Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people's lived experience—says different.
You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people's lived experience—says different.
It's the same on YouTube. One time I added a negative term and I ONLY got that term in the results. I don't understand how you can break such an important part of search.
Yeah, so they changed it so it defaults to the "new" way where quotes and -UnwantedTerm don't function the way they used to, but when you fill out the search box, hit "Google Search", and it fails to perform the way you want it to, once you're on the results page, go to "Tools" click on "All Results" and change it to "Verbatim".
I would NOT use it for shopping, I tried that recently and got a ton of really sketchy looking sites with way too cheap products that had no internet presence before this month. This might be more pronounced if you search specific product model numbers like I was rather than general terms.
I’ve had it be mostly okay on other stuff. I use it over Google but mostly because I don’t want to pay for a search engine.
I'm disappointed with the number of brave downvotes you are receiving. Recommend you stop supporting Brave.
Kagi has been really great, I've never looked back. I value ux, search, and privacy enough to feel it's worth the price.
Duckduckgo has turned into to a google clone at this point i've found - you get pretty much identical results with the added aggravation you can't exclude keywords.
i was wondering what would it take to make a free/open/noncommercial search solution maintained by a collective (like wikipedia or something). search is too important to be ruined for everyone by corporations.
Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it's still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don't see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.
I think it's related to paid search and SEO tactics. All my browser have adblocks for years and I think it helps. By my own experience I don't think it's worse, and to be honest I still think it's unmatched. I've been using duckduckgo sometimes and it's alright and all but it's definitely not better.
For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline.
That’s according to a new study by a team of researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, first reported by 404 Media Tuesday.
According to the study, those efforts aren’t working, but “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam.” These changes often lead to a “temporary positive effect,” but the spammers just find new loopholes.
Just last week, Gizmodo covered a bizarre situation that saw Google turning up what looked like a child’s homework assignment for a search about former president John F. Kennedy’s stance on the death penalty.
It’s gotten so hard to find authentic, useful results that people have started adding the word “Reddit” to search terms to turn up content written by someone who actually cares, instead of someone just trying to make money.
In 2023, a Gizmodo investigation found the tech news outlet CNET deleted thousands of articles because its team felt that would aid in the site’s performance on Google Search.
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Ecosia is pretty sweet if you fancy helping the planet. It's also privacy conscious as in does not sell or store any personally identifiable information. They also anonymize search data.
important to note that Ecosia does collect some non-personal information, such as search terms and click data, to improve search results and analyze usage patterns.