Blackmist comments on Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment: “Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was.”

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 15 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I remember Google coming out and changing everything.

It had billions of pages instead of millions.

It returned results in seconds, and by seconds I mean 2-3, not 60.

Everything else became irrelevant overnight.

permalink

fedilink

source

hideshow 7 child comments

[–] sirboozebum@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Now Google search is shit.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 5 child comments

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

it's not just google

for the past year or so I've been telling people that DDG is so much better as it actually returns the results you're looking for, which Google stopped doing. except in the past few months, the same thing is happening there now too.

I don't know if it's fuckery with the search engines, people gaming SEO, ads, or if it's just the sheer quantity of shit that's on the internet now, but it's at least half of the time now that I go to search something and it's not in the top half dozen results. and sometimes I can't even find it at all, despite knowing that it definitely exists out there.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 3 child comments

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

DDG been shit for years. I went for it when their campaign was about not being in q bubble and getting unfiltered results. For yesrs everything that came back was hyper local. Search a name you get a doctor or history or spelling correction of someone in my town of 30,000 people or their ancestor. Turn off location puts something generic in top place and then everything else after as normal.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

[–] ElectricTrombone@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

It's the web in general. Pages that have been meticulously altered to score high on the latest search engines so they get the most visibility. I remember several times where the top results were obviously LLM generated text scraped from multiple other pages. Tons and tons of text with absolutely zero substance on the topic I was trying to learn about.

I switched to using Startpage as my search engine now. It works great. It feels like being transported back in time. It gets the results I want. Less websites full of AI generated fluff articles.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago*

DDG has been shit for longer than a few months.

StartPage still gives me decent results, and my understanding is that it uses google somehow in the backend, so the capability is still there.

It's (Google) just been polluted by all of the AI and personalized ad bullshit

permalink

fedilink

source

parent