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. Google disagrees.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
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.
Saved 83% of original text.
The dangers of a monopoly. No matter how bad Google gets people will still use it because, in many people’s minds, there is no other search engine.
What are those? DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc. are all not really better than Google. I haven‘t tried Kagi yet, mostly because it costs money.
You can actually try kagi for free. 100 searches/month should be enough for you to decide if it’s worth the money to you.
(Not affiliated; just a happy user)
i was struggling with DDG too, but in another post i saw someone recommend searx and it is actually really good.
Fyi searx is deprecated or at least not maintained and discontinued Switch to searxNG which is an active fork and it is really good :D
I’m using Qwant and it gives me better results than Google. Even Startpage does and it’s using Google behind the scenes.
Google managed to fuck up their personalization so much it makes the results worse (it’s almost like they only really care about tailoring the ads /s). And I’m suspecting it’s by design, if the results suck the users are more likely to either press the ads or go through more result pages, therefore seeing more ads.
I agree it does suck in general One thing I tried is using a metasearch engine and for the least part I find the results better and way more customizable (for reference I am self hosting searxNG)
I am actually kinda ok with DDG, but the results are… not always very great and the second page is filled with weird websites related to my location…
Maybe i should try both Kagi and Searx
DDG is on pair with google, that’s enough for me. (in some topics far better and in some far worse)
It’s kind of terrible now. Since late 2023, when I go to search technical specs of hardware, I am presented with a view that looks like browsing an online shopping catalog. It’s weird and unwanted. For personal use, I went back to DDG.
Google search results suck and I’ve actually heard regular people mention it. They just either don’t know how to switch search engines or they think Bing search sucks.
Or they still think they are entitled to a “free” search engine and don’t see the amount of resources needed for that and that it’s actually a service worth paying for, either through a subscription or through a donation-based service.
Switching one private company for another is definitely not the way to go…
Careful about how you throw around the word “entitlement”. The top competition is free and search engines are very low value for the average person. It’s very reasonable to expect search engines to be free and for anything paid to be a niche product. Google search results may be terrible, but not so terrible that I’m going to pay $5/month to escape it.
Subscription services still get worse. The arrogance Cable TV must have to show us ads—cable was the ad-free service back in its day. The same is happening with Netflix. The same will happen with Spotify. This thing is a snake eating it’s own fucking tail.
I want something without perverse incentives. Donations, maybe. Taxes, possibly. I get free roads, why not a free search index.
I’m using Kagi for quite some time now and it’s awesome. But recently I was using a different machine and did not have my login credentials at hand so I used Google and holy shit I didn’t remember Google giving such aweful results. I was not able to find what I was looking for. Then searched the same thing on my phone through Kagi and the solution was in the first three results. So yes I also feel that Google search is getting worse.
Pay for the service or you will become the product. Kagi is more than worth it, its so nice to be able to find what I’m looking for again.
I can’t be paying $5 or $10/month for yet another service. I understand the companies need to make money, but the amount of services asking for a subscription is getting out of hand. And $5 is really high for a search engine, that price is crazy. I was expecting something like $12/year for unlimited searches.
You either pay with your money or by viewing paid content. I save WAY more time than the $5 is worth to me not having to dig to find real results. It’s ability to surface actual product reviews instead of page after page of amazon affiliate links has saved me hundreds of dollars. I felt it was crazy to pay for too, the free trial immediately changed my mind. You don’t know how bad you have it until you see how good it could be.
