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[..]There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was.[..] This is always a strange c

[..]There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was.[..] This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it? And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things? So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?

fernandotakai 3y ago
i.... 100% agree. google still is king for every single type of search i do. specially code related. i've tried again and again to use "Chat-AIs" and they get so much shit wrong while implying they are correct that i just gave up.
cityofdelusion 3y ago
Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.
- gtowey 3y ago
  Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam. Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. I look for recipes a lot. While what I find matches the "SEO-shaped recipe blog page" template mentioned in TFA, nevertheless the results still have the recipe(s) I'm looking for. When I need to fix/build/repair stuff, searching just youtube almost always gets me what I need or want.
  - kridsdale2 3y ago
    I've honestly found GPT4 to be fantastic for every recipe I've tried. I list what I own, say generally what I want, and say either use what I have, or minimize the number of new things I need to buy, and tell me how to make the thing. The instructions are far more legible than SEO spam recipe sites.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  Try finding decent content on gardening…
crazygringo 3y ago
The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time. Google tracks analytics on the quality of its search results, simply by observing which results users click on, how long it takes them, or whether they don't click on anything at all. The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense. What has maybe happened is that Search has improved for the population as whole, but gotten worse for certain subsets of users -- but still a net gain overall. Or alternatively, that the web itself has changed -- that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. (E.g. nobody writes straight-up recipes without tons of intro anymore -- but that's also so they have tons of space to insert ads, it's not about SEO. It's nothing to do with Google.)
- philistine 3y ago
  You’re hiding huge swaths of unforeseen consequences. Do you honestly think that when Google is presented with an improvement in search results that would reduce its revenue that they choose the improvement?
- blindhippo 3y ago
  I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now). The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse. But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. The reason that I don't think it's this is because often there are sites that offer exactly what I'm looking for. Google doesn't surface them in my results, but other engines do.
- 3y ago
JohnFen 3y ago
> And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? My hypothesis is that it depends on how you search. For me, Google has become unambiguously poor, and I've stopped using it because I get bad results. But I think that the reason for that is Google's use of AI (not the LLM stuff, but the stuff they started using a number of years ago). Google is clearly trying to interpret "what I really mean" from my queries instead of just taking them at face value, and it's awful at doing that. For me. It's obviously good at it for other people. It may have to do with me actively doing my best to prevent Google from tracking me.
pxx 3y ago
I think people much prefer thinking they know something with a superficial overview (see things like the popularity of TED talks). Responses from LLMs are great for this: they look like a cohesive summary but they often end up being total bullshit. Digging through search results to find what you need is work. Having something confident make you believe an alternate truth is not. People who actually try to use code output from chatbots quickly realize it just only _looks_ like code of the right shape and quality. There have been many blog posts and comments here touting how great the code ChatGPT generated is while the given example response is complete nonsense once you look a little deeper.
adamweld 3y ago
It's not that Google search has necessarily gotten worse, but it's lagging behind the shitiffication of the web caused by SEO and the new features (People Also Ask QA synopses) have absolutely horrible accuracy. ChatGPT and other LLMs are also absolutely horrible on accuracy, don't get me wrong. But, here's an example of what's wrong with Google. I search something like "Can mangoes grow in Washington state?" and at the top of my results is the condensed "People Also Ask" question answer result. These attempt to read and condense a webpage (of questionable accuracy) into an answer for my query, but they are often full of shit. For example expanding "Where are mangoes grown in WA" shows an answer about Western Australia rather than Washington. Another answer tells me "yes" but when I read the actual article it clearly says "no, they won't survive".
- felix318 3y ago
  I find it interesting that people write Google queries in correct, often polite English as if there is something intelligent on the other side. When I try this query: "where mango grow washington" I seem to get decent results, but the human-sounding query does return garbage. Perhaps the problem with Google is that it's trying too hard to convince people that it's smarter than it really is. I treat it as a stupid, mindless computer and it works fine most of the time.
  - zoomablemind 3y ago
    Ha, I clearly remember when natural language queries were encouraged for searching. I understood that it was the path to Assistant. Still, I agree that keyword search remains practical.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Yupe, keywords is still how I search most of the time unless I’m literally looking for a question (or something close to it) hoping to hit a Stack Overflow and clones / Reddit post asking that question. You can tell who all the old people are that were using search engines since back in the day. LOL All I ever expect from a search engine is it find pages with the words in my query (and maybe exclude certain words as specified), anything else is just gravy.
Macha 3y ago
I've certainly found that google results for me are worse than they used to be, and that DuckDuckGo is a lot more competitive and the !g bang gets used less and provides less improvement to results than it formerly did. I've been online since the time when people were moving from Yahoo to Google, so I'm not a gen Zer with different search patterns to Google's historical audiences. I'm not quite sure of the reason. There's a couple of possibilities: 1. DDG is relying on Bing for a lot of their search data, maybe bing's just got better, or DDG have configured their integration better. I don't feel that DDG's had a significant improvement, it definitely feels like they've caught google on the way down more so. 2. Google losing the SEO war. As it gets easier to run and monetise blogspam sites, more of them exist, and as time goes on, a longer tail of topics get "served" by these sites. Unlike the spam of years past which tried to convince Google that their viagra selling site was really about top ten movie downloads, these sites are nominally about the topic the user searched for, so maybe Google is having a harder time trying to evaluate "quality". LLMs are being given a lot of the blame for this, but this is an older phenomenon than that, there were plenty of sites doing e.g. templated articles fed product spec sheet, or pay a minimum wage intern to rephrase the wikipedia page before that. 3. I've cut down my usage of Google services to basically just YouTube and YouTube Music. I also run ublock origin pretty much universally. Maybe my de-Googling has just been successful to the point that Google doesn't have a accurate profile for me anymore, and this has more of an impact on search than I expected.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Google is degrading for sure but DDG is much, much, much worse.
- ForHackernews 3y ago
  > Google losing the SEO war. What are they losing, though? Isn't this more like a snake eating its own tail? Or the human-centipede of online advertising? I'm not convinced serving quality results is really in line with Google's incentives. If they trick me into clicking some garbage and have to go back and try again, isn't that another shot at showing me ads?
- worrycue 3y ago
  I don’t know if Google has degraded. I mean I haven’t noticed it. Maybe I just search mostly common stuff. For niche stuff that Google doesn’t know much about, search engines like DDG seem to know even less.
browningstreet 3y ago
I was discussing this recently on a hike and I joked, "SEO broke the Gen Z brain". In my own personal experience, I think the younger generations care less about search. They just don't use it much, nor do they value the information & cultural pipeline in which search is valuable.
Melatonic 3y ago
It has either gotten worse or there is just more crap websites out there to clog things up. They also have made it harder to search for "exact" terms (you now have to use quotes and check a box).
chrisnight 3y ago
I myself have found a very clear, objectively measurable, falloff for Google search results when it comes to non-NLP searches. The quotes operator is designed to search for pages containing exactly the phrase given, however I have found that Google has many times where it yields no results, and then does a “did you mean <no quotes>”, while other search engines can easily find the piece of information that was given. No matter the reason for why this is happening, it has dampened my usage of Google considerably because Google doesn’t seem to be able to handle the most basic of queries anymore.
- amf12 3y ago
  I just tried to search for "falloff for Google search results", as an example of random quoted string from your comment. Google Search returned one result - your comment. Then I replaced 'Google' with 'Bing', and Google returned results without the quote which were irrelevant - but that makes total sense to me.
- lezojeda 3y ago
  I've stopped trying to use the quotes operator because it clearly started ignoring it many years ago. It's very frustrating.
  - prepend 3y ago
    You have to do 2-3 clicks to select “verbatim.” And there’s no way to set this as a preference or setting. It’s weird. I suspect it’s more expensive to search this way or something because it’s such a basic feature that they haven’t done for a decade.
    - coryrc 3y ago
      There is a way to have Verbatim the default, at least by changing the default search engine settings in the browser. Ctrl-k in my Chrome uses a verbatim search (can't remember exactly how I set it up).
- Nition 3y ago
pault 3y ago
The proliferation of LLM spam websites has made it completely impossible to search for any video game related information. Every search returns hundreds of sites with the same garbage chat GPT articles derived from Reddit or game wikis. Ironically, this makes the source material impossible to find. It’s really dire.
- prepend 3y ago
  I’ve been playing Divinity2 Original Sin and have googled maybe 30 terms. And get good results. Even on ddg. Almost always in the top five results always first page.
  - ConSeannery 3y ago
    Try that for baldurs gate 3. The trash results that are returned might have what you're looking for, after scrolling past the SEO highschool essay style intro and after closing the mid page JavaScript embedded nag window.
    - gundmc 3y ago
      I've probably searched 100 BG3 related questions on Google in the last week or two and have always found what I needed. Including one particularly panicked search because I sold the ceremonial weapons from Rosalyn Monastery.
    - throw9away6 3y ago
      The results are functional but the sites they are on are absolute trash and should never be listed so high if it weren’t for SEO tricks
ShamelessC 3y ago
> And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people Yeah that claim doesn’t get made in any sort of widespread way. There are variants of it that do (“kids only know how to use their phones not keyboards”) but your specific wording here makes me think this claim came from some hyper specific bubble or from your own subconscious. Care to clarify or explain what I’m missing?
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  Those claims mainly come from people in schools, universities, youth orgs and companies. So the ones who should know it best I would think, as they work with young people all the time. This does not seem to be a particular hyper specific bubble. Of course, complaints about youth are not new, the young people are by nature lacking experience and knowledge, that's a given, and so are complaints about those lacks. But lately, there is a new type of complaints, which is about technology and specifically computers. This is atypically, as for the last decades, young people usually had the benefit of being more competent with new technologies, as they grew up with them. This was a defining difference between the generations for a long time. And now this seems to disappear, or at least change. And after thinking about, it makes sense. Technology today has reached a plateau of quality and comfort, has removed the struggles of the past, and is now cheap and widely used in society. That's very different from the previous decades, where tech was an uphill-battle, where computers were expensive and only used by those who had demand for it. Tech today has saturated society, and this also changed perception. Now more people can evaluate the actual ability of people. And old people today have legit reasons to learn and use technology. And the most notable change is: the old people today, are the middle-aged and young people from decades ago, meaning they are the ones who had already in the past reasons to learn technologies. So comparing old with young today in those aspects, is very different from 20, 30 years ago. And it seems, the young people today have finally lost their benefit of early access to technology, and now they compete again with experience and knowledge. So regarding Googles search this means, maybe the youth is just lacking good google-fu, which older users with more experience have. Or they generally have a difference stance on how the search should work, because they have no deeper understanding on what the Search is, what it should deliver and can deliver, and what not. Some of the comments here go very strong in that direction, that people have a very different approach on what they expect from Google. So again, it's a difference in perception.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I’m increasingly doing niche searches on other sites like Reddit, here, Twitter etc… though often google with specific dates is better than those. The rest of my searches are going to ddg after Neeva shut down and Kagi hasn’t fit the bill (though I’m not remembering why). But if there’s something I need to buy or do commerce- google is by far the best. So I try and use it the least.
jamesfinlayson 3y ago
I still find Google to be fine but I recently I was searching for an exact phrase that I knew was on a website and got nothing. I tried DuckDuckGo and got the one exact page that I was looking for. There have been recent discussions about Google pruning their indexes and I think that might be part of it - I've noticed in Google Webmaster Tools for some of personal sites that previously indexed pages have become unindexed with no given reason.
internet101010 3y ago
Yeah quite the opposite for me - I have to use Google to search YouTube because YouTube's search is completely unusable now. If I want to search for a video I go to Google and click the Videos tab instead of going to YouTube. YouTube's search gives you like three possible matches but then pollutes the page with "you might like" and "people also watched" videos, all of which are simply invalid results.
- worrycue 3y ago
  YouTube search doesn’t even respect the “exclude word(s)” operator “-“ anymore. Freaking useless. Imagine trying to find videos on the Cyberpunk genre and getting nothing but videos on that buggy video game that came out a few years ago.
fooblat 3y ago
In my recent experience, Google search is totally broken for anything that is hard to find or uncommon. I recently search for "raspberry pi uart hat" and Google responds with the following: Not many results include the word "uart" so we eliminated it from your search terms. Here are thousands of irrelevant results about random raspberry pi hats you aren't interested in. I don't understand this logic at all.
andersrs 3y ago
Google is good when you know what you're looking for like a specific local business but it's awful when you're trying to find a recipe all you get are wordy life stories. ChatGPT can give me a concise recipe in my preferred units (metric) everything by weight, substitute x for y and tell me the calories. Phind.com is great for programming queries. I run a fairly popular web game (Redactle https://redactle.net https://redactle.net). Thousands of people play it and there are thousands of links on social media which Google doesn't seem to care about. When you search 'redactle' you should be getting my site or a clone of the original setup by a fan; This is how it works on Bing and DDG. But on Google the top results are ad-infested link-farm game sites, a domain squatter page at redactle .com and crap like that. They simply don't recognize the social proof that is out there. A thousand https://spammygames{1..N}.com https://spammygames{1..N}.com sites linking to each other beats out all those people linking from reddit,fb,x etc.

fernandotakai 3y ago

i.... 100% agree. google still is king for every single type of search i do. specially code related. i've tried again and again to use "Chat-AIs" and they get so much shit wrong while implying they are correct that i just gave up.

cityofdelusion 3y ago

Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.

gtowey 3y ago
Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam. Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. I look for recipes a lot. While what I find matches the "SEO-shaped recipe blog page" template mentioned in TFA, nevertheless the results still have the recipe(s) I'm looking for. When I need to fix/build/repair stuff, searching just youtube almost always gets me what I need or want.
- kridsdale2 3y ago
  I've honestly found GPT4 to be fantastic for every recipe I've tried. I list what I own, say generally what I want, and say either use what I have, or minimize the number of new things I need to buy, and tell me how to make the thing. The instructions are far more legible than SEO spam recipe sites.
throw9away6 3y ago
Try finding decent content on gardening…

crazygringo 3y ago

The other thing I don't understand is the idea that Search is somehow becoming less accurate over time. Google tracks analytics on the quality of its search results, simply by observing which results users click on, how long it takes them, or whether they don't click on anything at all. The idea that Search is somehow worsening doesn't make any sense. What has maybe happened is that Search has improved for the population as whole, but gotten worse for certain subsets of users -- but still a net gain overall. Or alternatively, that the web itself has changed -- that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. (E.g. nobody writes straight-up recipes without tons of intro anymore -- but that's also so they have tons of space to insert ads, it's not about SEO. It's nothing to do with Google.)

philistine 3y ago
You’re hiding huge swaths of unforeseen consequences. Do you honestly think that when Google is presented with an improvement in search results that would reduce its revenue that they choose the improvement?
blindhippo 3y ago
I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now). The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse. But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.
JohnFen 3y ago
> that Search is doing better than ever, but some users just don't like what the web offers in response. The reason that I don't think it's this is because often there are sites that offer exactly what I'm looking for. Google doesn't surface them in my results, but other engines do.
3y ago

JohnFen 3y ago

> And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? My hypothesis is that it depends on how you search. For me, Google has become unambiguously poor, and I've stopped using it because I get bad results. But I think that the reason for that is Google's use of AI (not the LLM stuff, but the stuff they started using a number of years ago). Google is clearly trying to interpret "what I really mean" from my queries instead of just taking them at face value, and it's awful at doing that. For me. It's obviously good at it for other people. It may have to do with me actively doing my best to prevent Google from tracking me.

pxx 3y ago

I think people much prefer thinking they know something with a superficial overview (see things like the popularity of TED talks). Responses from LLMs are great for this: they look like a cohesive summary but they often end up being total bullshit. Digging through search results to find what you need is work. Having something confident make you believe an alternate truth is not. People who actually try to use code output from chatbots quickly realize it just only _looks_ like code of the right shape and quality. There have been many blog posts and comments here touting how great the code ChatGPT generated is while the given example response is complete nonsense once you look a little deeper.

adamweld 3y ago

It's not that Google search has necessarily gotten worse, but it's lagging behind the shitiffication of the web caused by SEO and the new features (People Also Ask QA synopses) have absolutely horrible accuracy. ChatGPT and other LLMs are also absolutely horrible on accuracy, don't get me wrong. But, here's an example of what's wrong with Google. I search something like "Can mangoes grow in Washington state?" and at the top of my results is the condensed "People Also Ask" question answer result. These attempt to read and condense a webpage (of questionable accuracy) into an answer for my query, but they are often full of shit. For example expanding "Where are mangoes grown in WA" shows an answer about Western Australia rather than Washington. Another answer tells me "yes" but when I read the actual article it clearly says "no, they won't survive".

felix318 3y ago
I find it interesting that people write Google queries in correct, often polite English as if there is something intelligent on the other side. When I try this query: "where mango grow washington" I seem to get decent results, but the human-sounding query does return garbage. Perhaps the problem with Google is that it's trying too hard to convince people that it's smarter than it really is. I treat it as a stupid, mindless computer and it works fine most of the time.
- zoomablemind 3y ago
  Ha, I clearly remember when natural language queries were encouraged for searching. I understood that it was the path to Assistant. Still, I agree that keyword search remains practical.
- worrycue 3y ago
  Yupe, keywords is still how I search most of the time unless I’m literally looking for a question (or something close to it) hoping to hit a Stack Overflow and clones / Reddit post asking that question. You can tell who all the old people are that were using search engines since back in the day. LOL All I ever expect from a search engine is it find pages with the words in my query (and maybe exclude certain words as specified), anything else is just gravy.

Macha 3y ago

I've certainly found that google results for me are worse than they used to be, and that DuckDuckGo is a lot more competitive and the !g bang gets used less and provides less improvement to results than it formerly did. I've been online since the time when people were moving from Yahoo to Google, so I'm not a gen Zer with different search patterns to Google's historical audiences. I'm not quite sure of the reason. There's a couple of possibilities: 1. DDG is relying on Bing for a lot of their search data, maybe bing's just got better, or DDG have configured their integration better. I don't feel that DDG's had a significant improvement, it definitely feels like they've caught google on the way down more so. 2. Google losing the SEO war. As it gets easier to run and monetise blogspam sites, more of them exist, and as time goes on, a longer tail of topics get "served" by these sites. Unlike the spam of years past which tried to convince Google that their viagra selling site was really about top ten movie downloads, these sites are nominally about the topic the user searched for, so maybe Google is having a harder time trying to evaluate "quality". LLMs are being given a lot of the blame for this, but this is an older phenomenon than that, there were plenty of sites doing e.g. templated articles fed product spec sheet, or pay a minimum wage intern to rephrase the wikipedia page before that. 3. I've cut down my usage of Google services to basically just YouTube and YouTube Music. I also run ublock origin pretty much universally. Maybe my de-Googling has just been successful to the point that Google doesn't have a accurate profile for me anymore, and this has more of an impact on search than I expected.

mvdtnz 3y ago
Google is degrading for sure but DDG is much, much, much worse.
ForHackernews 3y ago
> Google losing the SEO war. What are they losing, though? Isn't this more like a snake eating its own tail? Or the human-centipede of online advertising? I'm not convinced serving quality results is really in line with Google's incentives. If they trick me into clicking some garbage and have to go back and try again, isn't that another shot at showing me ads?
worrycue 3y ago
I don’t know if Google has degraded. I mean I haven’t noticed it. Maybe I just search mostly common stuff. For niche stuff that Google doesn’t know much about, search engines like DDG seem to know even less.

browningstreet 3y ago

I was discussing this recently on a hike and I joked, "SEO broke the Gen Z brain". In my own personal experience, I think the younger generations care less about search. They just don't use it much, nor do they value the information & cultural pipeline in which search is valuable.

Melatonic 3y ago

It has either gotten worse or there is just more crap websites out there to clog things up. They also have made it harder to search for "exact" terms (you now have to use quotes and check a box).

chrisnight 3y ago

I myself have found a very clear, objectively measurable, falloff for Google search results when it comes to non-NLP searches. The quotes operator is designed to search for pages containing exactly the phrase given, however I have found that Google has many times where it yields no results, and then does a “did you mean <no quotes>”, while other search engines can easily find the piece of information that was given. No matter the reason for why this is happening, it has dampened my usage of Google considerably because Google doesn’t seem to be able to handle the most basic of queries anymore.

amf12 3y ago
I just tried to search for "falloff for Google search results", as an example of random quoted string from your comment. Google Search returned one result - your comment. Then I replaced 'Google' with 'Bing', and Google returned results without the quote which were irrelevant - but that makes total sense to me.
lezojeda 3y ago
I've stopped trying to use the quotes operator because it clearly started ignoring it many years ago. It's very frustrating.
- prepend 3y ago
  You have to do 2-3 clicks to select “verbatim.” And there’s no way to set this as a preference or setting. It’s weird. I suspect it’s more expensive to search this way or something because it’s such a basic feature that they haven’t done for a decade.
  - coryrc 3y ago
    There is a way to have Verbatim the default, at least by changing the default search engine settings in the browser. Ctrl-k in my Chrome uses a verbatim search (can't remember exactly how I set it up).
Nition 3y ago

pault 3y ago

The proliferation of LLM spam websites has made it completely impossible to search for any video game related information. Every search returns hundreds of sites with the same garbage chat GPT articles derived from Reddit or game wikis. Ironically, this makes the source material impossible to find. It’s really dire.

prepend 3y ago
I’ve been playing Divinity2 Original Sin and have googled maybe 30 terms. And get good results. Even on ddg. Almost always in the top five results always first page.
- ConSeannery 3y ago
  Try that for baldurs gate 3. The trash results that are returned might have what you're looking for, after scrolling past the SEO highschool essay style intro and after closing the mid page JavaScript embedded nag window.
  - gundmc 3y ago
    I've probably searched 100 BG3 related questions on Google in the last week or two and have always found what I needed. Including one particularly panicked search because I sold the ceremonial weapons from Rosalyn Monastery.
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    The results are functional but the sites they are on are absolute trash and should never be listed so high if it weren’t for SEO tricks

ShamelessC 3y ago

> And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people Yeah that claim doesn’t get made in any sort of widespread way. There are variants of it that do (“kids only know how to use their phones not keyboards”) but your specific wording here makes me think this claim came from some hyper specific bubble or from your own subconscious. Care to clarify or explain what I’m missing?

PurpleRamen 3y ago
Those claims mainly come from people in schools, universities, youth orgs and companies. So the ones who should know it best I would think, as they work with young people all the time. This does not seem to be a particular hyper specific bubble. Of course, complaints about youth are not new, the young people are by nature lacking experience and knowledge, that's a given, and so are complaints about those lacks. But lately, there is a new type of complaints, which is about technology and specifically computers. This is atypically, as for the last decades, young people usually had the benefit of being more competent with new technologies, as they grew up with them. This was a defining difference between the generations for a long time. And now this seems to disappear, or at least change. And after thinking about, it makes sense. Technology today has reached a plateau of quality and comfort, has removed the struggles of the past, and is now cheap and widely used in society. That's very different from the previous decades, where tech was an uphill-battle, where computers were expensive and only used by those who had demand for it. Tech today has saturated society, and this also changed perception. Now more people can evaluate the actual ability of people. And old people today have legit reasons to learn and use technology. And the most notable change is: the old people today, are the middle-aged and young people from decades ago, meaning they are the ones who had already in the past reasons to learn technologies. So comparing old with young today in those aspects, is very different from 20, 30 years ago. And it seems, the young people today have finally lost their benefit of early access to technology, and now they compete again with experience and knowledge. So regarding Googles search this means, maybe the youth is just lacking good google-fu, which older users with more experience have. Or they generally have a difference stance on how the search should work, because they have no deeper understanding on what the Search is, what it should deliver and can deliver, and what not. Some of the comments here go very strong in that direction, that people have a very different approach on what they expect from Google. So again, it's a difference in perception.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I’m increasingly doing niche searches on other sites like Reddit, here, Twitter etc… though often google with specific dates is better than those. The rest of my searches are going to ddg after Neeva shut down and Kagi hasn’t fit the bill (though I’m not remembering why). But if there’s something I need to buy or do commerce- google is by far the best. So I try and use it the least.

jamesfinlayson 3y ago

I still find Google to be fine but I recently I was searching for an exact phrase that I knew was on a website and got nothing. I tried DuckDuckGo and got the one exact page that I was looking for. There have been recent discussions about Google pruning their indexes and I think that might be part of it - I've noticed in Google Webmaster Tools for some of personal sites that previously indexed pages have become unindexed with no given reason.

internet101010 3y ago

Yeah quite the opposite for me - I have to use Google to search YouTube because YouTube's search is completely unusable now. If I want to search for a video I go to Google and click the Videos tab instead of going to YouTube. YouTube's search gives you like three possible matches but then pollutes the page with "you might like" and "people also watched" videos, all of which are simply invalid results.

worrycue 3y ago
YouTube search doesn’t even respect the “exclude word(s)” operator “-“ anymore. Freaking useless. Imagine trying to find videos on the Cyberpunk genre and getting nothing but videos on that buggy video game that came out a few years ago.

fooblat 3y ago

In my recent experience, Google search is totally broken for anything that is hard to find or uncommon. I recently search for "raspberry pi uart hat" and Google responds with the following: Not many results include the word "uart" so we eliminated it from your search terms. Here are thousands of irrelevant results about random raspberry pi hats you aren't interested in. I don't understand this logic at all.

andersrs 3y ago

Google is good when you know what you're looking for like a specific local business but it's awful when you're trying to find a recipe all you get are wordy life stories. ChatGPT can give me a concise recipe in my preferred units (metric) everything by weight, substitute x for y and tell me the calories. Phind.com is great for programming queries. I run a fairly popular web game (Redactle https://redactle.net https://redactle.net). Thousands of people play it and there are thousands of links on social media which Google doesn't seem to care about. When you search 'redactle' you should be getting my site or a clone of the original setup by a fan; This is how it works on Bing and DDG. But on Google the top results are ad-infested link-farm game sites, a domain squatter page at redactle .com and crap like that. They simply don't recognize the social proof that is out there. A thousand https://spammygames{1..N}.com https://spammygames{1..N}.com sites linking to each other beats out all those people linking from reddit,fb,x etc.