It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can’t find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?
It’s been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they’ve continued to “optimize” their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I’d say these past few months, it’s become borderline unusable for finding actual information.
This is the thing. It really has become unusable. Trying to find obscure information is insane no matter the keywords. It’s always the same results and, ugh, YouTube videos. You can’t find parts for older stuff easily, simple answers are gone.
Amazon is similar. Change the keywords all you like you still will get the same ‘amazon choice’ products and recommended alternatives for whatever you searched for lead to the same list. But i have to agree it really got worse unreasonably fast last few months.
Someone posted it on here, it works soooo much better and no ad bullshit
Oh wow i just now saw this reply (thanks boost!) Seems very cool, many thanks!
Thanks for this. Trying it out now.
Define “sudden”.
This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It’s far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results
I disagree, Google has encouraged and profited massively off of SEO, they could’ve maintained the integrity of result but instead they bent over backwards to make sure SEO methods worked as long as folks were paying Google
The worsening has definitely been progressive over the last 10 years, but I feel there were some sudden changes over the last couple of months that make it a lot less usable than before. For some searches I get the feeling that there’s some kind of whitelist of websites that are included in the search and a huge part of the internet is being excluded. I was looking for a pretty basic diagram some days ago, nothing too obscure, and there were maybe three dozens of results in the image search. I also find more and more pages that are obviously badly translated English content when I search for German terms. I never had that problem in the past. The same goes for product testing. I tried to find a good office chair, but the websites that claim to test different models obviously try to lead you to one specific product. The texts feel like auto-generated content to simulate real articles about the products being tested, but at the end chair X, and only chair X, is the right one to buy.
Can you explain a little what you mean by “a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results”? I’ve never heard of that before and it sounds alarming to say the least
I’m assuming they’re talking about SEO(search engine optimization). There’s companies that offer it as a service to boost websites rankings so they are closer to the top.
Enshittification
This
Is it the way? Omg 😱
Google has really gone down hill to the point I can no longer find obscure searches anymore. Even youtube searches sorting by new has gone downhill to the point that most of the results are youtube shorts with half of them having multiple hashtags in the title.
I’ve found myself using DDG and Bing (fucking BING!) more than google lately.
Google going downhill led to me using DuckDuckGo 100% of the time. Before it was just too difficult to search for programming-related errors and stuff on anything but Google but that’s no longer true.
I REALLY wish there was a way to exclude shorts from YouTube results entirely.
Search operators for YouTube might help with that
All of a sudden? It’s been terrible for at least 10 years now. I have about 5 or 6 FireFox extensions just to make Google not suck.
Funny how much better google is when you block any Pinterest answer
It depends on which bit you’re talking about.
ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.
The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.
If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)
DuckDuckGo has some of the same problems too. It is mainly just a proxy for Bing search results. But they are less full of ads and crappy personalisation indeed. Also search.brave.com is worth a try.
Don’t use anything by brave
Ribbit
I’ve read somewhere that the Reddit debacle has something to do with it.
Ads. Ads happened.
It’s because of money. Google is a place where you can find the least irrelevant ad for your search query.
I wonder if their CIA money has dried up, maybe funds are tight and they’re forcing the algorithm for all it’s worth. Sorta like how spez is burning reddit to the ground trying to maximize the metrics for the ipo or whatever.
Maybe all the deleted and edited Reddit posts and comments are finally syncing up.
ComSci here. Lately Google for tech searches, and especially low level shit, gives a few relevant results on top with the bottom of the first page always being scam sites that my corp firewall blocks. Always sites with just random letters
I’ve read somewhere that the Reddit debacle has something to do with it.
Google is really useless for some things unless you know how to use search operators
Are you sure it’s true? I tried googling it and didn’t find anything…
