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Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be j
by sgt 2mo ago
Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.
- roysting 2mo ago[dead]
- gspr 2mo agoThey're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace. I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries. I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough. (Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)
- onli 2mo agoBrave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.
- gspr 2mo agoThank you for your suggestion. I think I've discounted Brave automatically because my brain is numb to the dime-a-dozen chromium browsers out there. I'll definitely give the search a try!
- spiderfarmer 2mo agoIf I recall correctly Brave scrapes the web via their users, cannot be individually disallowed in robots.txt and Brandon Eich is conversing in a pretty hostile manner in every thread about him or his company.
- GreenVulpine 2mo ago[dead]
- onli 2mo agoI'm not in the brave ecosystem otherwise nor a big fan. But the search engine was competitive with google when it was still cliqz, before it was shut down there and the leftovers bought by brave. And it still works really well. Even if brave were problematic it would be the lesser evil to me.
- GolfPopper 2mo agoI stopped paying attention to Brave years ago when it started fiddling with advertising-linked cryptocurrency and content injection. Is there any reason I should extend it any trust now?
- ehnto 2mo agoUnsurprisingly all search engines seem to be struggling with AI content sites as well. It's rare to get human articles, sometimes rare to even get authorative websites. It's frequently a bot site with a plausible enough name like, potterspainterly.com or medhealthdirect or something with oddly specific articles written in the last year.
- Gigachad 2mo agoThis is the root problem. The idea that Google is deliberately sabotaging search seems far less likely than the idea that the internet is mostly garbage and SEO slop.
- mittensc 2mo agoperhaps this would not be a problem if google did not directly monetize AI Slop... for that matter why even include AI crap in search.
- Gigachad 2mo agoThe Google conspiracy has been getting shared for long before AI slop came in to the picture. The fact is that SEO people got too good at their jobs and filled the search results with junk.
- mittensc 2mo agoGoogle can properly classify email spam. They should be able to fight this as well. Problem is they are the ones funding the poor quality spam and they're in turn profiting by taking money from advertisers.
- Nasrudith 2mo agoSpamming can be found by metadata and reports. There is no "this site is absolute crap" button for them to find useful feedback in searches.
- gostsamo 2mo agoKagi is not russian. The founder is from Serbia and the company is american. PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.
- germandiago 2mo agoProbably what is happening here is that in the race for AI, which, whether we like it or not, means power and control, Google crafted things in a way that it does not do "self-competition" by their old search engine. Idk, just throwing ideas aloud here.
- roysting 2mo ago[dead]
- drysine 2mo ago> there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products Why not?
- matkoniecz 2mo agoIn my case: Russian state is my direct enemy and most likely to invade my country. And would do it if they would consider success likely. Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences, so I dislike idea of even very indirectly funding them. And I support actions that are harmful to Russian economy, also when they are harmful to me - as long as it is not too badly balanced. As this is much cheaper than directly participating in war. (I am from Poland) PS Yes, I understand that at some point there are some indirect effects that you cannot avoid. I also understand if for some people paying Kagi that pays tiny fraction of that to Yandex that is paying taxes in Russia which funds their wars is too tenuous connection to care.
- inigyou 2mo agoI think at this point Russia is failing so hard they don't need a 100% boycott any more. 99.9% is enough.
- drysine 2mo ago>Russian state is my direct enemy and most likely to invade my country. And would do it if they would consider success likely. What makes you think so? >Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences What do you mean?
- maximinus_thrax 2mo ago> What makes you think so? Your resident propagandists like Solovyov, Dugin and Medvedev are very explicit about invading former warsaw pact countries when they're not threatening Europe with nukes. > Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences They didn't teach you about the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in your russian school? Of course not, it doesn't fit the great patriotic war narrative. It's about that time when your country's leadership was friendly with the nazis and decided to split eastern europe between themselves. Look, a picture of stalin shaking hands with a nazi: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H27337%2C_Moskau%2C_Stalin_und_Ribbentrop_im_Kreml.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Bundesar...
- casey2 2mo agoThat's certainly the goal, to drive more users to AI by making the other option worse. The real question is when do you put a stop to it. When brain implants are 2x as productive are you going to say nah? It's times like these were you are supposed to take a step back and consider what you are actually producing and why.
- apothegm 2mo agoHow is Kagi indirectly Russian?
- matkoniecz 2mo agoThey are repackaging bunch of search engine results, including Yandex (and paying for it). Yandex is Russian. I would not describe it as Kagi being indirectly Russian.
- sgt 2mo ago> I would not describe it as Kagi being indirectly Russian. What do you mean? That Kagi is directly Russian? Paying a russian provider isn't against the law and at some point we need to bring Russia back into the warmth of the West.
- inigyou 2mo agoYou need to get over your Russophobia, because Kagi is actually good. Or else make your own Yandex.
- duskdozer 2mo agoThis is just papering over it individually, but https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist is the only thing that makes searching bearable for me now.
- spiderfarmer 2mo agoThat's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss. It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names). And it's not working. A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all. Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content. It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working. Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google. My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money. He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only. "Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content. We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.
- mschuster91 2mo ago> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure. Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.
- spiderfarmer 2mo agoIf ChatGPT goes bust, they'll find another ChatGPT, not another Google. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.
- mschuster91 2mo ago
- sph 2mo agoThe Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with other teenage OS nerds like me, and of course participated in the nascent osdev.org forum. To note that all of those websites were readily found through Google, and interlinked with their own topic webrings. Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left. Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.
- shoobiedoo 2mo agoOn a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage. I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.
- wickedsight 2mo agoAbout 15 years ago, I won a phone in a contest. Last week I tried to find information about it, but I couldn't. No AI, nor Google could find anything the contest I won it in. When people say "the internet is forever" that can certainly be true, but it isn't for everything.
- sgt 2mo agoThat reminds me - my wife had a friend who was killed by a shark (no joke). There were newspaper articles, but Google has completely forgotten about this and the newspapers are often behind a paywall, changed their URL's or simply the article vanished from those sites as well, which certainly doesn't help.
- account42 2mo agoI wonder how libraries, who have traditionally been the ones to archive the news, have kept up with everything moving online and now being subscription-holed. Hopefully it's not just the Internet Archive doing this, which has its own problems.
- sgt 2mo agoI bet the intelligence agencies are keeping track, though. The likes of CIA and Mossad, at the very least.
- Multicomp 2mo agoMy library system has an aggressive book weeding policy where books that haven't circulated enough in about 2 years get binned. the excuse is other libraries have a copy available for inter library loan, but of course, those libraries have to weed as well. so no they are not archiving their own core books let alone periodicals
- armchairhacker 2mo agoKagi
- Gigachad 2mo agoKagi can’t solve the fact that the internet itself has gone to shit. The independent forums are largely gone, the mainstream social media’s have all locked down and been spammed with AI slop.
- Seattle3503 2mo agoA lot of the time I use Kagi to find the Reddit post or Wikipedia page I need. There isn't much else.
- matkoniecz 2mo agoThey only repackage what Google et all returns. Or have they started own indexing?
- inigyou 2mo agoThey use a mixture of sources. Some HNers like to get very angry because one of the sources is Yandex, which is Russian.
- Lammy 2mo agoHere's a Kagi search for the first situation mentioned in the article; you decide: https://kagi.com/search?q=sunset&r=us&sh=CuGH82dPbwxj9_b2i8YIDA https://kagi.com/search?q=sunset&r=us&sh=CuGH82dPbwxj9_b2i8Y...
- neysofu 2mo agoKagi is not immune to this (it's the substrate itself that's losing quality, not just search) but it's a decent antidote.
- sgt 2mo agoSo.. how do we design a Kagi, or a parallel Internet, that is immune to this? There's clearly a market.
- inigyou 2mo agoTry Marginalia. It's a breath of fresh air. It probably won't find what you're looking for because whatever you're looking for probably doesn't exist in the small web.
- bogzz 2mo agoI've been using duckduckgo exclusively for two weeks now, and I haven't needed to go back to Google even once yet.
- evdubs 2mo agoDuckduckgo has been incredibly worse with results for me for the past year. I had used Duckduckgo for about a decade, and now it is just littered with AI generated content for search results. I recently switched to a search engine that uses Google results.
- taude 2mo agogoogle searches have been terrible for a long time, which is why i have to kind of index all the links and blog posts of use from hackernews....
- backlava12 2mo agoThe combination of mass SEO spam/slop and Google's intentional lobotomization of search has lead to it being next to useless. I also strongly suspect Google censors topics at the whims of various government agencies (this was very obvious during COVID and leading up to the 2024 election).
- alightsoul 2mo agoI noticed that, on Google after a while, news are moved to like the 5th page of results or even further back. They are also gone from the news tab. Like news are de ranked after 1 or 2 weeks so like you have to know the name of the article or the month it was published to find it again