Search engine results are getting worse, research confirms
www.theregister.com
'Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam,' says study
      • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        211·
        2 years ago

        That’s not what we’re talking about. Ad blockers don’t do anything to fix Google’s search algorithm

        • Kbobabob@lemmy.worldEnglish
          53·
          2 years ago

          I understand the post OP but I’m replying to a comment. Specifically this part…

          It just became an ad-ridden hellhole.

          • MaggiWuerze@feddit.deEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            The ads you see injected in your search result as “sponsored” are not the only way Googles Ad interests affect your search results. They are actively manipulating your search queries to make them point more towards their paying customers wanted result without you noticing.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.worldBannedEnglish
    245·
    2 years ago

    Here’s my theory… Google wants to artificially fuck up it’s search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it’s going to be doing that by giving it’s own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that’s my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.

    • skarlow181@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      2 years ago

      It’s much simpler than that. Google is an ad company, not a search company. SEO spam gives them ad clicks just the same as quality content, if not more so. As long as they don’t became bad enough that everybody switches to the competition, they simply don’t have to care.

      • HessiaNerd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        2 years ago

        SEO spam gives them ad clicks

        It does? I thought the point of SEO was to show up in search results without having to pay for keyword placement.

        • skarlow181@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          It’s not about the ads on Google.com, but the ads on the SEO sites themselves, those are also served by Google. Ever heard of DoubleClick? That’s also Google. If Google Search would give you good clean non-commercial sites without ads, they would lose money.

          • MaggiWuerze@feddit.deEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Exactly. Google has an incentive to send you to the most ad infested seo garbage, that just barely answers your search.

  • northendtrooper@lemmy.caEnglish
    249·
    2 years ago

    I’m finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I’ll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.

    Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn’t really exist anymore.

  • sino@feddit.deEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    I’m surprised in most posts I’ve read about this there wasn’t a mention of Yacy which is a P2P distributed indexer / search engine. It heavily focuses on privacy. I’ve used it in the past and it worked great for my use cases to bypass censorship. It’s still actively developed after all the years. Would definitely recommend it or try it out as an replacement. The installation and usage is fairy simply.

  • lntl@lemmy.mlEnglish
    34·
    2 years ago

    FCC should impose regulations on search providers to make searching with Google’s competition more cumbersome and less useful. You know, ‘level the playing field’