I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
Yeah, it’s not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they’re covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I’m not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
Google got outsmarted. I feel like there’s maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
What is a good search engine these days? I use DuckDuckGo but I don’t find it’s very sensitive to local content, like if I’m looking up an obituary I end up switching to Google. Any more precise and privacy oriented search engines?
I just started using this one today: https://docs.searxng.org/ and it did a great job for what i needed. I never heard of it before, but found the link on an old Lemmy post.
I don’t know how it would work for other people with other needs, but i needed to find graphic designers to help me with a project. DuckDuckGo kept giving me hundreds of results from a handful of big companies, but i wanted small companies and individuals. Found exactly what i needed on the first search using this engine.
I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
Yeah, it’s not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they’re covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I’m not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
Google got outsmarted. I feel like there’s maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
What is a good search engine these days? I use DuckDuckGo but I don’t find it’s very sensitive to local content, like if I’m looking up an obituary I end up switching to Google. Any more precise and privacy oriented search engines?
I just started using this one today: https://docs.searxng.org/ and it did a great job for what i needed. I never heard of it before, but found the link on an old Lemmy post.
I don’t know how it would work for other people with other needs, but i needed to find graphic designers to help me with a project. DuckDuckGo kept giving me hundreds of results from a handful of big companies, but i wanted small companies and individuals. Found exactly what i needed on the first search using this engine.
I’m a big fan of Kagi.
I don’t care how good it is, but I’m not paying for a search engine.
Your loss because it’s actually good. There’s also a free version.