3d ago

How to Cope with Waning Search Engine Functionality

Happy Saturday All,

TLDR: I’ve been extremely frustrated with the increasing enshittification of search engines. I made this post to see how we all are coping with this.

I honestly feel like the past month or so, the functionality of web search has just completed dropped through the floor. The only sites that seem to get indexed are those littered with generated content.

I’m not the only one that thinks getting a list of synthetic text, especially one that reads like a machine-translated instruction manual isn’t the most helpful set of resources right? The “articles” go on forever without reaching a substantive conclusion or extending any bits of information to answer my original search query.

It’s very upsetting to see that it could somehow get even worse than it has been for the last few years. I miss finding individual blogs of people nerding out over common hobbies. Curated websites that actually could make it to the first page returned from a query. It also seems that social media websites are primarily indexed if it isn’t polluted with the automatic slopfest pages.

Let me know what y’all think. This really sucks

19 comments

I was just thinking this today. Constantly I get "top 10 stuff" like website in all my searches and always the same 5 websites for a topic. Tried looking up alternative to using search on google and other search engines, always "top 10 google alternative.
I can't even tell if the website is All slop cuz its always top 10 format. Nowadays, outside of Wikipedia and site:reddit.com I trust nothing.
Also, shit is so bloated nowadays that my browser constantly crashs and even without lots of tabs, the page lags when its bloated. There was a website with a progress bar stick to the webpage window that shows you how far you read and its like a 30 sec read. Thought I was gonna have aneurysm.
🙋🏻‍♂️was also a formed DuckDuckGo user and didn’t like the path they followed onboarding more AI slop, this game me some options
qwant ( EU based, France)
kagi (US based)
SearXNG (meta search engine, it means it’s querying all the search engines anonymously)
So I tested kagi free, enjoyed it; then finally paid €5 / mo because I enjoyed the results it was returning; not to mention I can downgrade/upgrade sites to filter them out of my search.
Yeah, well... The Internet is dying, basically
With the way things are going, it might fracture into smaller networks or everything might continue to be buried under the sheer weight of slop, making the clear web just propoganda and burying the real content into the deep web
so far my setup using disroot's searxng instance with ublacklist (already mentioned), some recommended blocklists for it, and banger for universal DDG bangs has been extremely non-frustrating (except one crashout i had when ublacklist updated with a method for adding custom search engines which forced me to write a custom entry for disroot that didn't initially work despite it working OOB perfectly fine before that) and my preferred experience. another example of my linux user autism taking over.
but i direct most folks i know to udm14.org since they're unwilling to give up google. :/
I've been just using more specific/targeted search engines. I put them on a bookmarks page I coded and that's my homepage when I open my browser. And then when I need just a general Google search without ai summary, my new tabs page goes to udm=14. Still not great - but fine when I just need to double check a url or search images.
I highly recommend Wiby and Marginalia for more indie/non-corporate website searches!
Oh also searching directly in Wikipedia when I'm looking up something that might have an entry there (science/history/whatever) that I just need an overview or definition of
- Any tips for managing bookmarks with an improved method from… “Autistic heap (corpus) of websites haphazardly chucked into similarly named directories”?
  Low-key I wish I knew how to extend the functionality of Firefox or how to write plugins.
  Great suggestions for Wiby and Marginalia! I will check those out. What was that service called that lets you download Wikipedia in its entirety? I was thinking of saving a local copy for information archiving purposes.
uBlacklist is a browser extension that can filter search results from commonly used search engines like Google/DDG. You can use it with Super SEO Spam Suppressor which is a community maintained blocklist targeting SEO/AI spam.
- add also Copycat Sites and Huge AI Blocklist, but honestly i feel like they are making a difference, there is just to much
I know everyone on Lemmy seems to hate AI, but perplexity.ai has been great for me. It does a search and then summarizes the results and includes citations. I can ask it complex questions and it gives straight answers instead of having to dig through results from search engines, myself.
I've been finding that a) google is the fucking worst, most others do better, and b) results on the 2nd and 3rd pages are becoming more and more relevant.
As someone with a seething hatred of AI and companies putting it in everything I found No ai DDG useful. They wanna add AI and keep turning it on after I disable it? Try turning it on now that it’s stripped from the search engine.
I moved away from google years ago. I was using duckduckgo until they started adding ai BS. So I moved to mojeek and ecosia.
I hate it, i really hate it, but what can we do?
- Occasionally I’ll throw my query into Google instead of DDG. If it’s an item on EBay, I used to be able to find it through DDG, but now I most turn to site-specific searching.
  Annoying, but I guess infinite convenience of a tool that we expect to work has to grind to a halt to allow for more value to be siphoned by the corporation.
Scholar.google.com is still quite good! And most of the time I want a good paper on a topic, instead of some random person's opinion.
- Haven’t used Google Scholar since I was in school, but glad it still works!
Do y'all believe that even a user owned search and scraping platform will have those AI generated websites in the top results?
- Would depend on the ranking methodology, instead of ownership
Why do you exactly post this on !autism@lemmy.world
The question is not autism or mental health related.
- if you squint, you can see it. Have interest in stuff and so google but Al slop

19 comments