this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT (danluu.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'll play devil's advocate.

The author is basically complaining that search results aren't tailored to their own search habits, and for all we know they are using tools to prevent Google data collection for personalized search.

Using the search term "YouTube downloader" and having the success criteria being the return of a fork of a command line Python tool is an insane test for the general public. How many of your family members who are looking to download a YouTube video would be helped by that result?

I searched "YouTube downloader" and received the usual ad-ridden websites that let you download a video. Then I searched "YouTube downloader Linux" and the top result was ytdl-org on GitHub. Seems reasonable.

I've seen many people complain about Google search lately. I wonder how many of them either have unrealistic expectations, never learned to use scoping keywords, or who stopped search personalization and lost benefits they didn't know they were getting. And expecting a fork of a command line tool to be the top result for YouTube downloader is definitely unrealistic.

Anecdotally, I've used more or less the same search strategy for 30 years, and it still brings up relevant results. And while I agree that seo gamification can make certain keywords harder than others to use, this article and test really wasn't testing search scenarios the average non-technical user of these search engines would have.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

While in this particular case I agree with you, I've noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for "best linux distro" to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.

On the other hand, people aren't making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren't being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

This is the direct result of Google diminishing the importance of forums and blogs in the first place.

There used to be a "discussion" tab in Google search and forums used to have higher placement in Google. At some point they decided that "professional sites" are more important than discussions. Forums and blogs getting less traffic means more people decide to create content on SNS instead.

Google created this issue in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I do agree that the content farms are frustrating, and I'd like to see more done to combat them. I also agree that discussions happening on locked platforms is net loss for the sharing of information. I think search engines can do more about the former, but not as much about the latter. I think folks like us having discussions on the open can help.

I went ahead and searched "best Linux distro" and the top three results for me was

I then turned on my phones VPN, opened edge (normally use Firefox), went to Google, and repeated the search with the same top three results. I tried to bypass personalization, but might need to use a clean VM with VPN to succeed.

I actually thought all of those results were pretty good from a quick skim.

I will say I have custom DNS filters and plugins that block ads and untrustworthy domains and I can't guarantee that didn't influence my results.

I tried other searches like "best Linux distro" plus "programming" or "gaming" and received similarly helpful results. But I can't tell if I'm in a personalization bubble.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I also typed this into Google.

My top result is this: https://linuxblog.io/best-linux-distro/

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

In my perception Google Search is far worse than it had been 10 years ago & I never cared about personalized search at all. I used to just sit down in an internet cafe, search some stuff & get great results, now that does not happen anymore, or at least not reliably. Google is better than its competitors at understanding your search intent if you use whole sentences instead of carefully selected keywords, but with a good search strategy even Duck/Bing are more than competitive now.

Of course the diversity of the web kind of dying could have something to do with this as well.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Tl;dr, use Marginalia for basic queries.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Tested to search for a stomp rust crate and got horrible results. So, I guess that you should test the different search engines with your use case and see which one fits that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

seems totally unusable for me too. even simple queries fail

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I searched for "counter strike surf" and the first result was about the origin of the idiom "with all the bells and whistles."

Much search engine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I searched for "frog" and got some... interesting results, some more relevant than others. Not any that I'd look to for information about frogs, but I guess the site full of someone's drawings of frogs was nice. Very 90s.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Totally agree. I posted the comment just summarizing the article and then tried it (order of operations, I know) and I could not get relevant results for the life of me. I tried queries and simple phrases and everything was unrelated to what I was looking for.

Not sure if the terms chosen were dumb luck or what, but the article may need to provide some instructions if it was so good for the author. It sucks because many people want a search engine that worked like Google from 10-20 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I wanted to finish reading it, but that post was so friggin' long! It's good to know that the feeling of "wow, search results have really gotten worse" isn't a unique one.

IMO, the only way to improve this is to have a decentralised/distributed search engine. Unfortunately, YaCY is written in Java and amazingly slow on the server as well as at getting results (see test instance). PreSearch is basically web3 crap. And I can't think of another search engine with the same model.

Since the fediverse is picking up steam, maybe there's a chance that a federated search engine could be made, but who knows...

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I have a baseless guess as to who that unsourced quote from a "bluesky thought leader" might've come from although I've never been on bluesky. Naturally the search engines cannot find its source either, which suggests another reason why they're less useful than they used to be.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Also, Bluesky only recently made it so posts can be viewed on the website without login, so search engines probably haven’t had time to scrape much of it yet, however that’s determined.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That you felt the need to use images instead of links exemplifies yet another reason search engines have trouble these days I guess. Interestingly, the search box on bsky.app is also unable to find it when I try from here. Mastodon search is often no better of course, but what with bluesky being completely monolithic and centralized you'd think it'd be easier for them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I didn’t feel the need to post screenshots for any reason, I just post screenshots. Don’t read too much relevancy into that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Why is google bad at the firefox query, the first result is from mozilla