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"Google has turned into a cesspool." That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came o

"Google has turned into a cesspool." That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks. Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking? Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me. In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.) I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off. I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant. Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.

emptyparadise 5y ago
I'm amazed that there isn't anything like uBlock Origin for search results.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  "My eyes are bent, my back is grey etc" I think we have loads of tools to play with but fundamentally there is a problem when you are fighting with your search engine to find stuff you want to find. My laptop (Arch) still has Chromium as default with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, uBlacklist and a few others running. I will be moving back to FF and running a sync server because I am that pissed off and able to do so. I'll also take a few others with me (between 2 and rather more) When I say move back to FF, I'm talking about something like reverting a 10-15 years change. I've always had FF available but it fell short back in the day for long enough for me to move to the Goggle thing. Now I think I'll go back. Noone at G will lament their loss, I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there.
  - eitland 5y ago
    > I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there. I'm already here :-) If 5 or so devs read it and change too and they start mentioning it then we have a fast chain reaction. Just look at WhatsApp or even Microsoft or IBM: they seemed unstoppable but are very nuch just another alternative today.
- aarchi 5y ago
  If you're referring to user-curated search result blocking, that's very easy with DuckDuckGo and uBlock Origin (just block elements like [data-domain="w3schools.com"]; see my comment to the GP). I don't know of any large extant lists like this though.
  - derefr 5y ago
    That won't do much if every result on the first page is blocked. Ideally a filter list like this could be pushed to the server side as a per-user preference to go with your query, so that if e.g. the top 10000 results were all filtered out, then you wouldn't have to click through (or infinite-scroll autoload) 100 empty pages before getting anything.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ tries something like this.
    - aarchi 5y ago
      DDG will add more results, if enough are hidden. If I search "w3schools" with my filter, there are only two results on the first page that are not hidden, so it immediately displays the second page below. It seems that they planned for this use case.
- drilldrive 5y ago
  I used to have an automatic google search-domain blocker. It was just front-end though so if a page would have website domains that were useless, it would only have 1 or 2 results on it unfortunately. Something a little better integrated would be nicer.
smegger001 5y ago
I wish i could have 2010 google search as a alternative to 2021 google search.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  How so? I haven't seen much change apart from that crappy yellow streak of piss thing that dribbles on pages. How do you recall 2010 search? (I suspect I've lost it a bit - I'm 50.5 years old)
  - smegger001 5y ago
    In general i had more relevent results on my first search qurry compared to now admitedly thats hard to prove as i can't rerun the search side by side for a comparison now. additionally ads were firmly separated into a colored box away from actual results
    - wernercd 5y ago
      As mentioned, I removing the think the rose colored glasses won't put lipstick on this pig. Google Search (and not sure how Bing or similar would do better, baring their censorship problems) is increasingly a minefield... This is the same problem with something like WoW classic... you can get the game that existed 15 years ago. But even if it is the exact same game, the world itself isn't. Online walkthroughs, videos, modding knowledge, theory crafting, etc. Those things are much more fleshed out today so even if the system didn't change 1 bit, WoW Original vs WoW Classic are really two separate games. Likewise... if you dropped Google Original down today? I'd love to see how fast it would get owned by these sorts of operations that have had a decade+ of practice in skills like CEO that didn't exist in 2010. You had more relevant results? That wouldn't change because companies live and die off of SEO now and didn't then. Highlighted ads are such a small thing on the website when compared to getting a full front page of the same Stack Overflow answers in 20 different websites that all have SO cloned and reskinned.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Problem is, I expect 2010 google search would be considerably worse now than it was in 2010, because "SEO" has had another decade to evolve.
oska 5y ago
I appreciate a lot of what you're saying in this comment but I disagree with this sentiment: > not the Ads - that's fine In my strongly held opinion, push advertising is not fine and it's the root cause of all the problems you are discussing. We will only exit this mess that the web has become when everyone blocks push advertising by default. People should only see advertising when they are interested in being advertised to, e.g. sites you consciously choose to go to that advertise products & services, like the old Yellow Pages phonebooks.
p5a0u9l 5y ago
Comparing Google now to Alta Vista is not very helpful. They don't get to rest on their laurels. Search is less helpful now, and it's not clear to me that they care enough to do something about it.
- lupire 5y ago
  You mean besides spending far more on people and computers than any other company, perhaps combined?
  - p5a0u9l 5y ago
    You're giving their entire search budget credit for dealing with spam results? My observation is that it's bad and has been for some time. They are either unable or unwilling to solve the problem.
Spooky23 5y ago
I don’t think Google is the cesspool, I think Google is a search engine for an internet that is the cesspool. We’re moving to the vision of information services that were pioneered by AOL, Prodigy, etc. Honestly, we’re there already.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  We were already there when Google was the hot thing all the nerds loved. At the time their search was a way to cut through that, not the primary window into it. The cesspool isn’t Google, now it’s just hosted by them.

emptyparadise 5y ago

I'm amazed that there isn't anything like uBlock Origin for search results.

gerdesj 5y ago
"My eyes are bent, my back is grey etc" I think we have loads of tools to play with but fundamentally there is a problem when you are fighting with your search engine to find stuff you want to find. My laptop (Arch) still has Chromium as default with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, uBlacklist and a few others running. I will be moving back to FF and running a sync server because I am that pissed off and able to do so. I'll also take a few others with me (between 2 and rather more) When I say move back to FF, I'm talking about something like reverting a 10-15 years change. I've always had FF available but it fell short back in the day for long enough for me to move to the Goggle thing. Now I think I'll go back. Noone at G will lament their loss, I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there.
- eitland 5y ago
  > I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there. I'm already here :-) If 5 or so devs read it and change too and they start mentioning it then we have a fast chain reaction. Just look at WhatsApp or even Microsoft or IBM: they seemed unstoppable but are very nuch just another alternative today.
aarchi 5y ago
If you're referring to user-curated search result blocking, that's very easy with DuckDuckGo and uBlock Origin (just block elements like [data-domain="w3schools.com"]; see my comment to the GP). I don't know of any large extant lists like this though.
- derefr 5y ago
  That won't do much if every result on the first page is blocked. Ideally a filter list like this could be pushed to the server side as a per-user preference to go with your query, so that if e.g. the top 10000 results were all filtered out, then you wouldn't have to click through (or infinite-scroll autoload) 100 empty pages before getting anything.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ tries something like this.
  - aarchi 5y ago
    DDG will add more results, if enough are hidden. If I search "w3schools" with my filter, there are only two results on the first page that are not hidden, so it immediately displays the second page below. It seems that they planned for this use case.
drilldrive 5y ago
I used to have an automatic google search-domain blocker. It was just front-end though so if a page would have website domains that were useless, it would only have 1 or 2 results on it unfortunately. Something a little better integrated would be nicer.

smegger001 5y ago

I wish i could have 2010 google search as a alternative to 2021 google search.

gerdesj 5y ago
How so? I haven't seen much change apart from that crappy yellow streak of piss thing that dribbles on pages. How do you recall 2010 search? (I suspect I've lost it a bit - I'm 50.5 years old)
- smegger001 5y ago
  In general i had more relevent results on my first search qurry compared to now admitedly thats hard to prove as i can't rerun the search side by side for a comparison now. additionally ads were firmly separated into a colored box away from actual results
  - wernercd 5y ago
    As mentioned, I removing the think the rose colored glasses won't put lipstick on this pig. Google Search (and not sure how Bing or similar would do better, baring their censorship problems) is increasingly a minefield... This is the same problem with something like WoW classic... you can get the game that existed 15 years ago. But even if it is the exact same game, the world itself isn't. Online walkthroughs, videos, modding knowledge, theory crafting, etc. Those things are much more fleshed out today so even if the system didn't change 1 bit, WoW Original vs WoW Classic are really two separate games. Likewise... if you dropped Google Original down today? I'd love to see how fast it would get owned by these sorts of operations that have had a decade+ of practice in skills like CEO that didn't exist in 2010. You had more relevant results? That wouldn't change because companies live and die off of SEO now and didn't then. Highlighted ads are such a small thing on the website when compared to getting a full front page of the same Stack Overflow answers in 20 different websites that all have SO cloned and reskinned.
tempestn 5y ago
Problem is, I expect 2010 google search would be considerably worse now than it was in 2010, because "SEO" has had another decade to evolve.

oska 5y ago

I appreciate a lot of what you're saying in this comment but I disagree with this sentiment: > not the Ads - that's fine In my strongly held opinion, push advertising is not fine and it's the root cause of all the problems you are discussing. We will only exit this mess that the web has become when everyone blocks push advertising by default. People should only see advertising when they are interested in being advertised to, e.g. sites you consciously choose to go to that advertise products & services, like the old Yellow Pages phonebooks.

p5a0u9l 5y ago

Comparing Google now to Alta Vista is not very helpful. They don't get to rest on their laurels. Search is less helpful now, and it's not clear to me that they care enough to do something about it.

lupire 5y ago
You mean besides spending far more on people and computers than any other company, perhaps combined?
- p5a0u9l 5y ago
  You're giving their entire search budget credit for dealing with spam results? My observation is that it's bad and has been for some time. They are either unable or unwilling to solve the problem.

Spooky23 5y ago

I don’t think Google is the cesspool, I think Google is a search engine for an internet that is the cesspool. We’re moving to the vision of information services that were pioneered by AOL, Prodigy, etc. Honestly, we’re there already.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
We were already there when Google was the hot thing all the nerds loved. At the time their search was a way to cut through that, not the primary window into it. The cesspool isn’t Google, now it’s just hosted by them.