What Happened To Google Search?
What Happened To Google Search?
Esp. relevant amidst the reddit blackout, and how it's affecting Google Search quality as well.
The blackout really affected the quality of Google search results. I used to add "reddit" at the end of my query to make sure I get genuine answer from the community. Now without reddit, I have to dig deeper. The verge has a good article on this
I hope we're also on the cusp of a new era of search.. not sure how that would look like but I envision with SEO-optimized AI-generated articles (esp. all those top 10 articles which is so easy to generate with AI), Google is only going to continue going downhill spammed with fake content.
also reddit's own search kind of sucks, so Google is basically a glorified reddit search engine for me half the time.
I've been disappointed in Google for a long time. Using their shortcuts doesn't work anymore so it's all ads until it's "We don't seem to find..... leave a question" Which. No. I actually get much better and faster results from Bing or Edge or whatever it's called through Microsoft. DDG and Brave are no's too.
@isdfoa I do much less in the way of generic searches now.
I have one for wikipedia, one for music, two for videos, and one for torrents.
It's been a couple of years, and now feels very natural to divide queries like this.
I definitely do the same thing, specially when I know I want something from Wikipedia vs. something else. I use Alfred on my Mac to do it. I’ve setup custom queries for things like Memory Alpha, Urban Dictionary, etc.
@leopardboy you know you're old when you have a hotkey for Urban Dictionary.
Today people append Reddit to their search to find human replies to their question. If the Reddit community fragments into the fediverse what keyword would they type in then?
Hot take: The old way of searching is outdated.
Bing Chat is rough, but it's the future. You ask it a question - it uses a modified ChatGPT to generate an answer and cites its sources.
About 60% of the time, it's right. About 40% of the time it's wrong. But either way, it cites its sources using links that it found during that search. You can click those sources and see responses from humans, who generally have the correct answer.
I rarely use Google now. Bing Chat is always my first stop for any kind of question or general knowledge query. Give it 5 years - 10 at most - and that'll be the only way to use a search engine. The tech isn't going anywhere, and it's only getting better.
This is almost a worst case scenario to me. There was a time when I could search the internet and find long form articles written by experts in the field, or at least by knowledgeable people answering the question that I had and often giving me a deep dive. These days I can search the title of an article I know exists and it will still be buried beneath pages of SEO driven AI generated garbage. I get the feeling that many of these sites and writers shut down simply because there was no reason to generate content that would be buried.
You’re right. I’m primarily using this, discord, and ChatGPT as my main tools for browsing/troubleshooting/interacting.
One thing that works really well with GPT is that sometimes it will tell you that you are framing the problem incorrectly and make a lateral move to a different system that still solves the problem.
I was about to spend a lot of time and energy setting up a server and it told me of a way to do what I was looking for through Google Drive instead.
It’s almost as good as talking to a real expert.
Reality is that we're going to be asking a computer to find it for us. Tools like ChatGPT are perfect for this. Sure, they are not 100% accurate, but that has always been the case with anything you find on the Internet (or read in a book or pamphlet or whatever form the information takes).
The massive reaction to these tools going public is the only evidence I needed to see that a massive paradigm shift was coming. It'll take awhile to figure things out and there will be lots of abuse, but also lots of good things, just like always happens with any new technology.