my first result using OP’s query. 300 queries, their starting tier was not enough for my use. I was using DDG before and like it well enough. I’m not sure if it’s worth it but I like the idea of paying for services I use. I stopped using Google years ago because of all the captchas I had to fill due to my VPN
I’m cool with paying for quality, ad-free service but I feel like they’re giving way too little for what they’re asking. 300 searches a month? What is this AOL?
Someone has to pay lemmy. If you don’t, it’s comparable to a free tier of a paid service. When I say “you” I don’t mean every single person. There’s no option to pay for google search that I’m aware of.
Not true because we’re getting the same experience whether we pay or not. The same kinda goes for google, they have other services you could pay to support them (please don’t), and it won’t make the search engine better. Big difference is one of them is actually free (full meaning of the word) and the other one is just usable without paying.
You’re still using a free platform to say good free software is not a thing tho, kinda weird.
So many SEO trick to put yourselves into top google search for traffic.
I have google for bug and stuff, and most common bug can be found on shitty content Java tip page with broken format, lot of ads, and sometime untrue/outdate information.
DuckDuckGo is also being poisoned by SEO unfortunately. Some group of people managed to crack its algorithm, and as Google is slowly but fading relevancy, DuckDuckGo is now also has the same issues.
Must be an old screenshot because there’s now half a page of Gemini AI garbage at the very top now.
Highly recommend using the uBlacklist extensions to filter out the garbage, spam, copycat, useless sites that somehow seem to always beat out legitimate sources in SEO.
Search results: “Here’s how you setup Rawinput in this competitive FPS, and look how it reduces input latency by a single milisecond! After 2-3 pages of AI generated SEO garbage full of misinformation, you might find something else besides of the official MS docs.”
Me: “Okay, this is not working, maybe I should look for some another preexisting SDL alternative, maybe at least one of them isn’t an even bigger dumpster fire than SDL itself.”
Search results: “Duuuude, have you heard of this game making tool, called Gamemaker? It doesn’t need coding, and it’s totally the same thing, because some people mistakingly called SDL a game engine, and now my AI hallucinates it as such. If you’re up to a bigger challenge, then there’s always Godot, or DirectX, which my AI also hallucinates being a game engine!”
SDL, on the other hand, is not, and instead is a multimedia layer (middleware) often used for game development.
One could argue that game engines constitute as middleware, but in reality, most modern game engines are way more than that, and instead often rely on other middleware nowadays (e.g. OpenGL, or even SDL for some). This, alongside with people mistakingly calling SDL a game engine, leads to stuff like this.
The section “other people also search for” is complete garbage.
I was searching for a used car part in my native language and Google mistook it for a name. No, Google, other people do not search for "car part net worth and marital status ". Why are you showing me this crap?
The English word ‘speaker’ has multiple meanings. In Hungarian, there is a different word for a speaker device that casts sound (hangszóró, “sound caster”) and Speaker of the House of Parliament (házelnök, “president of the house”).
Still, when googling one, you may get results for the other. 🤷
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