How did google manage to be worse than yandex?
By rewarding mysterious “quality content” indicators that SEOs know how to game with shit people absolutely do not perceive as quality.
That’s the closest one so far, actually.
I usually go to tools, and the option for results in the past year.
Damn, y’all still using Google. Rip
What are you using?
Kagi. I haven’t felt the need to use anything else since I started using it.
Same, except searches for local stuff in my area, as Kagi is a bit US centric
Brave is my go to for everything except image searching, for that I use DuckDuckGo.
Wait until you see the AI generated blog posts being top results…
Hah!
No.
Soon enough the result will be an AI generated “blogpost”, generated by the search engine, in response to your query.
That’s already been happening for about a month now… perhaps only for some users? Often the AI results are straight up lies.
I’ve seen some fucking hilariously wrong AI math.
It showed up for me about a month ago. I put up with it for about a week and then broke down and finally switched all my browser search engines to duckduckgo.
The funny thing is, I tried making this same switch a couple years ago. I legitimately had a harder time getting the results I needed and ended up switching back to Google.
Google is worse than useless to me now.
I’m sure all this nonsense waste of energy is exactly what we needed just to stop climate change.
The worse part, you enter the blog, it looks legitimate enough at a glance, go straight to the code, then find out it’s bullshit.
We need ai blog blockers now…
For certain languages and frameworks, LLMs are horrible right now because of this. Many answers I get are a Frankenstein of different versions.
I was looking up some tips for Baldurs Gate missions and these fking AI generated pieces of shit with hallucinated fake playthroughs ruined the whole experience.
There has been something similar for years: a page that basically says “Yeah, nah, we don’t have any information for that, but you might be interested in a totally irrelevant something else”, but phrased in a way that gets it high in the results. What’s astonishing is that Google doesn’t punish those pages.
Why would they punish pages that help them serve more ads? There are ads on the search, ads on the useless result, ads when you refine the query.
Yeah, you have a point, but then it’s a bit hypocritical of them to even have criteria for putting pages up in the results.
I definitely feel the pain when it comes to worthless results nowadays. Though in this case DDG comes through:
Adding documentation to the search makes the “correct” page soar to the top:
Google is better as a verb than a search engine.
I use “search” as a verb
Haha, nope. The links points to a table of contents after which you are on your own. The right link should point to a specific page instead, but the problem here is that postres docs are poorly optimized for search engines. If you click on the top link from google, you would see there’s a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said link is dead. It’s not an issue I’ve ever experienced with mysql docs for example.
And yes, w3schools, despite how terrible it is, is still above the official docs because it is more popular with newbies. I remember a time when I just started, I preferred sites like it, because they were simple and on point, rather than technically correct and comprehensive like the official docs are. If you forgot the feeling, try learning math on wikipedia (assuming you don’t have a math degree).
For the rest I cannot argue. Generated/AI shit is indeed ruining the internet and search engines giving up and joining them isn’t helpful either.
After which ctrl+f " in" takes you to the correct chapters. I do agree that a direct link would be more helpful.
And for learning postgresql I agree it isn’t very helpful - using their tutorial links, w3schools or something like udemy if you prefer video format is the way to go in that use case.I remember back when you were told to learn to work with the documentation, not memorize it, because you will always have access to it as a reference. Maybe bookmarking reference books/documentation will make a come back as the search engines degrade.
Surely the word ‘in’ would appear countless times out of context on the table of contents.
You can press alt-w though to only show full word matches
" in" appears 25 times on the page to be exact, with 16 of those being in the table of contents and 9 being in the text afterwards.
“in” appears 54 times, as you know end up hitting “string” and so on.Had I known that the functions table of contents was as short as it is I would probably have just scrolled.
This is partly why I prefer Firefox’s implementation of the find feature - it allows case-sensitive search while Chrome does not support it.
Trying to learn math on Wikipedia is an endless Sisyphean nightmare just trying to understand the first word in an unfamiliar vocabulary.
Kagi only lists postgresql.org for the first 10 entries, but outdated ones in first place. With the programming scope it collapses all official do s entries to one, with GH and SO filling the rest.
For the quick answer, it also uses the ‘outdated’ docs as source, but as it only gives a very shallow overview there shouldn’t be any difference in version (i.e. it checks for a value in a list in all versions the same, and quick answer leaves out details specific to different versions)
On duckduckgo it was only the the 4th result! Pretty decent.
Had to test with Kagi also, leads with official documentation, after that tutorials and unofficial things. Nothing obviously irrelevant. The only thing with the Kagi results, was that there were a few very simmilar official documentation links (for different postgresql versions) at top. But, still good search results. Not sure why anyone is still using google, when there are quite a few better alternatives availale
The power of defaults, comfort, not wanting to pay, and probably worse non English results
Well internet enshitification is real…
You are confusing Google and Internet… they are very different things.
Judging by Google’s chokehold over web browsers and websites in general, they’re not that different…
You’re confusing the web with the internet. But I don’t blame you because OP did that too.
Doesn’t mean the statement is less true, the enshitification of google is a symptom, the disease is the internet as a whole. Google and LLMs screwing the web, M$ screwing windows, Apple’s existence by itself, Meta monopolizing and screwing social media, and don’t get me started with streaming platforms and other media industries are all symtoms.
Considering all of that, yes, the internet enshitification is very real.
Symptoms of what?
But anyway, the cool thing about the internet is that you can find your nice cozy niche and stay there.
That’s how the 90s internet was. If the megacorps want to be in here, fine. I’ll just stay in Lemmy. And when Lemmy starts sucking, I’ll move to somewhere else.
It’s not just google, google is just the most popular, so a lot of the seo is targeted for it
It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
may I ask what it is?
Oh yeah, I heard about this. Is it rly that much better?
I’ve been using it for a few months. It’s good. I get the official docs for my first result using OP’s query. 300 queries, their starting tier was not enough for my use. I was using DDG before and like it well enough. I’m not sure if it’s worth it but I like the idea of paying for services I use. I stopped using Google years ago because of all the captchas I had to fill due to my VPN
I’m cool with paying for quality, ad-free service but I feel like they’re giving way too little for what they’re asking. 300 searches a month? What is this AOL?
Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Do you expect free services with no catch? You either pay with money or with something else
You literally sent that from a FOSS platform…
I give lemmy money. Not so for google
You don’t have to give either money and there is the option to give both money.
Someone has to pay lemmy. If you don’t, it’s comparable to a free tier of a paid service. When I say “you” I don’t mean every single person. There’s no option to pay for google search that I’m aware of.
Nobody has to pay for anything Lemmy or ActivityPub related because its FOSS.
That means Free Open Source Software.
As in, you can get and use the source code yourself without paying a single cent.
Not true because we’re getting the same experience whether we pay or not. The same kinda goes for google, they have other services you could pay to support them (please don’t), and it won’t make the search engine better. Big difference is one of them is actually free (full meaning of the word) and the other one is just usable without paying.
You’re still using a free platform to say good free software is not a thing tho, kinda weird.
I only use it for web stuff but W3Schools is usually pretty solid so I wouldn’t be mad having that as a first result.
Funny, we all used to avoid W3Schools because it was a heavily SEO’d ad farm, but nowadays it’s actually a Web 2.0 oasis in a hellscape of infinite scrolling AI bullshit. I’ve found myself using it over SO since their surrender to OpenAI.
Web 2.0 oasis
💀
Works alright for me. Maybe Google is bad just in the US?
Note the versions, none of the results give you the official operators page for the current version, 16. They give 9, which went EOL in 2021.
Can’t tell if you’re joking. The first three aren’t even the official docs and the official doc links are to an incredibly old version.
I feel like I’ve been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like “yeah, maybe it’s gotten a bit worse? Haven’t really noticed”
Huh, thats weird. Your chatgpt output looks just like a google result page.
I’ve started relying more on AI-powered tools like Perplexity for many of my search use-cases for this very fact - all results basically warrant a pre-filtering to be useful.
This is one solution to the issue, and it seems silly you are being downvoted for it.
Google became what it became, and years of seo optimisation cat & mouse play has reached new heights. Those obviously target Google instead of their competitors for now.
Would that we could have perfect search results, it would be bemeficial to google as well.
I think it might have to do with the broad anti-AI sentiment that seems to be present here at Lemmy.
Counter point: we had good search results a decade ago and Google voluntarily eroded their product quality for a pittance of extra ad revenue.
Having a decent search engine is achievable and we don’t need to shoehorn AI into fucking everything.
Unfortunately the spam arms race has destroyed any chance of search going back to the good ole days. SEO and AI content farms means we’ll need a whole new system to categorize webpages, as well as filter out human sounding but low effort spam.
Point being, it’s no longer enough to find a page that’s relevant to the topic, it has to be relevant and actually deliver information, which currently the only feasible tech that can differentiate those is LLMs.
It would be interesting tho to use a LLM to spot AI/SEO crap and add whole domains to a search blacklist. In that case we wouldn’t need AI to do the actual search, and this could easily just be a database for end users by the SE’s side (kinda like explicit content filters).
I’d call that option “Bullspam filter” and leave it on “moderate” by default.
I’d call it the Slop Bucket
I don’t disagree, but for obvious reasons, we can’t access Google from a decade ago, since they’ve made it unavailable.
I’m not really describing an ideal state, this is a mere matter of practicality.
Stop using google.
DuckDuckGo is also being poisoned by SEO unfortunately. Some group of people managed to crack its algorithm, and as Google is slowly but fading relevancy, DuckDuckGo is now also has the same issues.
I’ve been using Kagi for a year and am happy with it
Thank you, I’ll be checking it out
Yeah it’s getting worse too. It’s still far better than google, for now anyway.
The section “other people also search for” is complete garbage.
I was searching for a used car part in my native language and Google mistook it for a name. No, Google, other people do not search for "car part net worth and marital status ". Why are you showing me this crap?
The English word ‘speaker’ has multiple meanings. In Hungarian, there is a different word for a speaker device that casts sound (hangszóró, “sound caster”) and Speaker of the House of Parliament (házelnök, “president of the house”).
Still, when googling one, you may get results for the other. 🤷
Seems to have been
fixed.That moment when you realize Google might be translating searches into English before doing a “sounds like”.
Swedish: högtalare, “high talker”, pretty much “loudspeaker”.
Carpenter Jacob Part was my hero, growing up.
