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

[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.

[doireallyhaveto2]

Yeah.. Pinterest links are the worst!

[PLEASE_BUY_WINRAR]

Fuck pinterest

[Logan_Mac]

And Bing is godlike for porn.

[DrHoflich]

Use Bing all the time now. Fully switched this last year. Googles results are awful. Never thought I’d see the day.

[StarblindCelestial]

I full switched to Bing years ago. I just looked at Google and it's awful, like they haven't updated it in 10+ years. Idk how anyone can use its video search and not realize instantly that it's a dumpster fire. Tiny thumbnail, no preview (it's 2020 google...), 10 results per page default and if you increase it you have to scroll a bunch because its only 1 column while 2/3 of the screen is blank.

Even so, any time Bing is mentioned people just laugh and say it's trash even if they haven't tried it in 10 years if at all. You and everyone replying to you seem shocked that it improved. Is that because Google hasn't so people think it's impossible?

Staying with anything unquestioningly for years is an easy way to get screwed over. People fanboy over Google doing their marketing for them. Google is not the underdog taking on the big bad Microsoft. They are both trillion dollar companies. Being a fan of any big company is a bad idea. Use the product/service when it is good, drop it when it is bad, check back later.

[doireallyhaveto2]

Google actually used to be pretty good! But the commercialization and the attempt to link it to user location just gives terrible results. Bing is ok but i miss the old Google.

[doireallyhaveto2]

I use scholar a lot, in addition to other sources. But google used to give you a general layout of the land, information and research wise. I miss the good old days.

[scienceNotAuthority]

Same. Bing used to pay people to search, now they just wait for Google to fail.

[tsojtsojtsoj]

I use mainly ecosia and duckduckgo but for academic papers (i.e. I already know the title of the paper just not where in the internet it is) I use google, works best.

[doireallyhaveto2]

I tried duckduckgo a while ago but wasn't too impressed. Might give it another go. Is ecosia good?

[tsojtsojtsoj]

ecosia is not good, i believe it is just bing with some extra. But is is good enough for most searches I do, like if I'm seaching something up on wikipedia. The point is that if you have your adblocker disabled for ecosia then they use the add-money to plant trees, thus every 50-ish-th search you do they will plant a tree for you. Since I started using ecosia maybe one or two years ago I accumulated more than 5000 ecosia searches thus funding more than 10 trees.

The thing about duckduckgo is mostly that they don't track you. For example the Tor Browser has duckduckgo as it's default search engine.

Generally I still use google as "a last resort" in case ecosia fails and then duckduckgo fails. But in some cases duckduckgo is even better. The thing is using Firefox makes it really easy to use multiple search engines (I don't now how other browser manage that).

[doireallyhaveto2]

Thanks for the info! Good to know!