I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
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You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that’s just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
I’ve been using Mojeek lately and it looks like their advanced search can do some of that.
https://www.mojeek.com/advanced.html
Reminds me of early Google search.
I have it a test with some operators from the search bar instead of using the form and it did exactly what it was supposed to. I’ll keep this on hand. Thank you.
let us know if you find anything which could be better also, we’re always looking for ways to improve
It’s not just you. At some point, search’s primary purpose went from “finding the information you’re looking for” to “getting paid to put links in front of you”. Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there’s not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
Kagi is pretty awesome
My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.
What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.
Roccat Kone Aimo micro switch gives me “500 best mouse 2024” and such BS and that’s it.
I tried that for a couple of weeks recently and while not dealing with all the bullshit google ads was refreshing, the actual results were often pretty bad.
My bad, I should’ve replied to your comment first!
Have you tried customizing your search settings in SearXNG? I’ve found that tweaking the instance’s default search settings improves the search experience quite a bit
I might look into that later. Thanks.
Thanks! I love it, really works well from my limited testing!
I used priv.au
no worries!🤗
we have gone full circle back to metacrawler.
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I’m going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or “AI” tools predating the LLMs we have now.
It becomes more and more true every day.
Jesus, the “plandemic” explanation for why the Internet is dying. The Internet IS clearly dying, but this is stupid. Even if we got rid of all the bots and AI, the Internet would still be dying, because open protocols are not as exploitable as walled gardens. The value of capital in the world overwhelms the value of human labour and human interest, and all our social structures conform to the needs of capital over time.
It doesn’t really, it’s just that human activity on the internet is more and more taking place on platforms without any search indexing. 20 years ago, internet forum are where you’d go for advice online. Nowadays, it’s more and more becoming discord servers and similar, which just aren’t indexed by internet search.
DDG and qwant are basically bing
I agree with you. It has gotten worse.
You only tested Google and Bing.
Qwant and DDG both use the Bing architecture.
I agree though, search engines have become noticeably worse the last 2 years.
I’m pretty sure they discovered in the google monopoly case that google realized a couple years ago that a worse search experience would not negatively impact their bottom line. So makes sense
I’ve found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.
theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.
Kagi is very good.
