this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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~~may soon be~~ long since has been
It’s been so fucking long since I’ve used anything directly related to the goog’s …search thing whatever that I frankly have no idea how bad it is now, compared to when it got so bad for me a decade ago that I quit it altogether.
The giants of tech have been falling for quite some time now.
The alternatives havent been better.
Its like search engines all shit the bed 9-12 months ago. Specific pages I constantly referenced and never bookmarked just stopped showing up on Google searches pages 1-5 like they never existed. Lord help you if you try to find anything older than a year or not monotized to some AI article.
I think theyve finally created a feedback loop of bullshit. I mean Ive tried every search engine and its pretty much the same. Monkey see monkey do.
What really grinds my gears is that search engines simply do not show you the thing you are looking for.
Even when you put explicit captions and quotes around your search topic it will just ignore them and show you other stuff.
This issue is not limited to google. Start page, ecosia search, Bing, (God forbid you use that) all of them simply choose to ignore your explicit groupings of words.
I am also running a locally hosted searx server, and it's not much better because the results that it gets come from other search engines.
Do we need to build a federated search system to replace Google and everything else?
I think the answer is yes.
Yeah I hate it when it does that. It guesses based on your keywords what you are looking for and just shows the results for that. And they always seem to mix in some "popular" links for no apparent reason.
This weekend I was looking up more info on something specific that happened in Formula One. But the inclusion of the word "One" meant that my search would be ignored and it would just show shit about Liam Payne from One Direction. Like wtf. And it happened in Bing (DDG) as well as Google.
I get why it's the case, but I hate that search engines don't search using literal terms any more. Recently I was looking for something I had looked up before but forgot. I know one old forum post where I had found the exact answer and I knew one exact phrase because it was worded a bit weird. No matter what I did I could not find it. I figured I misremembered the phrase. Until I eventually found the post with the exact literal phrase I searched for. Utterly useless.
Start paying for your search engine and you can get better results. I’ve been pretty happy with Kagi.com