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Using Google whilst Duck Duck Go is down. How long has Google been this bad?

So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.

I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).

I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.

How long has Google been this bad?

Nom ,

alt text

^This is for anyone who doesn’t know, click on the web button in the “More” drop down list after making a search to get the old style search results instead of the new ones. People mentioned this in the thread earlier so I thought I’d make it clear.

AnUnusualRelic ,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

It started when Search Engine Optimisation became a thing, so it’s been a while. But it really went downhill a few years ago.

neveraskedforthis ,

Don’t think any engine is immune to SEO

Jourei ,

A couple years ago I began getting frustrated. Last year I started to first go to Bing, google as failsafe. Now I gave up on everything so might as well go with Ecosia. When I NEED something, I’ll go with bing/bing’s chatGPT.

Lesrid ,

Can confirm. I struggled to remember the name of the ancient website vampirefreaks after the concept came up in conversation and out of the big search engines only Bing’s flavor of chatGPT could tell me what I was looking for.

Twig ,
@Twig@sopuli.xyz avatar

Pretty sure DDG, Ecosia and Bing all use the same backend?

DAMunzy , (edited )

The last few months have especially been bad.

I love when I search for a movie: New Life (2024) it’ll give me IMDB results. I hate IMDB so I change my search to: New Life (2024) TMDB Google will give me the TMDB result as the first result and IMDB as the second result but it also has the did you mean “New Life (2024) IMDB” as an alternative search option. Makes me wonder if Amazon (which owns IMDB) is paying Google to push IMDB. Makes me feel like Google is trying to gaslight me.

efstajas ,

Tbh the reason for that is probably just that IMDB is wildly more popular

cmrn ,

I’ve found Google alternatives great for things that are… filtered (copyright etc), but honestly no matter what search engine I use, I swear none just give you the results for your query anymore. I’ve still been finding the Bing-based ones horrible quality for relevancy and defaulting to Google.

Scrollone ,

Maybe it’s not only a search engine problem, but a content problem. There’s less and less useful content on the web nowadays

Baguette ,

Ehh I wouldn’t say so. There’s still plenty of good content around, especially if you’re trying to learn. The issue is that there’s also a lot of bad content, a lot from garbage ai generated nonsense and a lot from low quality content that plays the seo manipulation game.

ChaoticEntropy ,
@ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk avatar

The proportion of good content to bad content has taken a steep nosedive to be sure.

kalpol ,

This is what millionshort.com was supposed to help with, but now you need an account for it.

coolusername ,

I think since around 2016? Google changed their algos to prioritize mainstream media. This is actually a way to censor since MSM is all controlled by the CIA. Jacobin and NY post have the exact same opinions about countries the CIA and state department don’t like.

azulavoir ,

please go back home, paid ccp actor

TenderfootGungi ,

Yikes. Found the gullible one or paid disinformation spreader.

x0x7 ,

You have infinitely other options. search.brave.com, yandex, bing. And probably a lot of cool ones I don’t know about.

All of them search more accurately your directly requested phrase instead of a blurry interpretation of your sentiment.

Jimmycrackcrack , (edited )

I’ve been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I’ve definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn’t become a disaster, it’s just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven’t exactly loved DDG in comparison. It’s okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It’s more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I’d be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn’t which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone’s asked basically that exact or very similar question.

I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I’ll persevere but I can’t say it’s been better.

retrospectology ,
@retrospectology@lemmy.world avatar

I found that switching DDG to my default was good enough for ~80% of my searches. I’ll only use Google as an alternative for shopping since that’s where DDG legitimately just sucks at providing anything that’s not “temu” or alibaba.

intensely_human ,

Google started getting really bad about a year ago

K0W4LSK1 ,
@K0W4LSK1@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I use 4get.ca

anarchoilluminati ,
@anarchoilluminati@hexbear.net avatar

Always.

I think SearXNG is best.

governorkeagan ,

I keep seeing this and I tried it but I couldn’t get great results consistently. Maybe I need to spend some more time looking into it again

anarchoilluminati ,
@anarchoilluminati@hexbear.net avatar

It may be the instance you used or something else I’m not aware of, but I always get great results.

The only thing is sometimes an instance dies and I need to find and start using another one, but it’s not a big deal. You can find instances here.

ComradeLove ,
@ComradeLove@hexbear.net avatar

I did 2 searches yesterday that gave me crap on Google and then I tried Bing and it gave me what I was looking for on the first page.

boonhet ,

www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Read for the exact timeline

makingStuffForFun OP ,

That is an amazing read. Thank you!

Mrs_deWinter ,

Insane. Thanks for sharing.

sovietknuckles ,
@sovietknuckles@hexbear.net avatar

Startpage (has Google search results) or Google with private browsing haven’t given me the new AI suggestions so far

TheObviousSolution ,

It might be my localization, but it doesn’t seem that bad to me, and I generally use duckduckgo. But forced localization is enough.

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