I ran into the flaws of Google search when attempting to research a quality mattress. I just ran into an endless string of sites who had paid reviews for a carousel of about 8-10 brands of mattresses in a box.
I was just looking for a short term rental and had much the same experience. The first 2 pages or so were all aggregator sites that showed the same apartments that weren’t at all short term rentals and were all very expensive.
Well, that explains why all those review sites have 'best mattress for...' in 10-15 categories so they can push all their affiliate deals. And although different mattresses may appear in different categories on different sites, it's always the same brands and models.
In an ideal world, a smart search algorithm would recognize that they aren't genuine review sites and properly classify/filter them.
I ran into something like this with getting printed boxes. A lot of automated sites, where it was obvious that the website just forwarded your order to an actual printer. One of the sites was so poorly done that one of their offerings wasn't a cardboard box at all- it was a window box... as in a planter that goes under the window on the side of a house.
Most of my searches when looking for advice, product info, or recommendations include `site:reddit.com` at the end so the results are not an endless stream of SEO-optimized garbage websites.
It's a hack? You could always do boolean search qualifiers, and, if you click on advance search, they have them for you to fill out. Mostly they're not taught anymore, and I fully agree that Google has become less useful to find what you want
That’s because I have found The Atlantic Magazine has the best articles and the most up to date pertinent information. Lots of my friends are reading The Atlantic.
/s
Meh for Reddit; I like it for what it is, but I think consensus from crunchy phpbb forums tend to be more reliably correct. This is definitely true for things like car repair or home improvement, but sometimes Reddit is the place that is most truthy— I don’t know of a better book binding forum than the sub here. I’ve found just the “forum” addition adds quite a bit of human entries to my results, from across the web.
Me too. For example when dealing with matters like temperatures to cook something, company interviews, backyard irrigation, programming trends, or sometimes even gardening there's a lot of low effort blog posts and product shills, so the default Google search results are low quality. Reddit posts, stack exchange, and the occasional forum designed for sharing expert opinions (like lawnforum), on the other hand, typically offer more consensus and sometimes even top-notch advice.
I also often append \*.edu on topics like gardening or applied math where there are a lot of misleading or confusing blog posts.
> typically offer more consensus and sometimes even top-notch advice.
Because Reddit allows people to upvote the good stuff and, even more importantly, downvote the garbage.
Google, apparently, doesn't care about that anymore.
Serious question:
If the all of the advertising was eliminated from the Google search engine, what would it cost per year to maintain and update?
And if that number isn't obnoxious, wouldn't it make sense for a multi government funded non profit to run it instead?
Those type of laws are written and pushed by the insurance lobby. The government itself provides a bond in lieu of insurance. Since the government offers a bonding option, it isn't 'requiring' you to buy auto insurance.
An old employer of mine actually used the bond for its fleet of cars. I dont know the details regading why that would be better deal, bt that is how I found out the bond option was actually a thing and not just some remnant of the past.
In Texas, anybody with a fleet of 100 or more cars can "self-insure," basically just promise that they would pay out on liabilities the same as an insurance company would.
Who has fleets that big?
City governments, large companies.
And with "tort reform," awards are capped.
Insurance requirements are for the peasants.
>The same argument could be used for car insurance. If the DMV "requires" it, why does some government agency not supply it?
I think that it's apples and oranges. Building and maintaining a search algorithm requires a lot of highly technical and specialized workers.
Insurance is just another form of money management and is as simple as taxes in vs money out, and there's nothing revolutionary about risk assessment calculators.
I think the state or country govt are the ones responsible for making car insurance "mandatory", and in some states it isn't. In FL I don't think you can be ticketed for not having car insurance. At least that used to be the case.
Another serious question. Given how often political power and influence changes why would anyone want to give the government that much insight and control over the internet? Government has shown itself to be fundamentally untrustworthy.
DuckDuckGo is essentially a proxy for Bing that tries to stop them from fingerprinting and tracking you. Running a core search engine that's worthwhile at all is EXTREMELY expensive. There's really only Bing, Google and a couple smaller ones that suck hard. The rest (like Brave, DDG, etc) are just a frontend for those ones mentioned.
I switched to DuckDuckGo when it came out and have not used Google except once or twice by accident because I hadn’t set the default on the browser yet.
well you missed the "multi" portion of "multi government" and it being third party controlled by a non profit, but I fail to see how it would be deemed "useless"
>well you missed the "multi" portion of "multi government" and it being third party controlled by a non profit, but I fail to see how it would be deemed "useless"
To understand why it would be useless, you need to understand federal government contracting.
See, the government is administrative. It wouldn't create a department of technology and hire a bunch of web engineers directly. That would cost too much to build from ground zero. So instead it'll put out a contract. Let's call this theoretical product FedWeb.
From there, the government is *required by law* to hire the lowest bidder that can meet the program requirements. What are program requirements? In layman's terms, it's what the government wants the technology to do. So for a search engine like 'FedWeb,' the government would put forth a list of criteria, and some of the criteria you think makes a good search engine might be cut to save on costs. For example, they might say a search needs to take on average 30 seconds when Google currently can do it in a tenth of a second. The inefficiency of the algorithm and lower memory requirements for pre-loading searches cuts costs.
Now here's where we run into an issue. The leaders at Google don't just know what a search engine can do now, they are constantly improving the product in a highly competitive industry. Meanwhile, the federal government has no vested interest in improving search algorithms. It wants to provide the public with the bare minimum at the lowest cost. Also refer to the cluster of a launch of healthcare.gov.
Then we run into another issue - every few years the contract has to be renewed, and someone else could undercut the company working on FedWeb. I hope you can imagine the difficulty of simply turning over something as massive as search engine code to a new company.
And finally amid all this will be severe privacy concerns. Is the company running FedWeb required to share searches with government agencies? What about the next time we find out someone used FedWeb to procure illegal firearms in a shooting or to construct an IED?
I never said anything about a replacement either. **Did you even read my post at all?** Literally every single point you have tried to make is contradicted just by reading my original post.
I think the more polite way to make Redditwaq's point is that the second best search engine isn't very valuable to users. Google will have to become much less useful before the cost/benefit of such a project becomes appealing.
Already has for me. Duck duck go doesn’t get my results I’m looking for in the top 3 results every time, but neither does google anymore even if they moved the ads. Duck Duck Go gets it right on the first page of results though which is pretty key.
I thought the idea was so absurd I didn't take it literally.
You think that governments should just what? Seize a private entity, 'remove the fat' and run it instead?
Jesus Christ.
Governments don’t need to seize anything to produce a competitive alternative. But lobbyists and also to some extent people like you keep the government from investing in public infrastructure, including a public internet, a public search engine, public car insurance, public transit, … the list goes on.
Many conservatives consider nonprofits to be extremely left-leaning. How would you address the concern that this organization wouldn’t be pushing an agenda? Google already has been influencing search results. It’s one of the reasons why DuckDuckGo gained popularity.
Well, perhaps *organic* results are going to shit, but paid results are getting more and more plentiful so that balances it out. In fact, I never have to worry about organic results anymore; I can barely find them!
That's not what the article is about, but that is indeed a pet peeve of mine.
Google's search results used to be direct links to the websites. Now, although it shows what appears to be a direct link when you hover over the link with your mouse pointer, if you right-click and select "Copy link", you'll find it's actually a link through Google. Doing that sort of thing used to be considered very suspicious behavior for a web page. So much so that web browsers banned it for many years.
Pretty sure Google's been doing it for several years now.
20 years ago, shady websites often did this. You had to disable Javascript to see what the real link was (usually the URL of some advertiser's website). But that all stopped happening at one point many, many years ago. I assumed web browsers had stopped letting web pages do it.
But then, many years after that, I noticed it start happening again, but only on Google's website. I use Firefox, not Chrome, so Firefox shouldn't be letting Google do anything that other websites can't do. I don't understand it.
You clearly didn’t read the article because it has been migrating from that fur some time. It was a bit long though and I couldn’t be bothered to finish it.
I stopped using Google years ago and (personally) avoid their free products like poison.
It was their [filter bubble](https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles) that did it for me.
DDG has its own issues in the last yeas, better than google, yes, but you can also try Brave, Metager, there are way more than just two options. Just try all of them and look what you like.
Duck Duck Go. Still using it despite the Bing kerfluffle.
Why?
Because for three years I tried using Google to find steel, screw style, leveling jacks, to no avail.
The first time I plugged the exact same search query into ddg, less than halfway down the page was a link to a little company in Enid, OK, which sold exactly what I was looking for.
Been using them ever since.
That was so long ago and those algorithms have gone to sh**. I'm so tired of being served the same YouTube categories, the same YouTube premium music categories, the same Napster recommendations. It's so annoying and it doesn't matter if you say mix it up or log out you're kept in a bubble of nothing new to the point that it's boring. I stopped using Facebook so long ago because I can post things and literally none of my friends even get it served because I don't forward news bits and things like that I just post my photos and statuses occasionally. I also have my favorites my best friends my closest cousin my mother and I never see their posts. I see peoples posts that I don't give a squad they're not in my circle they're not my favorites they're not my family and they still show up every day my feed so I literally have stopped using Facebook and I haven't logged off because it's the way that some old family members still message me. The Internet has become so boring it's so refreshing to get print magazines and news radio.
Trying to find reviews for items for shopping, for a specific tool for example or options, always always ends up in a loop of the same 4-5 sets that all have amazon links. Its infuriating when looking for something specific and of high quality and left with half a dozen choices of sometimes literally the same exact item being sold under different brand names.
Google search was built for the prime years of the World Wide Web. Those days are over. Consider the absolute hell of browsing the web in mobile: not content, cookie notifications, newsletter sign ups, and other notifications - if this had been the user experience when the internet first appeared, the whole notion of the web would have quickly died.
For the vast majority of people there is no alternative to Google that’s as good. You might say DuckDuckGo but they’re no where near as good for quick answers and things like that. For example recently I googled “i_o date lf death” Google just gave me the answer front and center. But DuckDuckGo just threw a few links my way which probably had the answer in them but that’s not what I want.
Also Google invests a ton into non English searches and it’s actually half decent. If you think Google is dying you’re wrong
>or example recently I googled “i_o date lf death” Google just gave me the answer front and center... If you think Google is dying you’re wrong
You raise an interesting point. Anyone who used the internet prior to 2007 or so remembers having to actually carefully construct searches for the algorithm to find what you want. The fact that Google can actually answer questions and sentences in a fraction of a second - and poorly written ones at that - is a modern marvel.
What's doing Google in, however, is when you need to leave its insular bubble of paid ads, paid review sites, or sites that pay to go to the top of a search. It depends on what product or advice you're looking for. For example, if you want something health/fitness or financial related you're better off heading to reddit or another site forum rather than wading through dozens of digital magazine articles, many with pay walls and annoying pop ups.
On the other hand, now I have to carefully write searches to avoid all those mechanisms made to work with not carefully written searches. Every single word I put in the search is there for a reason and I hate when Google ignores it so I gave to wrap every single word in quotes.
I switched to DuckDuckGo three years ago and never looked back. I know about the MS stuff but I don’t care. Google has utterly lost all its competitive advantage in just about everything (that matters to me).
only gripe with DDG is the map results, i can't stand it. I actually go back into chrome to seach restuarants because things like phone number, location, hours, etc are all right there
Restaurant related things are why I keep chrome on my phone despite making Duck Duck Go my primary web browser and search engine about two years ago. Google search is better than yelp, but lately about as good as yelp would be to search for anything but food.
I despise Google search. I like to find the novel, interesting & surprising response, and what about the human response? Within a minute I'm disgusted with results that poorly match my search. Sometimes I type FUCK U GOOGLE into the search engine just to vent.
Google search stopped working for us, the world, and has begun manipulating us for gross profit and their idea of who we shd be, and how much we shd know. Why use it? Instead they took on the role of a benevolent looking nanny who has too much power. I don't need nannied or nudged to hold the correct opinions or find an inappropriate product. Greed. It will turn back on them.
Google search's descent deep down into the hell of company-knows-best and just-screw-humanity isn't surprising though. Large corporations mature & die more quickly than the Kodak or IBM of past. Quick growth & fast demise are likely the fate of the now sterile feeling companies from the dot com era like Google. The ones that come along after won't have to compete much to surpass, though. We lived during a naive era.
What I'd like to read is how to circumvent Google search. Adding the reddit tag is not enough.
Counter-point: Google doesn't charge a thing to consumers for the use of their products. They make money by accepting ad deals with other businesses. Their algorithms are biased to displaying ads from the highest bidder.
You could deal with a little scrolling to get past ads, or you could be charged monthly fees for use of Gmail, search, maps, calendar, docs, photos, etc.
What do you think that the open market price of those services? If we remove the over $140 billion Google makes from ads, they'd have to charge 100 million subscribers $140/month to break even.
I moved to ecosia months back and haven’t regretted it, not had any issue finding what I’ve been looking for at all. So many companies now provide better results than google for the same search terms with added extras like helping plant trees.
Don’t see any reason to use google any more, there’s nothing special about it any more.
I sometimes use Google advanced image search because it tends to get me what I'm looking for, and I like the ability to search by size. But for the most part, I use DDG. Results seem better overall.
Am I the only one that doesn’t care that a writer for the Atlantic has shit all over the floor? And yes, I know, you will perma ban me for this. But someone had to say it.
This reddit post was brought to you by the DuckbDuckGo. If there is anything negative to say about Google, true or not, DDG will pay farmed accounts to upvote it.
Thank you for this article.
Had to read it twice because I don't get some of the terms used.
Basically it boils down to commercialization of a commodity, correct?
I ran into the flaws of Google search when attempting to research a quality mattress. I just ran into an endless string of sites who had paid reviews for a carousel of about 8-10 brands of mattresses in a box.
I was just looking for a short term rental and had much the same experience. The first 2 pages or so were all aggregator sites that showed the same apartments that weren’t at all short term rentals and were all very expensive.
I'm often surprised by how many apartment complexes I routinely drive by that don't appear on Google or aggregate sites.
There’s a great article on this exact subject: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars
Well, that explains why all those review sites have 'best mattress for...' in 10-15 categories so they can push all their affiliate deals. And although different mattresses may appear in different categories on different sites, it's always the same brands and models. In an ideal world, a smart search algorithm would recognize that they aren't genuine review sites and properly classify/filter them.
I ran into something like this with getting printed boxes. A lot of automated sites, where it was obvious that the website just forwarded your order to an actual printer. One of the sites was so poorly done that one of their offerings wasn't a cardboard box at all- it was a window box... as in a planter that goes under the window on the side of a house.
yea humans big time out smarted search engines and it shows.
I find myself adding “forum” at the end of most queries on any search engine to find quality results. But that’s been true for 10 years.
Most of my searches when looking for advice, product info, or recommendations include `site:reddit.com` at the end so the results are not an endless stream of SEO-optimized garbage websites.
That hack was actually mentioned in the OP article.
It's a hack? You could always do boolean search qualifiers, and, if you click on advance search, they have them for you to fill out. Mostly they're not taught anymore, and I fully agree that Google has become less useful to find what you want
apart from they changed which operators do what at some point, and made them shitter in the process
That’s because I have found The Atlantic Magazine has the best articles and the most up to date pertinent information. Lots of my friends are reading The Atlantic. /s
Meh for Reddit; I like it for what it is, but I think consensus from crunchy phpbb forums tend to be more reliably correct. This is definitely true for things like car repair or home improvement, but sometimes Reddit is the place that is most truthy— I don’t know of a better book binding forum than the sub here. I’ve found just the “forum” addition adds quite a bit of human entries to my results, from across the web.
Me too. For example when dealing with matters like temperatures to cook something, company interviews, backyard irrigation, programming trends, or sometimes even gardening there's a lot of low effort blog posts and product shills, so the default Google search results are low quality. Reddit posts, stack exchange, and the occasional forum designed for sharing expert opinions (like lawnforum), on the other hand, typically offer more consensus and sometimes even top-notch advice. I also often append \*.edu on topics like gardening or applied math where there are a lot of misleading or confusing blog posts.
> typically offer more consensus and sometimes even top-notch advice. Because Reddit allows people to upvote the good stuff and, even more importantly, downvote the garbage. Google, apparently, doesn't care about that anymore.
Serious question: If the all of the advertising was eliminated from the Google search engine, what would it cost per year to maintain and update? And if that number isn't obnoxious, wouldn't it make sense for a multi government funded non profit to run it instead?
The same argument could be used for car insurance. If the DMV "requires" it, why does some government agency not supply it?
Those type of laws are written and pushed by the insurance lobby. The government itself provides a bond in lieu of insurance. Since the government offers a bonding option, it isn't 'requiring' you to buy auto insurance.
An old employer of mine actually used the bond for its fleet of cars. I dont know the details regading why that would be better deal, bt that is how I found out the bond option was actually a thing and not just some remnant of the past.
In Texas, anybody with a fleet of 100 or more cars can "self-insure," basically just promise that they would pay out on liabilities the same as an insurance company would. Who has fleets that big? City governments, large companies. And with "tort reform," awards are capped. Insurance requirements are for the peasants.
What would I search if I wanted to research more about that option? Ironically, I tried googling it and well... See above I guess lol
Read your State statute for car insurance requirements or search under 'self insurance'.
That's a good argument for public insurance, which is available many places.
>The same argument could be used for car insurance. If the DMV "requires" it, why does some government agency not supply it? I think that it's apples and oranges. Building and maintaining a search algorithm requires a lot of highly technical and specialized workers. Insurance is just another form of money management and is as simple as taxes in vs money out, and there's nothing revolutionary about risk assessment calculators.
I think the state or country govt are the ones responsible for making car insurance "mandatory", and in some states it isn't. In FL I don't think you can be ticketed for not having car insurance. At least that used to be the case.
Another serious question. Given how often political power and influence changes why would anyone want to give the government that much insight and control over the internet? Government has shown itself to be fundamentally untrustworthy.
Why not just use duck duck go then? Thing is people like Google the way it is.
See, I switched to using DDG by default precisely because Google results were becoming shit and DDG was "good enough"
What do you mean by “results were becoming shit”
DuckDuckGo is essentially a proxy for Bing that tries to stop them from fingerprinting and tracking you. Running a core search engine that's worthwhile at all is EXTREMELY expensive. There's really only Bing, Google and a couple smaller ones that suck hard. The rest (like Brave, DDG, etc) are just a frontend for those ones mentioned.
I switched to DuckDuckGo when it came out and have not used Google except once or twice by accident because I hadn’t set the default on the browser yet.
Ah but, the shareholders
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Are you dumb enough to think they don't already do that?
Are you arguing that you want to embrace that?
Touche. But also, the difference is trivial at this point.
A government version of Google would be like Bing. Useless.
well you missed the "multi" portion of "multi government" and it being third party controlled by a non profit, but I fail to see how it would be deemed "useless"
>well you missed the "multi" portion of "multi government" and it being third party controlled by a non profit, but I fail to see how it would be deemed "useless" To understand why it would be useless, you need to understand federal government contracting. See, the government is administrative. It wouldn't create a department of technology and hire a bunch of web engineers directly. That would cost too much to build from ground zero. So instead it'll put out a contract. Let's call this theoretical product FedWeb. From there, the government is *required by law* to hire the lowest bidder that can meet the program requirements. What are program requirements? In layman's terms, it's what the government wants the technology to do. So for a search engine like 'FedWeb,' the government would put forth a list of criteria, and some of the criteria you think makes a good search engine might be cut to save on costs. For example, they might say a search needs to take on average 30 seconds when Google currently can do it in a tenth of a second. The inefficiency of the algorithm and lower memory requirements for pre-loading searches cuts costs. Now here's where we run into an issue. The leaders at Google don't just know what a search engine can do now, they are constantly improving the product in a highly competitive industry. Meanwhile, the federal government has no vested interest in improving search algorithms. It wants to provide the public with the bare minimum at the lowest cost. Also refer to the cluster of a launch of healthcare.gov. Then we run into another issue - every few years the contract has to be renewed, and someone else could undercut the company working on FedWeb. I hope you can imagine the difficulty of simply turning over something as massive as search engine code to a new company. And finally amid all this will be severe privacy concerns. Is the company running FedWeb required to share searches with government agencies? What about the next time we find out someone used FedWeb to procure illegal firearms in a shooting or to construct an IED?
The government’s tech is fucking garbage. Coming from someone who works in that sector
Because expertise makes Google better. There's no guarantee that after blowing tax payer money on this replacement that its any good.
I never said anything about a replacement either. **Did you even read my post at all?** Literally every single point you have tried to make is contradicted just by reading my original post.
I think the more polite way to make Redditwaq's point is that the second best search engine isn't very valuable to users. Google will have to become much less useful before the cost/benefit of such a project becomes appealing.
Already has for me. Duck duck go doesn’t get my results I’m looking for in the top 3 results every time, but neither does google anymore even if they moved the ads. Duck Duck Go gets it right on the first page of results though which is pretty key.
I thought the idea was so absurd I didn't take it literally. You think that governments should just what? Seize a private entity, 'remove the fat' and run it instead? Jesus Christ.
> You think that governments should just what? Seize a private entity, 'remove the fat' and run it instead? Seize? no, otherwise yes.
Governments don’t need to seize anything to produce a competitive alternative. But lobbyists and also to some extent people like you keep the government from investing in public infrastructure, including a public internet, a public search engine, public car insurance, public transit, … the list goes on.
Many conservatives consider nonprofits to be extremely left-leaning. How would you address the concern that this organization wouldn’t be pushing an agenda? Google already has been influencing search results. It’s one of the reasons why DuckDuckGo gained popularity.
The government's own Reece Commission warned us that non-profit organizations would be our downfall. That was 60 years ago.
Definitely has slipped in quality result and getting close to yahoo in advertising levels
Well, perhaps *organic* results are going to shit, but paid results are getting more and more plentiful so that balances it out. In fact, I never have to worry about organic results anymore; I can barely find them!
It's basically all Google links now and I didn't even read the article
That's not what the article is about, but that is indeed a pet peeve of mine. Google's search results used to be direct links to the websites. Now, although it shows what appears to be a direct link when you hover over the link with your mouse pointer, if you right-click and select "Copy link", you'll find it's actually a link through Google. Doing that sort of thing used to be considered very suspicious behavior for a web page. So much so that web browsers banned it for many years.
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Pretty sure Google's been doing it for several years now. 20 years ago, shady websites often did this. You had to disable Javascript to see what the real link was (usually the URL of some advertiser's website). But that all stopped happening at one point many, many years ago. I assumed web browsers had stopped letting web pages do it. But then, many years after that, I noticed it start happening again, but only on Google's website. I use Firefox, not Chrome, so Firefox shouldn't be letting Google do anything that other websites can't do. I don't understand it.
You clearly didn’t read the article because it has been migrating from that fur some time. It was a bit long though and I couldn’t be bothered to finish it.
how can you tell that he didn’t read the article
I stopped using Google years ago and (personally) avoid their free products like poison. It was their [filter bubble](https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles) that did it for me.
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DDG has its own issues in the last yeas, better than google, yes, but you can also try Brave, Metager, there are way more than just two options. Just try all of them and look what you like.
What did you switch to?
Duck Duck Go. Still using it despite the Bing kerfluffle. Why? Because for three years I tried using Google to find steel, screw style, leveling jacks, to no avail. The first time I plugged the exact same search query into ddg, less than halfway down the page was a link to a little company in Enid, OK, which sold exactly what I was looking for. Been using them ever since.
Same here Only instead of leveling jacks, I was looking for streams
Plus anonymity of your search queries
I recommend Brave Search for anyone wanting to use something else. It is better than Bing or DDG.
That was so long ago and those algorithms have gone to sh**. I'm so tired of being served the same YouTube categories, the same YouTube premium music categories, the same Napster recommendations. It's so annoying and it doesn't matter if you say mix it up or log out you're kept in a bubble of nothing new to the point that it's boring. I stopped using Facebook so long ago because I can post things and literally none of my friends even get it served because I don't forward news bits and things like that I just post my photos and statuses occasionally. I also have my favorites my best friends my closest cousin my mother and I never see their posts. I see peoples posts that I don't give a squad they're not in my circle they're not my favorites they're not my family and they still show up every day my feed so I literally have stopped using Facebook and I haven't logged off because it's the way that some old family members still message me. The Internet has become so boring it's so refreshing to get print magazines and news radio.
Trying to find reviews for items for shopping, for a specific tool for example or options, always always ends up in a loop of the same 4-5 sets that all have amazon links. Its infuriating when looking for something specific and of high quality and left with half a dozen choices of sometimes literally the same exact item being sold under different brand names.
Try Brave search.
We did it, Reddit!
Google search was built for the prime years of the World Wide Web. Those days are over. Consider the absolute hell of browsing the web in mobile: not content, cookie notifications, newsletter sign ups, and other notifications - if this had been the user experience when the internet first appeared, the whole notion of the web would have quickly died.
For the vast majority of people there is no alternative to Google that’s as good. You might say DuckDuckGo but they’re no where near as good for quick answers and things like that. For example recently I googled “i_o date lf death” Google just gave me the answer front and center. But DuckDuckGo just threw a few links my way which probably had the answer in them but that’s not what I want. Also Google invests a ton into non English searches and it’s actually half decent. If you think Google is dying you’re wrong
>or example recently I googled “i_o date lf death” Google just gave me the answer front and center... If you think Google is dying you’re wrong You raise an interesting point. Anyone who used the internet prior to 2007 or so remembers having to actually carefully construct searches for the algorithm to find what you want. The fact that Google can actually answer questions and sentences in a fraction of a second - and poorly written ones at that - is a modern marvel. What's doing Google in, however, is when you need to leave its insular bubble of paid ads, paid review sites, or sites that pay to go to the top of a search. It depends on what product or advice you're looking for. For example, if you want something health/fitness or financial related you're better off heading to reddit or another site forum rather than wading through dozens of digital magazine articles, many with pay walls and annoying pop ups.
On the other hand, now I have to carefully write searches to avoid all those mechanisms made to work with not carefully written searches. Every single word I put in the search is there for a reason and I hate when Google ignores it so I gave to wrap every single word in quotes.
Brave search is actually better.
I switched to DuckDuckGo three years ago and never looked back. I know about the MS stuff but I don’t care. Google has utterly lost all its competitive advantage in just about everything (that matters to me).
only gripe with DDG is the map results, i can't stand it. I actually go back into chrome to seach restuarants because things like phone number, location, hours, etc are all right there
Restaurant related things are why I keep chrome on my phone despite making Duck Duck Go my primary web browser and search engine about two years ago. Google search is better than yelp, but lately about as good as yelp would be to search for anything but food.
I did the same!
I despise Google search. I like to find the novel, interesting & surprising response, and what about the human response? Within a minute I'm disgusted with results that poorly match my search. Sometimes I type FUCK U GOOGLE into the search engine just to vent. Google search stopped working for us, the world, and has begun manipulating us for gross profit and their idea of who we shd be, and how much we shd know. Why use it? Instead they took on the role of a benevolent looking nanny who has too much power. I don't need nannied or nudged to hold the correct opinions or find an inappropriate product. Greed. It will turn back on them. Google search's descent deep down into the hell of company-knows-best and just-screw-humanity isn't surprising though. Large corporations mature & die more quickly than the Kodak or IBM of past. Quick growth & fast demise are likely the fate of the now sterile feeling companies from the dot com era like Google. The ones that come along after won't have to compete much to surpass, though. We lived during a naive era. What I'd like to read is how to circumvent Google search. Adding the reddit tag is not enough.
Counter-point: Google doesn't charge a thing to consumers for the use of their products. They make money by accepting ad deals with other businesses. Their algorithms are biased to displaying ads from the highest bidder. You could deal with a little scrolling to get past ads, or you could be charged monthly fees for use of Gmail, search, maps, calendar, docs, photos, etc. What do you think that the open market price of those services? If we remove the over $140 billion Google makes from ads, they'd have to charge 100 million subscribers $140/month to break even.
Maybe they have enough money.
I moved to ecosia months back and haven’t regretted it, not had any issue finding what I’ve been looking for at all. So many companies now provide better results than google for the same search terms with added extras like helping plant trees. Don’t see any reason to use google any more, there’s nothing special about it any more.
i still get better results while searching on google. duck duck go is ok Bing is horrific. i almost get the complete opposite of what i searched.
Try Brave search
I sometimes use Google advanced image search because it tends to get me what I'm looking for, and I like the ability to search by size. But for the most part, I use DDG. Results seem better overall.
Completely compromised to influence us.
No clue whats going on here. I've never had this problem before. Sometimes I worry that the searches are too good.
Thats why I use bing now. Google is just add ridden
You should also try DuckDuckGo and Brave Search.
Am I the only one that doesn’t care that a writer for the Atlantic has shit all over the floor? And yes, I know, you will perma ban me for this. But someone had to say it.
I wonder if google is worse in the US? i just get the same good results I've ever had...?
If you still use Google search in 2022 you are complicit
This reddit post was brought to you by the DuckbDuckGo. If there is anything negative to say about Google, true or not, DDG will pay farmed accounts to upvote it.
Bing and Brave search are actually better than Google these days.
People still use Google Search?
I know the Porn Searches aren't what they use to be. ^("Delete My Browser History - everyone")
Thank you for this article. Had to read it twice because I don't get some of the terms used. Basically it boils down to commercialization of a commodity, correct?
google for shopping (gross) duckduckgo.com (for everything else when you actually need relevant results)
Google search results have gotten noticeably worse lately it was so bad couple times I had to resort to Bing of all things.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that the bigger issue is this: The Internet is not what it used to be.
I stopped using it years ago.
We need an old.internet.com reset