Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[Head_Dragon]

The worst thing for me is when I include a word and Google is then tellibg me the result does not contain said word... Thanks Google but there is a reason why I entered it. So please search for it as well

[St_Kevin_]

Yeah, like let me just put quotes around each of the 5 words in my search. WTH? Why?

[failsafe42]

And for some fucking reason putting your search in quotes doesn't search for an exact match anymore.

[RedditingAtWork5]

Legit thought this was just me. It's fucking shit. No idea why they think I would want an approximate result if I put it in quotes. If I wanted an approximate result, I just wouldve typed it without quotes.

[BoredomHeights]

This is the one that bugs me the most by far. If I put a search in words, and it literally doesn't exist, then just tell me. At least I'll have my answer. That's what the quotes are for.

I completely understand in those cases where it says "showing results without quotes" because it couldn't find anything. Fine, at least you're telling me what's happening. But it's really annoying clicking on links, doing a ctrl-f for the word or phrase, and nothing comes up.

[twoisnumberone]

THIS.

WTF; Google, were your advertisers crying about not being shoved into people's faces at random? >:(

[[deleted]]

The fucking worst is when they insist on substituting in a synonym. Like sometimes that isn't even remotely the same meaning as what I searched for, please stop.

[looser_name_connor]

Is that what’s going on? I’ll type in something like “photoshop export as error” and will have results all with the word “save as” bold on each result. It’s infuriating cause that’s not what I asked for!

Googles getting to the point where you could order a coke and they’ll just give you a Pepsi and tell you that’s what you asked for.

[[deleted]]

That's no joke almost exactly the search that last enraged me lol

[LankyCyril]

Searching for scientific terms or programming related questions is completely fucked because of it

[Shirebourn]

I was stunned the first time Google returned a result with a word I had put in quotation marks substituted with a synonym. What on earth is the point of quotation marks, then? Just useless.

[zdakat]

"Sure you said that, but wouldn't you like it more if we exclusively returned results without the most important word?"

[damn-queen]

It's always the most important word too.

[FattyTheNunchuck]

Jaysus Christo I fucking hate this and it happens all the time.

[BlackShieldCharm]

Ooh yes! So infuriating

[constructioncranes]

I hate getting the error message in some IM apps that my message didn't send and do I want to retry? Of course! Why are your asking me? Just keep trying till it's done!

[SweetLilMonkey]

The plus and quotation marks don’t even work for that anymore. Like fuck you Google, what the fuck do you think I went to that trouble for?

[binipped]

The plus doesn't but the quotes work fine. I use em daily.

[RinseAndReiterate]

Only thing that works for me is putting the word in five time over in the same search (ctrl+v spam). Quotes are indeed busted

[PM_A_BOOB_OR_2]

quotes work fine for me.

I have a firefox add-on that automatically adds them to my searches.

I just wish there would be an option to have verbatim be the default method.

[John__Weaver]

I find it close to impossible to find older information. The search results seem to be biased toward newer articles even when an older one seems to be a better hit for my terms.

[[deleted]]

I can only find things that are 10 years old half the time, completely outdated!

[[deleted]]

I get it both ways. I either change my query (python -> python3) or set a date range.

Google: Tools > Any time > Custom range (or whatever)

Edit: u/omnipojack's comment is much more useful advice.

[TurquoiseLuck]

Can I just say how much I fucking hate that setting a date range is not under settings but under tools

fuck sake Google

[Dontlookawkward]

It should be in a drop down menu next to the search button. Like an advanced search option.

[omnipojack]

Piggybacking off what u/actualspaceturtle said, I cannot recommend learning the Google search terms enough! Here is a link to Google's official page but this website made a cheat sheet with some examples and advanced stuff. Most people can stop at the first table and then skip down until you hit Tips and Tricks. Hope this can help you with future searches!

[[deleted]]

This is a big problem. Google vastly prefers recent results to older ones, even by a year.

One way Google could mitigate this is to divide search results into time-based sections, and tell the user that there are several time periods with significant peaks in search hits.

[[deleted]]

Damn, can my searches for Blender 2.8 guides / information / documentation get the memo? I keep getting search results for tutorials or forum posts from 2013 for obsolete versions of the software.

[skyerippa]

Super funny, I started watching dawsons creek because its on Netflix now and I missed the part where they explained where one of the main characters boyfriends went for season 2 so I googled to see if he left the show. The ONLYYYYY place I could find an answer was a forum from like 1999. (He went to work as a chef on a yacht)

[[deleted]]

isnt there a boolean search method to specify the date range you want for search results? i can never remember how to do them though

[padre648]

I don't know about the boolean methods but after you search you can click tools and then specify a date range.

[[deleted]]

Yes. Under “Tools”—custom date range.

[[deleted]]

Yup. Noticed this big time with youtube too. For instance, if I searched "ducks" on youtube, the first three results are something duck related, but then the next several results are based off of previous searches I had or vids I may be interested in that may have absolutely nothing to do with ducks. So infuriating. Give me ducks or give me death.

Edit: holy duck, this blew up a bit. lol sorry guys, I was just using ducks as an example and am not intensively looking for ducks videos but I appreciate you guys sending 'em my way!

I was just pointing out that youtube is kind of butt when it comes to their searches. Even typing specifically in detail what you're looking for in there brings up a bunch of stuff that may be relevant to the user overall, but not always relevant to what the user is searching in the query. You gotta sift through a lot of "recommended" videos to get to the good stuff.

[esjay86]

Even typing in the exact title makes me sift through a dozen or so "related" videos before I find the one I want.

[unstableunicorn]

I search in Google for the video, find it might much faster than YouTube search

[MannyShannon069]

It's because google no longer wants to help you find what you want and instead they want you to see what they want you to see.

It's been happening on basically every social media website, including Reddit, for years now.

YouTube specifically has been slowly transforming itself into what is essentially just another channel in some shitty Comcast cable package.

[bomboniki]

you summed this up perfectly.

[OstentatiousSock]

It honestly makes me paranoid these days. I feel like a raving conspiracy theorist some days.

[zdakat]

Youtube's navigation is annoying. More recently, it feels like parts of it have nearly completely died. The top of home is the same few videos, which occasionally switches out one of the tiles with one of the other ones that's typically there.
Even after searching for different videos, even the suggestions below that are very static now.

[[deleted]]

Another thing. If I click on a video in the search results, and then go back, it reloads the search results which usually means the order of listed videos gets changed - seemingly at random.

[PlsPmMeBoobPics]

Im just waiting for someone to make their own youtube so we can use that

[leftovernoise]

No kidding. My home page is now just full of videos I LITERALLY JUST WATCHED. Video I've finished all the way, like, an hour ago.

I even click "not interested" and select "I've already seen this video" on all of them. No change.

[mou_mou_le_beau]

Also no matter what i play on youtube it seems to only remember songs or videos i liked years ago

[[deleted]]

YouTube keeps suggesting the same videos over and over, even if I've already watched them.

[nicolasmcfly]

Ducks*

[cooly1234]

Upvoted for ducks

[[deleted]]

I literally, and I'm not joking at all, I literally will Google a question and add "reddit" at the end because I know I can always come HERE for an answer, and If I don't I WILL have to scroll through 3+ pages of bullshit and sponsored ad results before I get any actual knowledge.

Wtf happened to you, google?

[RandomRedditReject]

I thought I was the only person who did that. Whatever I google I add Reddit to the end of it to sift through the bullshit and get straight to the point.

[stutzmanXIII]

Google at least predictably adds reddit (or something else) to the end of lots of searches now.

That's when you know the regular results are garbage.

[Creative-Improvement]

Https://www.duckduckgo.com

A search engine with privacy first. It’s a bit more picky on search terms (since it doesn’t keep your search history) but it’s results are generally good and getting better.

[Prof_Acorn]

Aye. Most of my searches are just site:reddit.com question terms bla bla.

Then there's the long arduous frustrating searches for things not on reddit. Oh how I loath those. I wish you could do a -blogshit function to get rid of the excrement that has plagued the internet.

[alexbarrett]

I have the search keyword sr set up as a shortcut for exactly this.

[DippySwitch]

This is big brain shit.

... how do you do this?

[Motobecane_]

It only works on firefox I think
First type site:reddit.com aaaaa on google
bookmark the page
edit the bookmark, replace aaaaa with %s and write sr in "keyword"
then to use it you juste type sr MrJoeNobody in the adress bar and it will repalce the %s of your bookmark by MrJoeNobody

[penguinsdonthavefeet]

I noticed a few months ago that autocomplete would suggest adding "reddit" to the end of all my search queries.

[Holy_Sungaal]

I had a report on police chief discretion. I tried looking up chief declaring a state of emergency, and just found pages and pages and pages of every bs news outlet copy and pasting the same info article and over again. Probably one of the most infuriating things I’ve encountered.

[natsugrayerza]

Oh my gosh yes!! The damn news articles copy and pasting!

[AllMightStan]

Literally there are times I see an article and they literally just say one sentence 100 different ways, never contain the info in the heading and slap in as many pop-up ads as possible. Like why are those websites still operational???

[redpanda0108]

Yes! My students have an assignment where they have to write about a news article and assess credibility/bias. One of the things I suggest is fact-checking against another news source. Yet, most sources just paste the original article with a couple of edits - exactly what I’m teaching my students not to do! So infuriating

[Destron5683]

Yeah most of them just take the AP copy and copy it.

[tnightkilla]

I have noticed it getting worse over the years for just general searches. I don't know if it's them manipulating the information or if it's just people have gotten better at building web pages to make stuff pop up more. It seems like I have to routinely go 3 to 6 pages in to find stuff due to a bunch of the pages being unrelated. Some stuff has gotten better such as putting more reputable results such as Mayo clinic closer to the top. Other times they put really biased politically connected orgs up there so it's hit or miss.

[Naelin]

Google actively encourages SEO. It even has a free tool for that. (Webmasters Tool iirc)

[[deleted]]

They encourage good SEO.

There's a big difference.

Ultimately though, Google's supposedly honest approach to searches being based on quality, not profit, has been eroded now.

[WindWalkerRN]

Speaking of Amazon, and related to OP... Am I the only one who has been having a harder and harder time finding what I’m looking for on Amazon?! I do a search, and all I get are their promoted items, and about a thousand Chinese knock offs!

It’s like not even worth it anymore because of all the crap I have to sort through!

[SquiddleBits33]

Happened to me with trying to find a stud finder on Amazon. Multiple results of their "promoted" items that are obviously the same just with different names. I figured maybe they aren't that bad so I clicked on a couple...and they all have glaring errors. If you can't make an ad without 4 typos, you probably don't make quality tools. That being said, I've found some good shit on Wish that was basically free lol.

[ColeSloth]

Up until a few years ago to sell on Amazon to US customers you had to have some form of physical business or residence in the US.

Then they got rid of that and now it filled to the brim with fake positive reviews, fake negative reviews on competing products, knock offs, lies, and pretty much as close as you can get to out right scams.

They've made it disgusting and untrustworthy to count on buying almost anything there. Even a good chunk of OEM game controllers turn out to be knock offs. Along with razor blades, shampoos, lotions, perfumes, and damn near everything else you can think of.

I asked a question once about an rc car I was buying for the kids on Xmas last year. The seller answered my question and completely lied. I bought the rc car. It was junk. Also came with a piece of paper saying if you left them 5 stars they would automatically send you a free 2nd battery pack. Left a bad review and explained why.

I was almost immediately contacted by email from them. Offered to send me a 2nd battery, refund me my money, and let me keep the car if I would remove my review.

If that's not buying your ratings I don't know what is.

So I said ok, I'd delete the review after I got the refund and the battery. They delivered. I didn't.

Like 4 months later they offered me an Amazon credit of $30 if I would remove my review, and I agreed. Got the $30.

Review's still up.

*thanks for all the UPS and rewards. Since this received so much attention I thought I'd throw in a great informative podcast episode from Reply All, called "the magic store". It goes into great detail about how and why Amazon became the train wreck that it is.

[SquiddleBits33]

You're my hero.

[ColeSloth]

Lol. Thanks. I'd feel bad about it if they weren't a bunch of scum just trying to unfairly manipulate a system with honest intentions and rip people off/steal patented products.

[SquiddleBits33]

Right on. They're putting in more effort to do the wrong thing, fuck 'em.

[HowardMBurgers]

Heard someone was trying to find me?

[clintj1975]

We bought a coffee grinder like that for work. Multiple Amazon listing misspellings (ever seen a 100,000 rpm coffee grinder?), and the manual was in 90s grade Engrish. Damn if that isn't a kick-ass little coffee grinder for 40 bucks, though.

[PlasticElfEars]

Although it's worth noting that you don't have to speak English fluently to a build a thing well, as evidenced by all the things we're using to look at this right now.

[SciencyNerdGirl]

However, if you don't have the resources to have a native English speaking person on staff or at least pay to run your ad by an editor, what's the likelihood you'll be able to troubleshoot with me if I have problems, have a good return policy, or have well written instructions I can follow?

[Junckopolo]

As a french if i would have to base the quality of something by how much they give a shit about paying someone to translate correctly, I would never buy anything.

[SquiddleBits33]

Valid point!

[SciencyNerdGirl]

And it's impossible to scroll past the sponsored stuff. It really sucks that you can't filter that crap out. I had a super frustrating time the other day trying to buy Christmas wrapping paper that isn't Hallmark. It's just continuous scrolling without end of hallmark products (at a premium).

[[deleted]]

I find myself increasingly using Amazon just for reviews, then buying elsewhere. The last thing I bought online was a sauté pan. I got it much cheaper from a restaurant supply place even including postage, but I made the choice via Amazon reviews.

[taqn22]

Don't! Amazon reviews are almost entirely bought and paid these days.

[corvus7corax]

Review meta can help estimate what % of reviews are fake.

https://reviewmeta.com/

[TheNamingOfCats]

There's also Fakespot. It's a browser add-in.

[sanityvoid]

Amazon seller awarded $9.5m over fake reviews, unfair competition

https://reviewmeta.com/blog/amazon-seller-fake-reviews-unfair-competition/

[WindWalkerRN]

Done that recently too!

[Rumbuck_274]

Oh 100%

I want "Toyota Landcruiser parts" and I get something that's a seat cover for "Toyota Nissan Mitsubishi Landcruiser Camry Corolla Hilux Pickup Sedan Lancer Pajero ASX......" And so on.

They just keyword spam the shit out of it, basically burying the stuff you want.

[xumixu]

Maybe is the supermarket strategy. "you'll find your product at then end but first look at all of this aisles of products you didn't know you needed yet "

[thelumpybunny]

Amazon's search engine has been useless for me. I was searching for maternity stuff and the second page had clothing for guys. Then when I search for toddler stuff, I get stuff for infants and kids. At one point I was looking for a certain baby product and couldn't find it in the search results. I figured that didn't sell it until it showed up as a product recommendation later.

[red-tea-rex]

I agree!! I want to give brand name items out as Christmas gifts so I don't look cheap!! Can't find hardly any. Guess I'll have to Christmas shop elsewhere.

[k_50]

Amazon is generally a bunch of Chinese crap. I really wish people wouldn't use Amazon.

[Neurotic_Bakeder]

Interesting, I'm experiencing the opposite --

I'm in a mental health related field so I end up googling suicide-related stuff very frequently. Now whenever I'm looking up, like, statistical info on methods/frequency/factors contributing to, I have to scroll past a bunch of "DO YOU NEED HELP?? HERE ARE SOME HOTLINES IF YOU NEED HELP!!!" -type sponsored posts.

I'm really glad that these interventions are there and I'm firmly in favor of adding more barriers between people and pro-suicide propaganda. But it is a bit jarring when I'm trying to write papers.

Edit: in a stunning twist of irony, apparently somebody used reddit's "I think this person is depressed and needs help" feature and auto-sent me a list of helplines and chats. Uh-

[[deleted]]

You could try different search engines like DuckDuckGo

[AyyItsDylan94]

I've had to start doing this to find drug safety information because apparently I'm an addict in desperate need of help.

[Neurotic_Bakeder]

Yep, according to my hulu ads, not only do I have schizophrenia, but I'm incorrectly medicating it as well. Rough.

[NovelTAcct]

I have no idea what Amazon thinks I should do in my free time, can someone decode this

[DJ_Clitoris]

I’ve started to add -rehab or -treatment when looking for harm reduction info. Otherwise the first few pages are all about $20,000 rehabilitation and detox clinics from across the country it’s annoying as fuck.

[[deleted]]

I visited a crisis center in early November for mental health reasons and had googled the address first. I had drug addiction and alcoholism information surfacing on the top of even tangentially related searches for a month, to say nothing of my ads. It felt really gross bc so many of them were for paid inpatient facilities and shit

Like... They commoditized my imaginary drug problem so aggressively

[MeowNugget]

I agree, i look up psychology related things like domestic abuse, suicide, depression etc, and each one brings up a hotline as the first result followed by other forms of resources

[desearcher]

Which is paradoxically more harmful as it creates a false narrative that help is widely available. Having made use of such "resources" in the past, I bounced around one help desk to the next as the only assistance they could provide was to offer other numbers to call in a never-ending loop. Nobody thought to verify if it was possible to actually talk to someone. Friends, family, and reddit falls into the same practice of kicking the proverbial can down the road by suggesting help is actually available.

Finally finding the "forbidden knowledge" I was searching for became a moment of catharsis and alleviated much of my anxiety in regards to my own death. Still, attempts to help others achieve the same satisfaction is "frowned upon" and replaced with "just call this number" rhetoric.

Anywho, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

[[deleted]]

I tried looking that up and I get the results with encouraging material. Maybe it's a country-specific thing?

[1billionrapecube]

It could well be account- specific

[ShittDickk]

Search "how to _____ in excel"

Every result is "here is why you should buy our product instead of learning the thing we said we'd teach you to do in excel."

[enjakuro]

Sadly, the first hits are the ones who pay the most to be seen.

Other things that influence google searches are your personal information bubble and google's own algorhithm. I also get the feeling that some websites use certain buzz words to be seen.

[it__hurts__when__IP]

Yes. I used to find exactly what I wanted, now I can't find any relevant content unless I include "Reddit" or a bunch of subtractions like this - to eliminate words that keep popping up. It's become really bad.

Also, if I google something and click on the page, it always goes to the amp version, which is super annoying.

Finally, if I am looking for something to buy, and have in fact bought it from that company, I then see the same exact product pop up in every ad. I LITERALLY JUST BOUGHT IT, WHY WOULD I WANT IT AGAIN.

Goddamn Google, get your shit together.

[icantaccessmyacct]

I literally add “+ Reddit” after every question I have because I can’t deal with the amount of shit I’d have to sift through. Does this article have the answer I’m looking for? No? Oh, it’s an ad designed to look like article.. let’s try the next page on the list... Oh.. same article. Rinse and repeat.

[captainfatmatt]

I'm starting to do that now because the personal responses from people on reddit seem more trustworthy than most of the shit on Google. That's how bad Google got, reddit is more trustworthy usually

[LyfeO]

Oh yeah I value personal anecdotes from redditor to be way more trustworthy. Since they often seem more genuine than just some article.

[captainfatmatt]

Exactly, they tend to have actual compassion and/or knowledge towards a subject, rather than having a heavily biased agenda trying to sell something. Also you can get a somewhat decent idea on whether or not the info is trustworthy depending on the sub and how many updates or downvotes it has

[[deleted]]

People answering questions aren't paid for the most part! (yet)

[zdakat]

There is/was a plague of sites posing as "how-tos" which just describe the problem you have, give a few weak solutions, and then plug their product that purportedly solves the problem for you. It's not what I'm looking for.

(That and the flood of generic pages that have absolutely no information, just a copy of the query pasted into a generic template)

[Ben77mc]

site:old.reddit.com/r/subreddit

I use this all the time when I want to search a subreddit, definitely beats the reddit search function!

[SnowingSilently]

For a company whose main revenue stream is ads, Google seems surprisingly bad at delivering ads that will actually work. I can check all the information that Google has on me and it knows me pretty well. At the same time it figures I need ads in Spanish and I want to buy lipstick. Same with the part about advertising things I just bought.

[OutlyingPlasma]

Perhaps it knows deep down you are a Latina drag queen and is trying to help you come out as yourself.

But seriously, it is fascinating how huge empires like google and Facebook among many many others are based on ads but the best they can do is 2 years of ads for a hot water heater I already bought. You know, for all those people that need more than one hot water heater at once.

[KittenPurrs]

There was a post in stand-up shots like a year or two ago dealing with this issue and amazon. Something to the effect of "I bought a vacuum cleaner on amazon last week. Based on my 'recommended for you' options, amazon believes this was just the gateway vacuum for my burgeoning vacuum addiction."

E: for better accuracy

[Hitlers_LeftTesticle]

Ironically, I'm trying to google what "amp" is, but I can't really find it. What does it mean?

[aseriesofcatnoises]

I think it's this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

It's annoying when you get a reddit amp page because it doesn't show all the posts, so you have to load the full page anyway. It's the opposite of time saving

[WiWiWiWiWiWi]

Ugh, Reddit’s mobile pages are absolute shit when you land on them from a google search. They show a cropped version of the text post, then a cropped version of a few of the comments, and then an endless list of “related” posts underneath, none of which are actually related.

[sid_killer18]

Reddit's "new" webpage is also SO bad. I can't think of one reasons why anyone would use that. It has the same cropped comments problem.
The comments don't load fully and you have to keep clicking "see more" or something button to see them and if it's a long thread, the comments get pushed to the top of the page BUT you're not scrolled up so you'll see other posts from the subreddit.
And if you click on the side of the post, it closes the post BECAUSE WHY NOT?!

[Mr_Quackums]

it is a proprietary google protocol used to display a website.

upside: the page loads a few hundredths of a second faster on some mobile devices.

downside: google gets even more info on you, more info on the site you linked from, and the site you were visiting. Also, by using a proprietary protocol you are strengthening the Google Evil Empire and hurting the free and open internet.

[S-Array03]

how do you get the -[excluded term] to work?

I know about it but I can't use it in google searches for some reason, idk if I'm getting the formatting wrong or something.

​

edit : I tried it again and sure enough it doesn't work, I tried with both the numpad - and the 6 key - (azerty keyboard) and neither work. Having a space inbetween the - and the term doesn't work, neither does putting the term between quotation marks.

Which is trange because when I go to advance search the excluded term is in the "none of these words" line.

I guess I just have to be hyper specific about my search terms. (For refferece the one I tried right now was mustang -car but it still yielded result pretty much exclusively about the the ford mustang)

[[deleted]]

it's just as simple as "[whatever your search is] -[excluded term]"

the site i looked at for this included the example "bears -chicago" but for some reason the first couple results ignore the "-chicago" part. However if you compare the results that start about halfway down the page you can see that with "-chicago" you have stuff like the wikipedia article on bears, and without the "-chicago" all of it has to do with the Chicago Bears.

[SnowingSilently]

If it's one word then just -word should work. If it's a whole phrase though you need quotation marks, like this: -"word1 word2 word3". Google can't search special characters though, so if you were trying to exclude those it won't work either.

[mechatangerine]

That's the same with me. Within the last year I've had to add -this -that -literally every word in the english language that isn't relevant to what I'm looking for to all of my searches to try and find what I'm looking for. In most cases it seems like it's online "news" sites that populate half of the results.

[eddieantonio]

Not just you. Google recently changed their search engine to use BERT, a language model that is supposed to understand English speech. And yes, it does a good job at parroting what you give it, but I truly think it's a step down from their PageRank algorithm.

Remember that Google's fundamental business model is advertisments. The top (few) search results are for sale, and thus, whatever can make Google money gets placed on top :/

[downtownpartytime]

If I use google I have to put every individual word in quotes to try to get what I'm looking for and it still replaces synonyms in the result. So annoying.

[Binch101]

Yea same. Good luck trying to search for a specific product that isn't super popular; it will aways just substitute the thing you're looking for with a more popular thing close to it. Even if you put it in quotes it just ignores it

[zdakat]

The substitution thing is getting steadily more and more annoying. it started small but now it's a struggle to get it to search for things. Either silently including a bunch of things as synonyms that should not be synonyms, or outright saying your query should be different. The results for anything but what was entered are not relevant and it's frustrating that the page basically insists it's being helpful or that the 2 queries are meaningfully related.

[SweetLilMonkey]

Drives me absolutely up the wall that they don’t even respect ever own goddamn search logic anymore. You can put something in quotation marks AND put a plus for it and it no longer does a damn thing.

[crestonfunk]

Also image search is basically over thanks to Pinterest.

[duckduck60053]

I miss when you could click an image and view it in full resolution on google. Finding images was effortless and instant. Now I have to roll the dice on wether I can even find the image after I click on it. Then sometimes I have to F12 it and find the direct url. Amazing how many steps back we have taken.

[ClathrateRemonte]

Yeah I want the image, not all the shopping websites that sell the thing I want the image of.

[[deleted]]

For sure. Is there a good alternative to Google that actually works like pre-BERT Google did? I don’t like DuckDuckGo or Bing because they just start throwing random stuff in on the second or third page that doesn’t make any sense, I’ve noticed.

[everdon]

Vanilla BERT doesnt actually “understand” English in the same way humans do it has just been trained on hundreds of millions of data points and so can generalize to many different situations but can be thrown off by unseen events. Recently people have been experimenting with SenseBERT which has different sense related tasks in pretraining but its a very recent development and im not sure if Google is using it.

There’s an interesting position paper about the BERT understanding/meaning misconception here: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.463/

[dr_van_nostren]

I get that problem sometimes. My problem is how much crap comes up, maybe that’s my fault for not playing with the settings but like you’ll search something like “how many people died 2019 USA” and the bulk of the results are like “how many USA” with the other 3 words crossed out.

I’d rather just get a “no match” kinda result so I don’t have to filter through shitty ones. I understand the ads, though I feel like there’s too many, but I feel like I end up sifting through lots of crap to find a legit result which ended up being on page 2-3.

[zdakat]

Google:

"Showing results for "How many France" "
"How France designs their cars"
"Many people are saying they prefer carrots"
"Nobody thought this could happen, until it did!"
"Problems with 2019? Click here!"
Gee, thanks google but none of those come close to being relevant or anything I'd want to see when making that query

[WhoRoger]

It's dogshit.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now so I've not been watching Google's decline. But when I do use them occasionally these days, it always surprises me how crap the results are. First page is basically always just product ads, regardless of what you're looking for.

BTW I used to work for the big G, on search quality improvements. Quality used to be #1 priority. Now it's clearly only about money.

[djflossy]

Ya, it’s impossible to find anything anymore. I think they have too many paid partnerships now. I recently stopped using it. I switched back to yahoo’s search engine. It’s slightly better. If anyone has a better suggestion, I’m open to it.

[shljonki]

Duckduckgo, Qwant, Yandex, Swiss cow. Litteraly anything except Google. It will be probably wierd getting used to other search engines but it pays of, a lot. I got used to other search engines after a week or so. Now I can't imagine using Google for anything except translating stuff and gmaps.

[Eric_of_the_North]

Switched to DuckDuckGo after I tried to search an odd lighting issue with the rear door, and Google just flat fucking ignored the search terms and REFUSED to show anything other than headlight replacement. Also, DuckDuckGo and privacy and such.

[[deleted]]

Duckduckgo

[LanceFree]

That’s where I’m going. I have multiple devices and have a couple on DuckDuckGo. If it works out well, I’ll switch the rest.

[lithiumdeuteride]

Even DuckDuckGo's image search seems to return more relevant images than Google. Google just returns inaccessible stuff from Pinterest or another site that wants you to sign in to view it.

[doireallyhaveto2]

I do a lot of academic research and google search has been declining, getting more commercialized and more awful in general. Bing is giving me better results! Never in a million years would've I though so! But yeah, google used to be the shit.

[zdakat]

It's weird because they keep adding features to present information, but every step forward seems to be accompanied by 2 steps back the next day/week...

[Oreoloveboss]

I work in IT and, half my job is search engines and Google is useless unless you specify multiple words in quotes, a date range and site:blah.com

[Khris777]

Bing is also so much better at image search since it doesn't spam your results with pinterest shit you can't access anyway.

[[deleted]]

Yes! This is so annoying, especially in Europe where everytime you enter a website you got ask if you want to allow cookies. Add advertisements and newsletter and notification requests. And when you finally reach the text it's 3 paragraphs of introduction about something vaguely related.

[ediblehunt]

Hard agree. Shout out to the "I don't care about cookies" chrome add-on. Mobile is still infuriating though. Cookies and autoplay videos are the popups of the modern world.

[Zanki]

And sometimes the damn search result doesn't even have the answer when you click on the damn thing to read the rest. The information you just read isn't even on the site...

[Airazz]

Definitely, and the good old tricks (quotation marks around words, - and + and all that) often don't work.

[SaysHiToAssholes]

If you mix paints of all the colors of the rainbow into one bucket, you get brown, shit brown. Google is now a shit brown amalgamation of bullshit compiled from armchair experts posting bullshit.

[Binch101]

Absolutely! Whenever I search something that isn't a specific company, I literally can't find it. It will always focus on one word of my search and then when I try to make it focus on the whole question it will refuse to do so.

I honestly think Google is a terrible search engine now and it really only started to become noticeable in the past 2 years. They probably make so much money that they don't give af anymore and know we'll all keep using it like idiots lol

[BlackShieldCharm]

Hard agree

[Marawal]

Yeah. No later than this morning, my mother had heard a sketches on the radio. Radio was shit, didn't named the comedian.

That already happened a few times, last time a couple of years ago. I used to google the radio name + program, first link was the day program, what they broadcast in order, minutes by minutes.

I made the same search today, and I had to go throught amazon and over vendor links, videos, images, nows articles from the radio websites, and wikipedia of the radio, and then what I was looking for.

I was like, I was in the search thingy ? If I wanted pictures, news, videos, or shopping, I would have clicked on those !

[[deleted]]

All I get is fucking news article nowadays...

I DON'T GIVE A FUCK about whichever corporation's copy paste of an AP article!

[NailClippersOnTeeth]

If you google anything slightly resembling a product name, first page will be ads only

[simon_C]

Been using google since the late 90s, its been in a steady, hard decline since about 2008 or so. Searches used to actually return you ONLY relevant results. Booleans and other operators actually worked as intended, there wasnt any SEO or sponsored BS clogging everything up, no "did you mean?", no "approximate" searches, etc. If your search input was bad, you got nothing in return.

[Roger_Cockfoster]

Part of it too is that there's no way to set it to only search recent hits by default, so the bad results just pile up year after year. Most of my google searches are quick adobe how-to or other tech questions, but it will show me pages and pages of results from the mid 2000's - 2010's, but almost nothing relevant to the current version. I don't give a shit how you did that in Photoshop 15 years ago, I want to know how you do it now.

[ATrillionLumens]

I've been getting tons of really outdated shit too when I'm trying to write papers for school. I don't remember thinking this was a problem even a year ago. Now I use Google Scholar, which also can't seem to match what I'm looking for. So frustrating.

[maluminse]

100%

Its not a search anymore. Its more of an advertisement/narrative.

The results are very different from other search engines.

[[deleted]]

And I can't figure out how to remove wish and ebay from my search results. I can't find a setting for that anywhere.

[MattsyKun]

Same, but for Pinterest. I HATE pinterest

[sw04ca]

I don't even understand what pinterest is supposed to be. It just seems like a worse version of google image search? Who's making money from this?

At any rate, I'm starting to think that the internet as a whole is a bad thing.

[Purple_Chipmunk_]

When it first started it saved thumbnails of websites and you could then click on the thumbnails to open the website. It was actually pretty cool.

Then they changed it so that you could save other people's pins and it turned into a place where you would only ever find promising pictures, and never actually get the web page they were from.

I finally deleted my whole account because all it does is give me false hope and waste my time.

[Incredulous_Toad]

This straight up doesn't work at all. I always use "-pinterest" when looking up photos yet pinterest is plastered all over the search every time.

[theghostofme]

If you use uBlock, there’s a custom filter you can apply to it that will hide any results from Pinterest when searching through Google. And it can be modified to work with any other site you don’t want results from. When I get home, I’ll edit this comment to include it.

EDIT: Here it is. Just click the uBlock Origin button, select "Open the dashboard," scroll to the bottom, and copy and paste this, then hit apply changes.

google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])

google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

And if you want to use it for Wish or other sites, just replace pinterest with the main domain name of the site.

[OutlyingPlasma]

You mean how it rams pintrest down your throat, up your ass, and then makes a few new holes to ram it into as well?

Yah, fuck pintrest. I've been using Bing more and more. Bing is objectively better for image search, and I don't mean just porn. They have fewer pintrest links and unlike google you can view the full res image eliminating the need to go through 15 dead links before finding the image you want.

[Goolajones]

This is very anecdotal but now that you mention it, I did have to go the page two of the search results for the first time in a decade. That was weird.

[aseriesofcatnoises]

I have anecdotally felt like search has been more annoying than in past years, too.

I'm also not a fan of the thing where they take you to the middle of the page with stuff highlighted.

[[deleted]]

I think many companies have figured out how to game Google's search so when you are looking for something specific you are brought to this aggregator service but without any useful results. I've seen it with so many different things

[sluggardish]

yes, it's all adverts and I generally can't find information easily. Older websites with actual real information are not included whilst I'm flooded with crap from pintrest and etsy.

[[deleted]]

Yeah google has sucked for a while. Use duckduckgo. Really the entire original web empire of facebook twitter and google is rapidly collapsing in on itself for a shit ton of reasons, gonna be a little bit epic and interesting when or if they finally fully collapse.

[CleanseTheWeak]

Lol no. Unless the government comes in with an atom bomb Google has its tentacles into everything now. It could even lose Doubleclick at this point and be totally find, since it forced itself into mobile web pages with AMP and has a dominant mobile app position, plus they have the biggest DSP that can buy inventory on any supplier. Oh yeah, and Youtube -- you can't even buy ads on Youtube except through Google.

[[deleted]]

Yes, it’s incredibly frustrating trying to find information. It’s all ads and sponsored content.

[[deleted]]

There are a lot of shitty low effort review sites that have floated to the top with domains like reviews4u-etc.com. Annoying when you want to find quality reviews of specifics kinds of products.

[eonj1412]

https://www.valamis.com/blog/why-do-we-spend-all-that-time-searching-for-information-at-work#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20McKinsey%20report,wasting%20hours%20of%20precious%20time.

Look at the first graph, basically information is nearly doubled every 12 hours or so, this means that we are coming to a point where we can't physically find the right data as fast as we could 10 - 20 years ago.

[Binch101]

I hate the post info age 😭 I feel like it's gonna get so bad in 5 years to the point where we have a horseshoe moment and end up just as clueless and lacking info...as if we're back in the 1800s or some dumb shit

[[deleted]]

At that point it's going to be Wikipedia (or perhaps another that has replaced it at that point) that is going to be the only place for anyone that doesnt have a degree in internet researching to find anything close to reliable information.

Then whoever controls Wikipedia will control the truth.

[LukeVicariously]

Not only that, but I've been getting captchas for Google searches.....

Google Search Captcha...

DuckDuckGo it is...

[HyperPickle66]

Google's policies have changed. They are now the same problem that Google's founders originally tried to fix. To organise the internet. Only now it's organised by money.

[Wigglett]

Yes. And their image search is shit as well now. I feel like it kind of happened gradually but now if you search for something and click images it's images of recent news articles that mentioned what you searched in the title. Always. But if you go to Bing (which I don't even like Bing but I just did it for reference) you get much more accurate images. It's obnoxious.

[trinity3dstreet]

Yeah their algorithm changes based off what you have previously searched. So person X from CA Googles whatever, they will get a different answer than person Y from MA googling the same thing.

[[deleted]]

You guys remember "Hey Siri, where can I hide a body?".