Yes, we need to accept that it is broken and move on to something that isn’t
Some of us left it behind quite awhile ago:-).
The problem is that a fuckton of the web is SEO poisoned, so even a better search engine will find garbage because for a lot of subjects garbage is all that’s available.
The best chef in the world can’t turn shit into anything you want to eat.
This is what they want you to think but they’re hardly even trying. Google is shitty on purpose because if initial search results are bad, you “engage” more and see more ads. And since they’re not worried about competition because google is the default search nearly everywhere – most people don’t even know there are alternatives, google is synonymous with search – they can enshittify their search as much as they want. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I don’t understand what you are saying. If some other search methodology were to use the same exact methodology of Google in paying attention to the SEO terms, then obviously it would fall prey to the same thing that killed Google. Similarly if the method was not precisely 100% identical yet still used SEO, then it too would be poisoned.
However, if the search method were to ignore SEO entirely and focus purely on the content of the page, plus other metrics such as number of links to that page, from other highly-ranked websites, but independently of SEO, then it would not be poisoned by SEOs. Although it might suck due to other causes, either related or not.
Anyway it all depends so heavily on what you want to find - e.g. a replacement for Google Maps is harder, and Google Images is also fairly great too.
What Google used to do is a lot of manual effort to keep SEO stuff at a minimum. You can’t make it go away entirely, but it was a give-and-take that basically worked.
We’re stuck now because Google decided they didn’t want to spend the money on it anymore, so the SEO people won.
However, if the search method were to ignore SEO entirely and focus purely on the content of the page
As another poster mentions, SEO is about gaming the content so search engines pick them up. If you change your algorithm, they’ll just change their methods. Google’s old method may be the only way to clamp down on it.
It’s powered by Bing. That’s all. Compare DDG results with a private Bing session.
Oh fuck!
Looks like you can turn it off though - https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures.
Duckduckgo, searxng, and if you are willing to pay, kagi is far better than google was.
“is” absolutely, “was” there was a time in the mid-teens when Google’s search was god-like in its powers of finding what I wanted.
Duckduckgo is ok but not great even, although search in general is harder nowadays I think
Asked Google assistant today what the withdrawal symptoms of Adderall were… got told the suicide prevention hotline. So, that was fun.
Today I was trying to look up the syntax for how to search before a certain date on Google. The google AI overview turned out to be wrong