Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.
Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on “the best impact hammer” or “how to buy solar panels” without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.
undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.
I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I’m sure it’s a people circle thing.
It’s way too easy to use Twitter and complain… it’s way to easy to use reddit … (if you use their app) and complain.
I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.
Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I’ve gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse… so would I get that experience here ever? Idk… but it’s a minus for me.
Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don’t see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.
I’d prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it’s currently in.
Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.
Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it’s an okay vid.
there’s a browser plug in for that.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.
I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.
Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?
Yeah this, it’s demented.
I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and “no further results.”
It’s more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.
I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it’s been working out fairly well.
Which is great… until it becomes influenced by all the other AI generated crap.
Well, what caused the chase for ad-money and affiliate link clicks? Google, Amazon & other mega corps. It’s just indirect enshittification :-|
Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.
The last couple of times I’ve had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.
If it keeps up this way, we’re going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.
Google sucks now at giving me information. It seems like now it just gives me products.
I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there’s so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that’s why they don’t see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on… So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far… and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they’ve been worse than competitors for years.
That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I’m willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit’s only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that’s how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).
I’ve got the Nitter equivalent that works just as well. Well, until Muskrat breaks it again, lol.
Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.
It’s pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.
I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world’s most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn’t know I needed regarding how they all work.
To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.
Not a vacuum salesman but repair man. Still active on reddit, but that’s the last AMA he did.
I doubt vacuums have changed that much in 4 years.
i wonder if chatgpt will eventually replace reddit.
in the same way that infinite monkeys will replace Shakespeare, maybe.
(this is not meant to imply that reddit posts/comments are praiseworthy works of literature. although obviously, they are.)
Not gonna happen at it’s current state. I really can’t wait for the “AI” trend to die. People think it’s some magical resolution when it’s really “As an AI language model 2+2=5”.
You have to have some idea as to what the answer might already be
it doesnt provide sources etc. which is a bit annoying.
the chatgpt “bot” in the edge browser is actually decent at providing sources, but its terrible at finding specific info. i tried finding information about what TIME a certain game would be available to play, and it just kept giving me its release date. (which i also gave it, in my query)
but they’re still very new.
google, and such, have had over 2 decades to refine their search etc. and to be honest i think the issue is its not giving you “generic” results. its trying to specify the results based on your previous searches etc. which means it can be difficult to find new info…
as for chatgpt …
i use chatgpt quite often to summarize a large blob of text, in a simple manner, or give me code snippets for generic stuff im too lazy to write. test-data as well. or just “facts” about some topic. simple stuff.
chatgpt works by looking at your query, and then based on that, it tries to find the queries “key words” and fetches some result based on that. It only gives you one result. and as we’ve all tried when searching the internet, often times the list of results will show stuff that is clearly not what we’re looking for.
For simple coding it is a dream. Or like, shitty DNS errors that need to be sorted out because apparently you can’t have 2 SPF records lol. I copy and pasted all of the records over and said WHAT IS WRONG lol, and it figured it out for me.
I get that some people don’t like it, but… its not going anywhere.
I second that, it’s been very useful for coding/debugging for me too. And the cool part is that it’s only going to get better.
Exactly - this is the worst it will ever be.
Machine learning is here to stay. This is really just the beginning of mass market adoption for it, there’s still a lot of room for the tech to grow.
I really don’t think your representation is fair. For Chat gpt at least, it will sometimes be wrong, it will sometimes make things up, but is an extremely useful tool for getting quick answers and meaningful insight into questions.
But if we know that it makes things up and gets things wrong, how can we trust any information it gives us? Fact-checking is one thing, but at that point, you might as well skip the LLM and just look the information up yourself.
At the end of the day you can’t 100% trust anything you see on the internet. You have to think critically about the answers it gives you and cross reference it against other sources. No different than when evaluating search results, which can also be wrong. But it’s a great starting point.
It’s a lot easier to get a thorough and concise answer from chat gpt and double check it than it is to wade through a search engine.
I really can’t wait for the “AI” trend to die.
I think you vastly underestimate the impact machine learning and large language models are going to have on our society. It’s like saying “I really can’t wait for the Smartphone trend to die” in 2007. Or “I really can’t wait for the Google trend to die” in 2000.
All aspects of our lives are going to be infiltrated by machine learning and large language models. Personal organization, work, grocery shopping, entertainment… Everything!
The hype around it is pretty insufferable though, in a way neither of the other examples you gave had.
The closest example I can think of is NFTs.
I don’t think it’ll go the way of NFTs, but it’s also going to disappoint people because it’s promising to be everything for everyone.
As far as I’m concern it’s a very powerful search assistant and especially for bridging the gap between regular and power users - being able to use natural language is a game changer.
I also found it great when getting set up with a new piece of SW, and rephrasing or summarising text on general topics. It’s not so good for parsing specialist information even when asked for specific items.
I’m looking forward to seeing what other tools people build with it but thus far I’ve been thoroughly… whelmed.
Speaking from personal experience, it was obvious NFTs would go nowhere and large language models would succeed. They’ve both been hyped by the public, but one of them has the utility to back up the hype and the other doesn’t.
I use chat gpt all the time. I use it at work, i use it for looking up recipes, I use it to help with DIY projects around the house, and I use it to just get more information about a niche topic. The results are catered specifically to me and my question, and they’re better than a search engine. This tech is only going to get more common from here.
Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error
It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.
What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.
It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers
What were you searching?
I’m a beta tester for Google’s Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it’s easy to see that Google’s focus on its AI seems to be search results.
PS: It’s also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.
Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.
It’s going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.
Google’s got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now…can’t find shit. And it’s about half its own fault.
I’ll put right around half of the blame on “platformization.” Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn’t get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what’s there. Twitter is slightly more open…but not really.
The other half of the problem is Google’s own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.
That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they’ve gotten in the habit of appending “reddit” to google search strings because a. that’s where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit’s own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn’t work so well.
So what are we keeping them around for?
That’s why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.
Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.
I’m using startpage.com for a few months now, I’m surprisingly quite happy with the quality of search results.
And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.
That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.
I haven’t been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it’s just stupid crap that isn’t helpful. ‘Here’s 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.’
I’m in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google’s attempt to be useful was to to search for “baluster” instead of “banister”. It’s a complete fucking joke.
And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you’ve ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I’m located in the US.
Also is it just me, or did search engines (not just Google) suddenly start disregarding quotation marks a year or so ago? I’ve been adding quotes to tell the stupid thing “no, I really did mean that weird word you think is a typo” and lately it just fucking auto-incorrects it anyway!
Yea I have this problem as well. Brackets, quotes, nothing forces the search engine to ONLY return that specific term.
How to fix your tech problem:
- restart
- the same generic fix you already saw on the last 10 websites that didn’t work
- download our totally legit software that’s specially designed to fix this exact issue
I’ve found that bad addons, spyware, and adware can immensely affect your Google results. Which is… Really alarming, but… Its true.
This is not to say a lot of seo hasn’t absolutely ruined search. Because it has.
The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.
They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google’s retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn’t satisfy it’s ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.
I literally couldn’t find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.
Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.
Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match… They don’t fucking work anymore.
Google heavily prioritizes .com, .org and other similar “popular” top level domains.
.world, . travel and similar ones are heavily penalized in Google’s ranking for search results.
We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)
I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).
Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn’t significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.
i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling “how to x site:reddit.com”, we’ll just fedisearch “how to x”
in fact, i’m pretty sure i already found one but it wasn’t very good, and i’ve forgotten it’s name
SEO scammers are already figuring out how to game Google’s new Perspectives thing: https://searchengineland.com/optimize-content-google-perspectives-427876
I know this because when I Googled for, “Google Perspectives” Google gave me that URL with all the tips & tricks on how to game it 🙄
DuckDuckGo has great results IMO
DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it’s not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn’t going to cut it.
Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.
Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.
Ive started going to chatgpt to help me out with errors i dont understand and google hasnt helped with
Same, it helps with a lot of issues and even skips the part where people are questioning why you even want to know that and how you’re doing it the wrong way and should do their way
Yesssss, me too. And often it gets to the right response on the first try which is the ultimate timesaver. This is why Google may be toast unless they can figure out how to integrate this.
The only caveat is that sometimes Chatgpt just hallucinates an answer or it’s incomplete, so you need a bit more dead reckoning to make sure you’re going the right way.
I find DDG has the same garbage AI generated content as Google. Also, search operators have been broken on DDG for years
I liked them well enough, but recently is it just me or it seems like every time I reload a search by simply going back to the page, the ranking of the results immediately changes?
That is supper annoying to me, as now I can’t keep track of the results I opened easilyThis happens sometimes if you search for a new non-cached search phrase. It’ll give you a couple pages, then update it’s index and when you go back you’re on the updated index.
Interesting, but how come it never did that before? Did I just not notice?
I don’t know. I’ve noticed it happening for the last few months. Maybe they have the ability to update caches faster now and want to give the most fresh results. It can be irritating if you’re like me and like to click a result and then go back and open a bunch of results in new tabs.
Sounds plausible yeah, so I haven’t gone crazy haha, it really is annoying since usually the new results are also worse than the first batch in my experience. Guess I’ll just pick up the habit of opening everything in a new tab from the get go
the new results are also worse than the first batch in my experience.
FWIW I thought the same. Seems like every search engine turns to doo with time.
Would be a great moment for a great open source search engine to take everyone by storm, well, like that’s ever gonna happen…
I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you’d eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I’m grateful.
I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.
No, it was the Google that failed me.
I’ve noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.
Agree. Something definitely changed in the last two years. It’s unbelievably bad now, to the point where I give up if the answer isn’t among the first 3 results. It’s insane.
As others mentioned, Google just straight up ignores most of my quotes and excludes and just shows me what it wants to. Shockingly bad, I remember a time when if I couldn’t find something, it was my own failing.
edit: this is with ad-blockers etc btw. Imagine using Google raw, must give you e-AIDS
As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I’ll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.
Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn’t restore your comments? They’ve been doing that to a bunch of people.
So far they have not.
You still can request a data export to see what they still have.
As a plus point if your GPDR request was logged and they can’t fulfill it in 90 days they will be fined.
They won’t be fined if you don’t report it
Google search is a pain from a year ago.
When searching for something on Google, you should include terms like “Reddit”, “superuser”, “Stack Overflow”, etc., to get better results. Because if you don’t include them, the first page of Google looks like a bot-generated page. Of course, Google are ‘not quite happy’.
Google search has been pretty weak for awhile now. I/O spoke a lot of big talk about bring generative AI into search, but from my part of the world it still seems the same.
Ai isn’t going to fix the first page being all ads, that’s a business decision.
If they wanted to return actual content they could do that without AI.
that’s not even close to the issue, though – Google Search fell because of SEO pushing irrelevant auto-generated garbage towards the top.
I think it’s both - the SEO fight as well as the explosion of ads on Page 1. Throw in a dash of average-user search optimization (vs a flatter term-based search) and you’ve got Googles downfall in a nutshell.
I’ve started using DDG as defacto since the last 3 months. Use Google search only for sports updates because they’ve good widgets for those.
I gave in an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn’t been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.
I don’t like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it’ll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I’m using from them and it’s working out I’m kinda okay with that.
If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I’ll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.
I’ve been using DDG for a few years now. Occasionally when I can’t get the results I need there I try a !g search to see if Google will give better results. They never do. I have no idea where this “DDG search results are bad” argument comes from.
You might want to give Searx a shot. It’s a FOSS, self-hosted (with several public instances) search engine that can pull results from several other search providers while stripping ads/tracking/personal data.
I’ve stopped using it. I now bounce around alternatives but Kagi is the best and my go to now. Here are some alternatives to consider:
- DuckDuckGo
- Brave Search
- Ecosia (A bit spammy, but a passive praxis.)
- https://www.perplexity.ai/
- https://www.phind.com/
- https://kagi.com/
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ (very cool!)
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/
- https://knaben.eu/ (torrents)
