I always bookmark sites I know I will use frequently. I didn't realize people didn't do that anymore lol
What happened to the search engines? They always seem to work fine for me
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.
My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.
Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.
For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.
It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.
My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.
Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.
As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.
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AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.
The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.
Wtf? Yall have been using Search Engines to go to websites you've been to before? Why even, just type the url in...
"ne" presses enter for netflix.com
"l" presses enter for lemmy.world
Auto completing urls are so fast.
I accidentally used chrome the other day.
Tried to go to Gmail with "gm" enter.
No autocomplete, just a Google search.
Almost went to the General Motors website.
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I never stopped bookmarking. Type a word and usually the browser will find that long lost page from the bookmarks.
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The only reason I don't bookmark much, is because I'm actively hoarding 517 tabs.
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People stopped bookmarking?
Trust me, most people don't even know what that star in the URL bar is for
It's the Yelp review, duh.
Google has been so bad it's making bing better. No seriously, bing is better than Google.
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I didn't realize people stopped....bookmarks are incredibly useful.
Bring back personal homepages and webrings!
And visitor counters
The keywords for bookmarks in Firefox are amazing. I type the thing my brain thinks of when I think of a website and boom I'm there.
I never stopped bookmarking.
I already bookmarked but with this whole enshitification I began hoarding data. All those txts, images, videos, songs that I bookmarked? Am downloading and categorizing all of it
I've never let go of bookmarks and RSS. Still the best systems around.
People don't bookmark? I have dozens of bookmarks all set up in folders. It's just easier than typing every time. Plus, I have a PC connected to my TV for watching illegal sports streams. With bookmarks, I don't need my keyboard most of the time. I just have a wireless mouse and that's it.
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I never use bookmarks. Not because of search engines but because of browser history.
DDG seems to still function nicely. And I've never stopped using bookmarks. Didn't know people weren't using bookmarks anymore... I mean, what do you? Search for the same website you frequently use or just make a button that can do it in one click?
DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.
And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.
DuckDuck Go took getting used to for me due to it lacking all the convenient algorithms from Google that... used to in the past... contribute to getting better search results.
The lack of these conveniences is why I switched to DDG years ago in the first place. I realised Google was essentially helping everyone build their own Internet echo chambers and I didn't want to be part of that.
It does mean you actually need to be good at searching for what you want because DDG is very bad at "guessing".
Or to put it differently; I call you complaints skill issues. :)
You may call it as you wish. And in some way you might be right. But I've been searching the web since the 90's, from AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Google to DDG. I use operators in my queries etc. I'm not new to this. One thing that drives me mad with DDG is that it translates search terms, even if they're in quotes, and gives me results with the translated terms mixed in with the original term. That is never ever what I want. It really likes to decide for me what I want I feel like, like when I searched for screenshots of the software for a particular surveillance camera, DDG showed me nothing but product images of said camera. I tried several different queries, only got product photos. Tried Google and immediately got a whole bunch of screenshots, which DDG should have known given the term screenshot and other synonyms, in quotes.
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From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:
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I bookmark so much these days. Other times I collect links with better descriptions in Joplin.
I know people that just keep all of their tabs and never close them rather than bookmark. Its insane to me, I don't get it.
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Sounds like someone has been searching YouTube on google every time they wanted to watch YT
you are way more right than you think. Now that i think about it i started bookmarking more and more in correlation with the search engine enshittification trend.
So I'm not really crazy right? Google has been going downhill over the past year or so?
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RSS and bookmarks. I never stopped. Firefox even searches first on my bookmarks and offers them before the online search option.
Excuse me, my 783 loose bookmarks and I would like to have a word.
Bookmarks and search engines serve different purposes, though search engines can replace bookmarks. But the main purpose of a search engine is to find sites you've never been to before because they contain specific information you're looking for.
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Offline AI is a better search engine now. Even at 20% fake or made up references, it is better than a search engine.
The reverse is likely true. Search engines suck because they are actively trying to edge out the AI competition as the products that will emerge from AI will soon make search engines unprofitable for peripheral data mining through stalking people.
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