I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
I’ve started to use Qwant a few months ago when bing and duckduckgo started to give me result I had filtered out in my search. But now it is way past this stage. When I look for something I find a lot of related topic but nothing about the topic I’ve searched for.
I notice it was suddently become much worst about 10~15 days ago*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it’s just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.
The other day I asked google what season we were in. The AI got it wrong, and that’s like the simplest question ever.
It has definitely been getting worse over years, but I specifically meant the last couple of weeks. I could still find what I needed between all the garbage… now I can’t even find it after adjusting the search multiple times.
Don’t forget your glue on your pizza! Can’t have a pizza without glue…
It’s not just glue it‘s Elmer‘s Glue. They still have some standard.
Elmer can go Fudd himself. Store brand non-toxic craft paste is just as flavorful an half the price.
We’re talking about glue not craft paste. One can be launched across the room at an unsuspecting teacher, the other taste fantastic.
If we could roll back the internet 10-15 years, everything would be much better.
Google Maps is utter crap lately too. It seems to be making up locations, and several times in the past month, it’s taken me to the wrong place. It’s getting almost as bad as Apple Maps
Hey now, Apple Maps is more accurate, provides better directions where I am, has more up to date satellites imagery, and has been this way for years. I only use Google Maps to search because Yelp is god awful. I live in a rapidly expanding area and all of that matters.
I went to a low data plan and learned that Google Maps consumes a vast amount of data (relative to my plan limit), and I download all my maps and had location off. 1 single bus route between two pinned locations was 30Mb. Maps and search could be so simple but they are insanely bloated.
Oh god, yes this too. All the sponsored location spam drives me crazy. I love when I zoom in to a location and it doesn’t mark ANY of the shops besides STARBUCKStm
Apple Maps is fantastic for navigation, but it doesn’t have enough locations on it. I use Gmaps for searching locations and apple for navigating.
My favorite one recently is constantly telling me to keep straight to remain on a highway like 7 times before I need to actually get off the highway. Glad I turned off the sound a long time ago otherwise I would have lost my fucking mind.
We have express (toll) lanes on some highways around me, and the navigation system loses its damn mind every time. “Keep going straight”, “continue going straight”, “proceed in a trajectory perpendicular to your current trajectory”; I fucking get it!
Perpendicular would actually have you make a 90 degree turn, you are thinking of parallel.
Derp, i blame 10 hour shift brain…
Try finding old band photos. Basically impossible
People still use Google?
Lmao. Don’t kid yourself, a vast majority do. Id bet 80-90%
Probably 99%. This question was only meant to be taken as “I am above the common pleb, those idiots”
Those poor bastards
This is what I call the linux bubble. People who use linux and are used to alternate solutions, which may offer better performance than the norm. Then they surround themselves with other like minded people. So much so that they begin to forget that they are using alternatives rather than the norm. Despite what benefits they gain from alternatives, some people can’t grasp that they are, in fact, alternatives.
Twitter has 368 million monthly users. I find it to be a cesspool of hate, racism, and right wing agenda.
So you would think mastodon or bluesky would have equal or better numbers.
Bluesky has 9.7 million monthly users, which includes a huge recent boost because of brazil ceasing twitters ability to operate. I think that alone was 2 million users.
And mastodon has 975,000 monthly users.
So yes, despite it’s flaws, twitter is still the default in microblogging. By a LOT. But I’m sure the feeling around here is “who still uses twitter???”.
Everybody. Same way everybody uses google. Same way everybody uses instagram. And it’s not even close to being close.
The fact I’m most flabbergasted about is that only a third of people use password managers by default. An independent American surveysource: bitwarden over 2000 “random” Internet users shows 34% use a password manager. The randomness of this survey is probably skewed, which would make the total percentage even lower in actuality.
Which is insane since they’ve mostly been using iOSs or Androids built in password manager for as long as that’s been a thing on both. Doubt they even realize that’s what it is though.
You can’t actually believe the default search engine in most configurations isn’t used.
My question was mostly a light jab at OP
You honestly though the most used search engine has been abandoned by everyone? Maybe share what you’re using instead of just being pretentious?
I totally honestly believed that. I’m just so naive, how do I get by in life? Thank goodness you’re here to set me straight. What would I do without you? How did you get so good at computers? You must be some kind of wizard.
I always feel a sense of dissonance (I think that’s the right word?) when I see posts like this. Everyone seems to be talking about this, but I haven’t noticed a difference. Honestly, when I look up something, what I’m looking for is usually in the first few results. Not really sure how to feel about my experience being so different from others.
Are you pretty consumercentric, or do you have some niche interests as well? Google is great at basic tasks and delivering product results and promoted content, and if that’s what you’re usually looking for it probably works great for you. People have trouble these days trying to find the specific stuff. Google used to really excel at this in the past, but now it’s buried under pages of promoted content or pages SEO gamed to the top but not being very helpful
They fucked it all up with that AI bullshit awhile ago and it hasn’t recovered. I use start page now and am much happier.
If you use Firefox you can add a Search Engine that removes the google cruft.
In about:config browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh Boolean, hit the plus sign to add. Exit out of that screen. Then go to Search engines in Settings and “Add” [ whatever name you want to call it ] as a new search engine. And paste this URL and save it. https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
You will see that it deletes everything but search when you use it. You can also just use the url but you must replace the %s with your search term, like red+espresso. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=red+espresso&udm=14
I’m sure this works for other browsers, I just use Firefox.
I have tried many times to do exactly what you said, and I still am not getting the option to add a custom search engine.
Any advice you have is appreciated.
This is correct (your screen). Now go to your Firefox Settings, click on Search on the left side, scroll down to the Search Shortcuts section and below that box is a button labeled Add. You will get a box to add a search engine, the Alias field is optional. Make sure after you add it, there is a blue check in front of it on the list in the box or it’s invisible.
If you’re going to use it as a one-off, you can put the udm part first, making it much easier to type into:
Ooo I haven’t heard of this, thank you! The amount of garbage they’ve added is absurd.
I’ve already added a new search engine like this, but what does the about:config setting do?
Returns the add custom search engine button. Which for some reason, has been hidden by default.
Oh my god, thank you for this. You solved a year long sufferfest for this internet stranger because of that greyed out button. Every god-damned guide online points you towards that button and I could not find the solution for it. What the fuck Mozilla
You can right click the URL bar for sites that support the OpenSearch XML standard. Which I guess is what they wanted to replace it with. But I don’t really know why they removed the button to a about: config setting. Could at least be a checkbox or something to enable.
Hm interesting. I guess that is part of why tenbluelinks.org even needs to exist. Because a custom one is now a PITA. Thanks.
I love you.
i’ve been manually curating your search results the past few weeks. Sorry boss, i’ll do better.
If you can’t do better, then at least add some cute cat pictures in it. At least then I’ll feel a crumb of joy with every wasted effort!
I was honestly getting so frustrated the other day at work when searching for something very specific and coming up empty handed. Tried DuckDuckGo and even fucking Bing and found what I needed in a matter of seconds. Google search is trash now. I have to go to the second page or further just to find something that isn’t an ad, AI response, or reddit. None of which are helpful.
I’ve been swapping around search engines too, but they still seem bad. I always end up back at Google just because I know how to manipulate the search terms better.
DuckDuckGo is just Bing with a duck on it.
Regardless, I still got better results than Google.
Google makes money on ads. They make $300-$400 annually per user by displaying ads.
They are motivated to tarpit you in order to show you more ads.
Giving you your results quickly and efficiently costs them revenue.
Use kagi, or another search engine.
I remember Google saying like 2 decades ago that it was actually their goal to get you off of their website as quickly as possible. If you clicked on a link, and then clicked back in less than 30 seconds, then Google would consider that search result to be not what you were looking for.
The people who said that are long gone.
Golden parachuted away
More to it then that. tl;dr The engineers in charge at google were pushed to the side by the ads people.
Oh wow. Thanks for the added details
Is it sorta built similar to google? I keep switching search engines but Im SOOOOO used to google that its hard for me to adjust. I need something that kinda looks like google, but I can both Customize it more and just isnt google.
aHHH NAHHH i just tried it. It’s everything I want BUT THEY MAKE ME PAY TO SEARCH??! fuck no- I’m not about to fork over cash for a Subscriptions to USE THE INTERNET. Sounds really really nice but I’d much rather not. They aught to have it so you can pay for extra perks but paying JUST to search??? I’m good-
The internet has slowly become more and more useless over time since the pandemic. It’s fucking impossible to find anything now. Half the time it’s like I have better luck doing an lan search on my home network than looking it up on Google and I’m not even very deep into the self hosted everything rabbit hole.
It’s like they want us all to be stupid, uninformed and not know how to do anything.
reddit has been 10x more useful than google and this fact alone bothers me to high fucking hell because im STILL BANNED.
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
- ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
- duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
- any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
- marginalia.nu - specifically ‘random’ - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
Aside from DDG, these are all new to me. I’ll take a look this week, thank you.
I shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working
What are quoted strings?
A string is just a collection of characters, in programmer speak. When you use quotation marks in your search to find exactly what you want. If your search was:
dog “fast drive”
Google used to show results that only had both the word “dog” and the joined phrase “fast drive” in the same result. Or tell you there were no results.
Now it feels like Google uses that as a suggestion, giving you “dog” and any combination of “fast drive”, “fast driver”, “fast driving”, or whatever else Google thinks you want, instead of what you asked for. Or if they don’t find it, they serve you up whatever they want, with a small message about there being no matching results.
I didn’t realize. I’m horrified.
You mean when plused strings stopped? Because that was tragic as hell
YEAH WHAT THE FUCK
As a basic bitch that hasn’t gone to page 2 of a google search in years I don’t really notice a difference.
The ai answers, related questions, and ad results are not especially helpful but at the end of the day I will find what I’m looking for.
