Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.
You know, that was a good article until the author took a completely unnecessary and irrelevant swipe at Biden; at which point I completely lost interest in anything the author had to say.
I'm really fucking tired of political bullshit being embedded into every-goddamned-thing I read.
It feels like AI wrote it already. Try googling a windows error now. Instead of getting forums or a blog you get 10 shitty websites with lists of generic fixes that end with them recommending their shitty software that will absolutely not fix your issue.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan reportedly said.
Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that's what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
"Many of us may wonder," yep. Some of us are pretty sure it's because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They're very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.
I can't trust a single thing that pops up on google because everything is auto generated blog spam
And regarding reddit, moderation keeps reddit at a good quality but if reddit takes away moderators tools and introduces more instructive ads it will become low quality and untrustworthy as well
Some Reddit posts are already at an all time low in quality. Places like r/worldnews, r/technology or ELI5, where you used to find "at least" a couple decent comments, have already seen top posts with 0 useful top comments... and I've looked through all of them out of morbid curiosity, but no, not a single one.
What's your preferred alternative? I use DuckDuckGo, and it's... OK. I still often switch over to Google when I'm having a hard time finding relevant results on DDG.
DDG works really good in my opinion. I rarely use google, and if I do use it, I find the results almost always lacking too. The only time when google is better, is if I’m looking to purchase something, and want to find a place that sells the product I’m looking for.
It seems to depend on the type of search. For ordinary information, I'm using DuckDuckGo. For shopping, I go to Google, but the results aren't great. I'm undecided for serious research.
The article starts with absolute non-news: To get results on reddit.com you should addd site:reddit.com to your search, not just Reddit.
Unfortunately, I think this is a disadvantage of the Fediverse when it comes to search: The "site:" operator won't work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search. E.g. DIY Esp8266 camera activator scope:fediverse, scope:lemmy or maybe scope:diaspora
I never bothered with that. All my results were from reddit.com anyway with just appending reddit to the end. Even Bing chat would add reddit to the end of search for you without asking.
he “site:” operator won’t work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
Agreed, that's the problem.
Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search.
Also agreed, that would be a solution. I'm doubtful wether they deem a particular network important enough to justify the extra effort on their part.
Is it possible to pipe search queries through a website? If yes, then let's make a fedi-search! In which you can find any publicly available fediverse content.
Would it then be possible to google for site:fedi-search?
The cynic in me sees a symbiotic relationship between Google and Reddit.
I started messing around on Reddit around 2007, but it felt like a firehose. Google's results covered what I was looking for to the extent that I didn't need a second source for most searches, and my job involved reading the AP wire, so I was decently covered on news with additional RSS feeds at home.
Fast forward a few years, and I'm noticing the pattern that most genuinely helpful information is coming from Reddit (as well as no longer being in a newsroom), so I join, and the experience is far better with subreddits (sorry, hipsters). It wasn't yet readily apparent that Reddit was not only getting better at being comprehensive, but Google was also getting worse.
In the late beforetimes, maybe 2019, Google became useful for searching Reddit and finding product information for items I already knew about. And nothing else. Even with coding questions, there are a lot of red herrings. Without Reddit results, I'd have noticed Google's search irrelevance far earlier.
I think it's a bold move for Google to present Perspectives as a new feature to improve user experience when really, it just makes it easier for them to present sponsored content in different formats. Astroturfed advertisments (fake "ordinary customer reviews," usually) have been a thing on social media for ages, especially on YouTube, and Perspectives is just giving Google a creative way to get eyeballs on those ads.
Using the Reddit implosion as a jumping off point is also clever, and I think it's evidence that Google doesn't plan on paying for API access next month, or ever. They don't want to take advantage of Reddit's data, they just want to take back the eyeballs that Reddit attracts.
(... not that Reddit was ever immune to astroturfing, of course, but I think strong community moderation made it better than YouTube, which doesn't give users much opportunity to get rid of fake reviews. Now that they have chased off a lot of mods and nerfed their tools, I expect the authenticity of Reddit product reviews to decrease dramatically).
I add site names to searches all the time. For example, if you want medical information instead of advertisements for dick pills, you can add "site:nih.gov" to your search
Too late. On the advice of another Lemmy thread, I started trying Kagi a couple weeks ago, for exactly this reason. I highly doubt I'll come back; it's been working great for me, and given how important search is to me both personally and professionally, it's easily, easily worth the price.