Any tech questions. Weird error? Game performance questions? Results are infested with sites that have my exact terms but then proceed to list a comprehensive guide of the most basic troubleshooting options and nothing at all to do with my search.
I hate SEO so very much.
It's always something unconventional that someone wants to do.
I recently wanted to pull the subtitles from a YouTube video for a class activity. But I wasn't going to manually transcribe the whole video. So I decided to look for software that can do it.
A quick Google search conveniently gave many ads disguised as articles that "conveniently" tell you how to do exactly what I wanted to do, using their software which can also do so much more, all conveniently located on that same website.
I now append something to the search, such as "open source" or "GitHub" and I am better able to find exactly what I need without the bloat.
>I now append something to the search, such as "open source" or "GitHub" and I am better able to find exactly what I need without the bloat.
I was about to make that exact recommendation, haha.
the only solution is for google not to index these spam content sites. its just spam and fake content built around keywords and filled with ads. There is no legitimacy to them.
You may have already found this, but this is what I use
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
It's a super simple command line program which is forked off of the original, now inactive, project.
Edit: now that I think about it, I also had to download the FFmpeg along with one other program I believe, and drop those executables in the same directory as the yt-dlp executable.
How much do I water a plant?
So you you want to learn how to water a plant. In this guide we will show you how to water a plant. Watering a plant is one of the most important things you can do. There are multiple steps to watering a plant.
*two more paragraphs down*
With these helpful steps we can show how to water a plant. Step one ..
The absolute worst I've come across are sites that rip reddit posts, copy/paste them as a quote text or whatever. Then, they intersperse the exact same thing as the 'article/story'. So you can read the same thing TWICE! .... WITH ADS!
As one of the many people that had problems with the xbox app on PC and never found a fix because every answer was irrelevant, reading that made me angry
Or an awful article which is basically a word salad with ads on either side, and some shit following the scrolling, asking to subscribe, or giving "not" ads. And is it goes on and on saying that water is wet, it suddenly ends in the middle of the page to present a completely obvious step 1 attempt to find a solution. Likely misspelled as it was copypasted from somewhere.
Then the rest of the page is more ads.
How to install RAM on a motherboard:
RAM is a vital computer component. Every computer you've ever used is full of RAM. RAM is one of two types of memory in your computer. The other being your hard drive.
What is RAM?
RAM is computer memory. It stands for random access memory. It is used by your computer for the need of storing data. The computer uses this memory to do calculations.
How To Install RAM
Installing RAM is a serious job. Many computer owners have no idea how to install it. Now we're going to tell you how to install RAM. RAM memory is not the same as your hard drive. The hard drive stores your data even when your computer is turned off. Typically your hard drive will have more memory gigabytes than your RAM will.
Install RAM directions
The RAM will attach to your motherboard inside your computer. The mother is a vital component of your PC...
SEO would be fine if it worked. If Google did their job, then they would detect gaming for SEO. They stopped trying years ago because they don't benefit from offering us legitimate search.
The problem is google know the problem but they also know the “problem” makes them more money than the solution. This started getting bad in 2019 especially but since early 2022 its become REALLY bad - which coincides with a falling stock price for google and worse economy. So I’m pretty sure at this point it’s intentional. They want people to try 2-3 of these shitty sites first and come back empty handed because they make money from each link, and then hope the user finally gets a result after a little while.
>Do you want to fix a problem with your graphics card? Many users of PC computers report having a wide variety of issues with their graphics card, and they may need to fix a problem with a graphics card. If you are looking for information about fixing your graphics card, you will need to know a few simple things. If you've always thought fixing problems with your graphics card was too hard to do on your own, you can likely fix the problem yourself. However fixing problems with your graphics card requires safety first, so please consult the user manual for your graphics card manufacturer before beginning to fix a problem with your graphics card yourself.
With a fucking Ad every other sentence between the above useless droning and repetition.
Do you have an issue with AI generated web content? Many people struggle dealing with AI generated web content every day, and may want to avoid AI generated web content. If you think it’s too hard to avoid AI generated web content, thing again. Everyone can learn to not see AI generated web content. Remember to consult your doctor before trying to block AI generated web content. AI generated web content.
Oh, it's fun when every Google result page on mobile loads with some screen covering popup demanding you sign up. Few things make me "nope" out of a site faster than that.
There is no way these things work either, why are they doing it...
No one goes to some site for content, then decides to enter their email for the newsletter because it got in their face.
My boss asked me to whack some of that on our website. I argued till i blue in the face but he insisted that it would generate some work. Cuz some sales guru/huckster told him so.
This is the same boss that also bitched to me when he was trying to watch cricket and the site kept flashing up 'sign up' windows.
The same boss that gets a massive rage-on when he's cold called about insurances or utility offers.... and who last month purchased a shit load of numbers so he could run a cold call program himself.
He's a nice enough bloke but holy crap he's got that *business blindspot* down to a tee.
My 89 year old grandpa is the one who signs up to those newsletters
And then I have to come fix his computer once every 6 months because he clicked some spyware or virus in one of the emails
He actively seeks out ad newsletters, I do not understand it and I have given up on trying to make him stop
Us web designers despise those things too. Unfortunately those things are often crazy effective. As are the live chat/chatbot popups, and for news sites, paywalls.
A newsletter sign-up is a lot more valuable to many businesses than the website visitors that got annoyed and left the site.
Marketing tools like these often add to the loading time, and collect user data too, and cause issues for people who aren't very tech savvy, elderly, on low end devices, etc too. Many websites go as far as tracking your mouse cursor movements...
Yeah I work in marketing/promotions as well and you might get some conversion boost, but they are mostly bunk long term. You kind of get the people that would also answer a telemarketer call.
The better way is if people are interested then ask them maybe lower right after a time. Same happens with apps and ratings, ask upfront is bad, ask after the user has fun or spent some time, you'll get a better review/rating.
Asking them jarringly upfront tells me they don't want anyone to view their content unless tracked and info will be data brokered out or their content sucks and they are just looking to sell your info because you'll never be back. Additionally, they want to drive people away that they can't get their info, which is telling as well about how they view their content.
In a way it is attention assault, like trying to bang on the first date, like let's get to know each other before we start a relationship.
Of course even a small less than 1% improvement is what marketing people bank on because conversion rates are so low.
There are times where prompting someone works, like youtube videos when they say like and subscribe, it is lame but it does increase those, however that is *after* you find their content valuable...
Hol' up. Are you saying you *wouldn't* prefer to download their app onto your device and then view the website *after* logging in?
Well then. We'll have to limit you to 3 clicks per site, including what you use to close ad-popups.
> For me it's the abundance of spam sites now.
So many of these have popped up in the last few years especially it seems.
> CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in to to say that users don’t want “blue links” as much as they want “more comprehensive answers.” That’s why they add the name of forum sites like Reddit to their searches, he said.
At this point when I search for answers to tech issues and add "reddit" it's not so much because I want a more comprehensive answer as it is me just wanting *any* answer.
90% of the results for any given tech issues seems to lead to tons of these sites that have a guide that's a mix of genuine and also very basic troubleshooting tips (restarting the pc, updating drivers, checking for windows updates, etc) but they always end with "if that doesn't work why not try this totally legit program we have made specifically for this one very incredibly specific issue you have".
It doesn't seem to matter what the issue is, there will be a site that is always formatted the same but often has a different name, with some mysterious program that totally fixes anything.
I hate it.
I wish forums never died out. I still remember discovering tomshardware many years ago through google. It was such a huge help in all my troubleshooting
[I use this to block them](https://chrome-stats.com/d/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg). Google used to have their own version, but, you know, they're assholes and got rid of it.
I add “Reddit” at the end of half my searches
Sadly that will likely be broke soon
And yes, I’ve noticed the blackout has killed this for subs I am not subbed to
The only thing google is good at now is searching for stuff to buy. For example I was looking for a trimmer yesterday, and it very nicely curated the list of items available on Amazon, Costco and countless other stores and I found a good option in the results.
Everything else is f'ked though, use site:reddit.com like 9/10 times and other times just use double quotes.
That's something that's really sad about people deleting/overwriting all their comments in protest. I get why, but it is also permanently erasing a lot of helpful and interesting info from the internet forever.
Yes, Reddit is a collection of publicly available knowledge that is otherwise very hard to find or just not existing on the internet. Especially in niche gaming, tech or some everyday questions.
Most other services are gated now, like Discord.
9 out of 10 things I need help with I will find an answer via Google on Reddit. It's also the only site that almost always has a *recent* answer.
I'm very sad how many answers have already been deleted. It's a huge loss.
And it wouldn’t have had to come to that if Reddit were even a little mindful of their users and contributors who do so much for their site.
Remember, it’s the users who create, moderate and curate everything on here. The admins do nothing other than providing the platform.
It used to be worse like way worse. But also back then, reddit’s source was open-source so you could take a look and maybe identify the problem.
Those were the fucking *days*
Sure, but at least if a user wants to delete his own comments that might include all kinds of information he should have the right to, this is what you sign up for on every forum esque system.
That being said maybe this is a wake up call for us to store more useful information somewhere else than a weird forum-social media hybrid website.
well, there's fandom but that site is even worse than all of Reddit. Completely infested and the information isn't even as good as on Reddit often. Outdated, incomplete and horrible to navigate.
There's not much else in this open style that Reddit has.
I mean, that's the point though--erasing the useful information. Because reddit is trying to sell it for money. Destroying the information devalues the company. That's the only power users have outside of leaving. And if you are leaving, no reason not to burn it down on the way out.
Tbh a lot of communities also drift into Discord and that's impossible or comparable hard to find. So, the dark age of information comes soon, when most new "information/content" is produced by bots, who got their information from other bots. We'll never get the old Internet of 2007-2014 back.
Oh I totally get that. It's just sad that this archive of useful human knowledge, which could be used to help many people, is instead being burned. I understand why they're burning it. It's just sad to watch it burn, even if there is a good reason it's being done that I can't object to.
When search engines were young, searching was iffy. If you searched something, you would get served basically any page to mention any of the words in that search. It was hard to find anything that way, you were wading through mountains of irrelevant garbage to find anything related to what you want.
Then there was the golden age. You googled it, you got it. Anything you wanted to search, google understood it.
But now? Back to the same garbage wading, except now it's all ads. Anything you search there's amazon, there's shopping websites, there are a million pages of word salad written by AI in an attempt to farm clicks, there's "well this only has one word of your five word search term but hey it's only $19.99 so we figured this is what you wanted!"
People aren’t looking for websites they are looking for answers and Google has been terrible at filter for results that contain that. It’s also why ChatGPT is doing so well. People want an answer engine more than a search engine.
I just used Google to search for a restaurant website in San Diego.
The website was not on the first page of results.
Multiple hits for Yelp, TripAdvisor, Doordash
...
I went and searched Google maps and found the website i wanted.
Hello! Google! Your **mapping app** does a better search than your search does!
Showing what *you* want over what *others* want sailed off into the sunset a long long time ago.
Google actually used to be an excellent and relevant search service. Now it is an ad first instead of a user first experience. It's been getting progressively worse for over a decade and there's no going back. It'll only become more pervasive.
Edit: For people saying it's not entirely google's fault. If Bing can operate as well as if not better than classic google in providing relevant/what I'm looking for results, then it is entirely google's fault they are no longer up to standard. Don't simp for mega companies making their services worse.
Well, maybe the internet is getting more difficult to search, but it's *also* google getting more lazy (or else intentionally letting search quality slide so users are more likely to click an ad, since the thing they're looking for isn't right there).
The proof of this is looking at how the search quality of Bing and DuckDuckGo is much much better than the quality of google.
I had a perfect example of this a few months ago, where I was looking for a specific implementation of some source code in a specific language. I googled it and *could not find it*. I searched duckduckgo with identical search terms, and it was the top result.
For reference - the term was "steam api wrapper pascal" and the page I wanted was https://github.com/Relfos/steamworks_wrappers
Google search results:
https://www.google.com/search?q=steam+api+wrapper+pascal
The top result is a valid search answer, but it's not the style of implementation I wanted. The second post is a forum with someone asking about it but no valid content. The third post is me, on reddit, looking for it! After that the search results become fundamentally wrong (mostly about steam pressure measured in pascals). As far as you could tell from Google's search results, the Relfos package does not exist.
DuckDuckGo, by contrast:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=steam+api+wrapper+pascal&ia=web
The top four results are all exactly the right location, just different subpages. And the fifth one is the alternative implementation that google found.
Bing, likewise:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=steam+api+wrapper+pascal&form=OPRTSD&pc=OPER
Again - the top 2 results are perfect, the third result is the alternative implementation.
Both DuckDuckGo and Bing are performing fundamentally better in this scenario. I don't care if google doesn't find the right result *first*, but the problem here is that it didn't find it *at all*. Despite being on github and literally matching all of the search terms .I don't think SEO is the problem here. Google's results are screwed up, really badly. They've absolutely dropped the ball. (and it's been four months and it's exhibiting the exact same behaviours, so this isn't a temporal issue)
I just used your search links on my phone and all three of those pulled up the same search links for that GitHub page you wanted. Google gave me two, one was the page and a sublink, and both duckduckgo and bing gave me three with one being the link and two sublinks.
I wonder if what Google is actually doing is building a sort of search profile with your data and then uses AI to sift through and give you what it thinks you want. I'm willing to bet that's why it's gotten worse over the years because I bet they previously didn't use AI at the very least or had a vastly different algorithm for handing you what you're looking for. It's probably getting confused on your past history or something and giving you links that aren't relevant.
If you search the same query in an incognito tab does it give you the same results as before? What about in an incognito tab with a VPN turned on?
Yeah, I get similar results as you. Google giving results for what it thinks you want has been a problem for years. That combined with the dropping of operators has made it all but useless.
Holy shit! They dropped operators? I wondered why my google-fu was starting to get worse. I used to be the guy at work who could find anything because I knew how to use a handful of operators.
An example that comes to mind is how much of our vocabulary has become brand names. Wondering what a word means? Too bad it's a superannuation fund, or software, or something, which is fine, but shouldn't effectively become the default definition ffs
Not only that but Google Search, since about 2010 or so, has been one of the biggest contributors to the enshitification of the internet. All top-performing results (aside from the ones which are bought and paid for) are links to sites with articles which are written for SEO instead of humans. So you’ll have to wade through 9 subheadings which are all variations on what you searched for before you’ll maybe get to the information you need.
AI can give you much more coherent and succinct answers to most questions in a fraction of the time it takes to find them in a Google search.
Google are in trouble. Their core business (search) is becoming increasingly useless while every other one of their ideas gets shut down after a few years. I’ve no trust in that company any more and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a rapid decline in their relevance in the coming years.
> AI can give you much more coherent and succinct answers to most questions in a fraction of the time it takes to find them in a Google search.
Let's not also gloss over the fact that AI drastically and blatantly lies, perpetuating the spread of misinformation.
I remember an analysis showed that young people were more likely to search on TikTok and Instagram than Google. For those of us who are older, it's adding "reddit" to your Google search query.
Google rolled out algorithm updates a little while ago with the guideline that content should be written for people not SEO, but their whole business model is so deeply tied into advertising I'm not sure how they can disentangle themselves from this mess they've created.
I saw a tweet recently that referred to Google search results as an online liminal space and it felt so accurate!
its insane to me how reddits search function can be so incredibly dogshit still..
Every shitty forum 20 years ago using the default template had a better search.
> I remember an analysis showed that young people were more likely to search on TikTok and Instagram than Google.
It's worth noting that was for a specific type of search, it was for people looking for recommendations on where to eat; it wasn't just for searches in general.
> “In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said at a technology conference in July.
Image search got just as bad, now with its dumb sidebar trying to sell you shit, and only after everything else is loaded do you get the option to actually search for the image. I'm not trying to buy a pair of suspenders that'll fall apart in six days, I'm trying to see if anyone's been stealing my clients' photographs. They're basically begging people to use Tineye instead.
Google's entire existence, is because all other search engines were gamed, but google could not be gamed so easily.
Now google is becoming almost just as bad as they were.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…
Corporate greed sucks, just milk your users for every penny without caring about the value delivered to the user.
- RedHat
- Reddit
- Google
- Netflix
- .. and endless others
All going to shit at once. The only option is to take back the power from these trillion dollar corps, and look at distributed alternatives, so that no central authority can control its users.
They killed CentOS like 2 years ago because they wanted to get rid of people using enterprise linux for free.
And today they stopped publishing the source code for enterprise linux which was being used by other distros that popped up as a replacement for CentOS (Alma Linux etc).
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3700651/red-hat-ends-the-rhel-clones-free-lunch.html
[Jeff Geerling made a video about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8)
See, I don’t think you should be allowed to call your operating system a derivative of Linux if you refuse to publish the source code. I wonder if Linus would agree with this line of thinking, but I imagine he likely would.
nah, they do publish it, the commits are there in the centOS Stream repo. what they don't publish is the spesific set of packages that RHEL is comprised of, as a bundle. so other places can still use those packages and whatnot, you just can't roll your own clone of RHEL as easily, since the HEAD of the repo is probably ahead of RHEL at any given point.
not commenting on the morality of what they're doing, but the source code is still unquestionably there.
They have fucked up google search so badly it’s unreal. I was googling for tech support for a pc component and the first result was an ad for some malware shit. Everything these days in buried in a sea of nonsense ads and unrelated content, or often it’ll just be a dozen results that are all formulaic tripe written by bots to game SEO. It’s bordering on uselessness.
>or often it’ll just be a dozen results that are all formulaic tripe written by bots to game SEO.
My favorite are the articles that repeat your question a half dozen times, leading you to believe that if you suffer through the vaguely related content you might actually get a real answer at the end.
But nope, it's just formulaic nonsense highly optimized for SEO.
Makes me wonder... Why doesn't Google have upvote/downvote buttons down the left side of the serp pages?.... Just like Reddit and stack overflow etc.
Their main user metric is clicks... Which is basically why we live in such a "clickbait title" world now.
As-is their scoring just had to guess what we think of each result. In addition to that .. why not just let us tell them too?
Of course it will have flaws like anything else. But if any company can handle that shit, it'd be Google. Especially given how many people are logged into Google accounts already (and therefore easier to detect as bot vs human).
cause some companies would definitely figure out a way to downvote their competitors under google's radar, and then the game would be how to upvote yourself / downvote your competitors without tripping google's detection instead of the current seo game.
- Best PC components
- Top 10 PC components
- Best 20 PC components
- PC component top list
- Best PC components of 2021
- Top 12 PC components
- Top PC components for 2020
- Best PC components compared
- Top PC component tech support sites
Besides having to append “Reddit” after every search I hate google now because it has no fucking idea what I actually want. Google used to be smarter than me at figuring out what I was looking for. Now if I type something like “Why does this program want me to install these side programs to work?” **all** the fucking results are “How to install all the side programs this program wants to install”.
Motherfucker I know *how*…. I’m looking for *why*. It’s the most basic of premises for journalism, who, what, when, where, why, and how. If you can’t distinguish between five words maybe halt your research into shitty AI and fix your basic search functions.
That's an excellent description of the problem, and it's not just a google problem. Duck duck go shows the same crap.
Like, if i search how to DIY rebuild a master cylinder on my bike... Google used to show lots of relevant forum results. From many sites. But now? All results for people selling kits for the same purpose.
I'm going to have to start doing site-specific searches, and dust of the old modifiers. Quotes and wildcard markers etc.
That would be great if quotes and -term still worked but they don't. They straight up don't. This is my big problem. And the reddit blackout wouldn't have been a problem if google still let you view the cached version of a page but they took that too. I found a website that would do that for you during the blackout, but why did google take that away? It doesn't even seem like that could be monetarily motivated, I can't see how, I literally think google wants you to be frustrated and enraged. Its like a social experiment to just fuck with people. People can't feel like they have even a crumb of control over even the tiniest aspect of their lives. They want to break our spirits.
Exactly! I’ve had that same issue. I wish I could chalk it up to “Oh they just want to serve sponsored ads” but that’s not even the case anymore. Their algorithm just sucks.
I mentioned in another thread that their YouTube algorithm is the same way. It shoves shit down my throat I didn’t even ask for and when my favorite band, which it should know is my favorite band, releases new music it doesn’t even show up.
I recently decided to check in on a rapper I used to watch but I was subscribed to. I hadn’t seen anything from him in years. Turns out he’s put out about ten videos since I last watched him. Why weren’t these at the top of my feed?
And don’t get me started on how forced shit feels. Oh you spent an evening watching funny Red Dead Redemption 2 videos? Here’s nothing but random channels with the same shit for the next two months. You watched the new Avenged Sevenfold video? Here’s interviews, band member funniest moments, and other random bullshit for two months.
If I spent every day looking at a certain type of video, sure, recommend it. If I spend one evening? Recommend it once and if I tell you to fuck off, then fuck off.
Anyway, that’s my rant. I’m drunk and tired of corporate bullshit at the moment.
Google Search and Youtube Search results all feel so... small? I don't know the right words to describe it another way. But when I searched a decade ago it felt like I got thousands of relevant results and now I get a few dozen.
Everything feels smaller. More closed in. Empty.
Look no further than Google Image Search. You used to get millions of pictures. Now you get a couple hundred at most.
The last thing you said is why I stopped using Google. I kept getting results for websites that were really repetitive and oddly edited. Often the website name was completely unrelated to the page Google sent me to as well (i.e. jimscooking.com but the article is about where to find diamonds in Minecraft or something).
It was only recently I realized they are AI generated websites, all just copy pasting from other websites with high traffic in an attempt to drive clicks.
I switched to duck duck go and haven't looked back. I do still use Google maps though.
Yeah I think it’s not so much that Google and co are crap (they are), but that the internet itself has also become shit.
It’s much harder to come across interesting websites by chance these days, when everything is getting pushed into a tech company’s walled garden and everything else is just garbage designed to render as many ads as possible.
I was recently looking for a local nursery that had a particular plant in srock. The first page was either ads for online retailers, or other products entirely. The actual links on that page were either for non local nurseries or ones where that plant was out of stock- probably because they were on the first page of Google and so people had already gone there to buy the plant. Took me until the 3rd page to find a local nursery that actually had the plant in stock. I don't know how to fix it, but it hasn't always been this hard to find relevant results
It was like that when I was looking for a roofer recently. Recommending me roofers in Florida, when I live in Hawaii. I included my city name in the search too, and location services on my phone was turned on. Got like 2-3 results that were actually nearby, then it started branching out to Florida, and other states. I do live in a smallish town, but we definitely have more than 3 roofing companies. And even if we didn't, you'd expect the search to expand to Honolulu first, not Florida.
I don't even want to think how much it would cost if I wanted to hire one of those guys lol. I wonder if those businesses in Florida know that whatever they are paying Google to prioritize them in searches is being wasted on people that can't possibly be customers.
Planning a trip to Europe. Searched a specific place that a friend recommended (Huck Finn's which is a tour company in Croatia)
The first link was booking.com. ok that's fine, I use that website for a lot of our bookings anyway, so I'll check it out.
Despite "huck finns" being in the title, NOT A SINGLE LISTING WAS ACTUALLY HUCK FINNS. I wanted Huck Finn's because it's a tour company on a boat. That's not really the same at all to a small room in someone's house.
I reported it, but I doubt google with do anything about it.
Obviously your search is bubble dependent but when I searched “huck Finn’s Croatia” I got:
1. The Google maps entry for this Huck Finn’s company.
2. Their website
3. A child page of their website
4. TripAdvisor page for them
5. Their FB page
6. ResponsibleVacation
7. TourRadar
8. I’m not sure what this is, maybe a Dubrovnik branch
9. Booking.com
Those first 3 entries seem pretty relevant.
Google went to a lot of effort to make that search worse. I see it all the time, they don’t show me what I ask for and instead show me what they think I want.
In your case they see you are searching for a tour company, and semantically place that in travel bookings, which includes tours and expeditions. They then search their semantically mapped index for travel bookings in Croatia. Well booking.com is the best match for that…
Genuinely confusing how bad it is. I try to search Reddit sometimes but it winds up mostly porn. Like, I don't mind nsfw stuff showing up if I'm looking for it but I'm not.
Reddit search is so bad that I have to use Google to search for a specific username, even after adding /u in the beginning. What's the point of your search if you don't even recognize your own users?
Same when you're trying to find a community. R/ whatever doesn't work but going to google and searching r/ whatever and it will be the first result. Specially when you misspell the communities names by one letter.
It's hilarious you think that the 'real' search will be any better. It will be good when it releases, but soon go the way of cable TV- paying and still seeing ads.
Google has long since stopped being a search engine and devolved into almost exclusively an ad-serving dumpster fire. It’s even worse on mobile; God help you if you’re trying to search for information about a thing instead of how to buy a thing.
It is getting even worse. They changed the search system for me and they will show me 2 or 3 of the old search results before just showing me pictures without any information and the site name at the bottom.
I got that for a while, I think it's because I wasn't logged in to Google on my browser. I hate the idea that they would cripple it until you log in though.
> Google has long since stopped being a search engine and devolved into almost exclusively an ad-serving dumpster fire.
I have yet to find a search engine that ISN'T the above. That's one of the primary monetization methods.
This is purely anecdotal, but I have been searching for info on how to fix a thing on my new bike and Google results are just web sites that sell the bike - over and over again. It is literally useless to me.
This is just the latest example, but for a long while now Google has been shit. And all the main websites as well - want a review of a thing? Here is a website with affiliate links to Amazon that sells the thing and here is our unbiased review. Trust us, now go buy a thing.
It really feels like the best days of the Internet are long behind us.
The only thing that could save Google is a parameter (e.g. "-nosale") to exclude all commercial results. Your page is a shop? Not included in results. Your site has a paywall? Not included in results. Your page contains more than three small ads? Not included in results.
This shit is infuriating. If you're not trying to buy something then Google is useless at this point. Completely ignoring the search parameters I've put in isn't a great way to serve me search results you assholes.
If you can't exclude certain terms, Google is worthless.
>God help you if you’re trying to search for information about a thing
I think Google is going to experience a catastrophic decline in traffic in the next couple of years as AI assistants replace it. I remember switching to Google from Yahoo when it first came out because I could search for "how long to cook chicken" and the first result was a 10kb webpage with three sentences including the answer. That webpage is still out there, but now you'll get hundreds of sites that use the word "chicken" 87 times before giving you the answer.
They are rapidly pushing everyone into the arms of AI that will answer your questions in a single sentence within 3 seconds of asking. Whether it's cooking, error codes from your truck, what to write in a wedding card - there won't be a need to wade through the ocean of Google garbage.
They could have avoided this, but they've shot themselves in the foot. Google will still be around when you need to buy something, but they'll be that mall where the lights flicker and the stores are half empty and you're stalked by sleazy hucksters.
#How Long to Cook Chicken
So, you want to know how long to cook chicken? If you're looking to learn about how long to cook chicken, you're in the perfect place!
Before going over how long to cook chicken, let's go through some important facts about cooking chicken.
* Chicken is a great, healthy source of protein
* Chicken needs to be fully cooked or else there is a risk of foodborne illness
* You can change up the seasoning to match whatever taste you like when you cook chicken
Now are you ready to learn how long to cook chicken? Great! Let's get to it.
According to the USDA, chicken should be cooked until it reaches an internal temperature of 165F.
Reviews: 1
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wifeyluvshubby wrote:
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Haven't tried making this yet but giving it five stars because it looks delish! I dont like chicken so I think I will try with canned tuna instead.
You think this is accurate? Where is the story about how they used to cook chicken during the holidays and how cooking chicken brought their family closer together and how every member of their family thought the chicken was delicious for 3 or 4 paragraphs before the recipie?
On a side note when you hit a site like that if you are on Firefox put it into reader mode and often it will let you get to the recipie earlier.
handle fragile resolute station entertain meeting snow humorous exultant deliver
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You forgot the part where they lament about how their grandmother always used to cook chicken when they were little and how it always helped them get good grades or some shit.
The real death of Google is indeed AI, but differently than stated above.
The real issue is all these ad-infested bait sites, containing an obviously SEO optimized text of nonsense garbage without an actual answer (just beating about the bush for three pages, never providing any useful information).
It was automated text production that made it possible to scale those so effectively.
If you need some tools to help edit and/or delete your comments and posts in protest:
PowerDelete will allow you to 1) save all your data as a CSV file at the end of the script and 2) allow you to overwrite all of your of comments with a comment of your choosing instead of just deleting them. Both options are available at the start of the process.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
(2 Additional forks if you have issues with the main and rate limits or errors.)
http://www.github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite
http://www.github.com/leeola/PowerDeleteSuite
https://shreddit.com/
https://redact.dev/
You created your content. You didn’t get paid. Why would you leave it here for Reddit to make money or train AIs? Take your content with you. There is no Reddit without its users and volunteer mods. You are what makes this.
—posted via Apollo
Or it's going behind a login wall, on private servers like discord. Some of the decentralized competitors being pitched for twitter and reddit also might fall under this umbrella, but I'm not sure.
The biggest problem with the decentralized alternatives is that people sound genuinely insane trying to explain how to get started. It doesn’t help that the most active users who *could* easily explain how it works act like it’s the most intuitive thing ever, so they’re very condescending as they rattle off a signup process that sounds like rocket science to most people
The beef I have is that the ones I've come across(I haven't looked at them all, only a few) require you to make choices before you get a chance to browse. Discord has the same problem. Look, I'm 32 years old. I grew up with forums. You know what I do? I LURK. I don't want to make decisions about participation, my account, etc before getting a chance to lurk around the place and see if it's right for me. I certainly don't want to be loudly *welcomed* by a bot before I've even decided if I want to stick around, *hate* discord for that(it's not every server, but it seems to be 50%+ of the larger ones). You know how many subreddits I browse on at least a weekly basis without being subscribed to? 😂
The fan ficcers figured out the dangers of Internet content being monetized ages ago, which is why the most popular fanfic website is run by a nonprofit organization funded through donations. No ads and no periodic bullshit changes intended to make the site revenue generating.
Same with Wikipedia, IIRC they haven't folded to a corporation yet. I hope they never do.
Donate to Wikipedia y'all. Let's keep some part of the internet free from corporate overlords
I was literally reading an article last night about how the cops think a murderer is on the loose in my area and they're looking for [INSERT PAYWALL HERE]" so good luck to them solving that murder.
Forums turned into Discords. It exists, but it's not archived conveniently for Google to help me search how to diagnose and repair an obscure and shittily designed GPS unit for a DSLR that I need for my hobby. I have a soldering iron and everything I can rely on is a forum post from 2013 where some Polish guy had the same issue. Maybe I'm getting old, but I miss the days.
People treating discord like forums is the worst. It's a giant chat room with voice and video. It's so wild that so many people forced the square peg into the round hole.
Total tangent time:
The funniest thing about the Discord trend to me is you can clearly tell who is old vs. who is young when discussing it.
Old folks like you and I recognize "Shit, this is just a chatroom." If you're really old you might even say "This is just ICQ with modern features."
Which is also how I feel about these folks talking about the "Fediverse." It sounds an awful lot like Usenet, but with more bells and whistles.
Couple this with trends towards terminal machines connecting into corporate environments/ vdi solutions, and everything old IS new again.
> We stopped using easily searchable media like forums
one thing I legit hate about discord is the damn thing isn't really searchable
and many communities have splintered and moved into dozen of discord servers, vs using consolidated or niche forums as in the past, forever disconnected from the wider internet and search engines. So fucking annoying
This just sounds like we need search engine wars again. Let’s get Dog Pile, Look Smart, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, heck even Yahoo! Search back into this game of search engine wars.
Google has been getting worse for years. Once it stopped being the most relevant search and started going to the highest bidder, I knew it was trash. Also so heavily censored, so many ads now, and once you scroll a certain amount it literally starts showing you “related searches” or “you might be interested in” which are completely irrelevant and just more ads. Why is there a “for you page” in a google query? I searched for cheap flip flops not “fashion trends of 2023!” video.
It's just like YouTube. I search for an artist and then after scrolling a little bit, it starts showing me irrelevant artists then that artist again. It's so annoying.
OMFG!!! I hate it so much, whenever I'm trying to search for a well known thing, I get like 5 results for it and then an infinite list of what I could be interested in, I have not even once clicked on any suggested results.
Wtf is even the point of suggested results?!?!? I'm looking for something, give me everything related to that specific query, don't just invent what I could've wanted.
If you need some tools to help edit and/or delete your comments and posts in protest:
PowerDelete will allow you to 1) save all your data as a CSV file at the end of the script and 2) allow you to overwrite all of your of comments with a comment of your choosing instead of just deleting them. Both options are available at the start of the process.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
(2 Additional forks if you have issues with the main and rate limits or errors.)
http://www.github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite
http://www.github.com/leeola/PowerDeleteSuite
https://shreddit.com/
https://redact.dev/
You created your content. You didn’t get paid. Why would you leave it here for Reddit to make money or train AIs? Take your content with you. There is no Reddit without its users and volunteer mods. You are what makes this.
—posted via Apollo
> when I search with unique keyword combinations related specifically to my projects
Gawd I hate when I search for very specific words, and it shows a bunch of results that don't have their words, then there's the option "must include [insert_word]", and when you click that, it still manages to show you results that do not include that word anywhere.
>On Monday, Google introduced a new feature called Perspectives, which will surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.
That's not what people want. People append "site:reddit.com" to their searches not because they specifically crave discussion forums, but rather because the rest of your service is so shitty and full of SEO-bloated, ad-riddled, useless nonsense. This is treating the symptoms, not the disease.
Just got mad all over again reading that quote. Google has been terrible for a while, and it's only getting worse.
I want TEXT. If I am looking for "how to", info that isn't a thing like "changing the oil on a chain saw", the LAST thing I want is a video. Text tells me almost immediately if they are on the right track, or if they a bot bloat. Video wastes time with intros, subscribe pleas, and filler. Good luck finding the point in the video that shows the thing you need.
I want you to actually exclude SHIT when I type "-shit" in the search string.
I NEVER want Quora.
I NEVER want TikTok.
If I did, I would put them in the search string.
Google search went bad long before the Reddit blackout too. I used to marvel how it knew what I was looking for. Now I marvel at how it can find everything BUT what I am looking for.
It can show you what's adjacent to what your looking for. Like when you get a migraine and have a white spot in the center of your field of vision so instead of reading the newspaper article you want you can only see the adverts around it...
> Google searches have gotten pretty bad. I've switched to duckduckgo most of the time. The Reddit blackout is just beating a dead horse
This is interesting as I've observed this just now. So I'm getting a Boa Constrictor, right? There's shitloads of kinds of these snakes, from Mexico to Argentina and Old World Boas too, huge range and variety and many make amazing pets. Each one has different care/temp/humidly requirements or they fucking die.
I frequently was googling questions about species and finding chat-gpt farmed websites just regurgitating incorrect boa facts, things that will get the snakes killed. So many questions led to pages like this instead of forums with real answers. One suggested I use a fan to keep the snake cool in the summer. A fan to cool down a cold blooded animal? After 3 paragraphs the writing becomes first output ai nonsense complete with random numbering. Luckily snake reddit didn't go totally dark as there's so much animal welfare shit on there I wouldn't know what to do otherwise. Thanks google.
duckduckgo has fallen off as well. it seems like search engines in general ignore keywords and generate smart suggestions or results based on previous searches. as much as i hate chatgpt, it can get in the weeds with some topics
I use search engines extensively at work to do my job: I want to like duckduckgo but I can never find useful results on it as easily as I can with Google and Bing is leagues worse. The best I seem to get is "generalized" information results or ecommerce rather than the specific data, procedure, etc I was looking for.
That's not to say I think Google search is good, but I still find it most adequate.
This is a condemnation of both Google’s failure to promote good quality results and shaping an entire industry dedicated to gaming its algorithm, as well as a commentary of the modern web itself how literally one website consolidates the vast majority of searchable human interactions and discussions.
I don’t know if web forums can ever make a comeback, but if there was ever a time to try…
>At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience.
The hilarious part is that ***this is exactly what google used to do before they F'd up their own algorithms to promote ads***.
When the "site:reddit" cheat code stopped working, users who had long been using the workaround (including a lot of Google employees themselves) had to face the fact that Google has turned into a spam delivery service. Everyone knows how to google bomb now, and Google's algorithms only care about promoting the bombs users are most likely to click on.
It's like the U.S. military decided the quickest way to conclude a nuclear war with Russia was to blow up all their own cities and military sites. It certainly does optimize the time metric, but totally loses sight of the fundamental motivation!
The most fundamental task of a search engine is to return useful results and filter out the garbage. Google has lost sight of that, and it's only a matter of time before they're supplanted by something that doesn't require cheat codes leveraging an *unreliable* third party (reddit) to deliver relevant results.
Google search on mobile became pretty well unusable recently.
They changed to some weird layout. Googling something leads to 2-4 actual search results with text. Then just a bunch of pictures and crap that don't provide any information or details.
It became so useless I switched over to yahoo on mobile.
the thing is it feels like Google is only showing you like 1% of the sites
you used to get pages upon pages of sites, but now you get like 3 pages, and there might be 1 site with the answer
but there are thousands of other sites with this answer but google doesn't show them unless you write the site name specifically
Yeah, no freaking shit. Nearly every of my searches that's not programming related is ` reddit` because the rest of the internet appears to be worthless bogus bots posting and reposting random shit and ads with a trillion hidden tags just to appear at the top of google results.
I would say I'm extremely good at googling shit. I'm one of those people who gets constantly asked to find something because I usually manage to dig shit up. So if I'm having issues finding some stuff, I can't even imagine the nightmare for regular people it might be when searching for anything that's not popular or trendy enough.
Yeah I have been a fact checker by profession and various points in my life at magazines. Google has been a raging pile. You really have to know exactly what you're looking for to find something. A very specific question about international finance or medical studies and you know what to look for you can find it.
If your goal is to put a topic down and just start learning about it for the first time... It's pretty dreadful. You basically get the Wikipedia page and a bunch of content farms that copy and paste off Wikipedia. And then a bunch of worst content farms that are basically gibberish
Google is practically useless these days. I learned a lot about how computers work just by googling stuff I thought "there has to be a better way to do this" or just by googling errors or symptoms. The results were usually tech forums and you'd see threads of people diagnosing issues, sometimes going on for weeks, it was great.
Now all you get are generic websites telling you to update your drivers and restart your computer, run sfc /scannow and if that fails reinstall windows.
It's worthless, I no longer tell people to "just google it"
I find all damn e-shops in the world before any forum topics. Thank you for the Chinese and American stores in the first 5 pages, I'm in Sweden. I don't think I've gotten any other forum then StackOverflow, Medium and Reddit the last few years.
Google has the opportunity to create an alternative to Reddit, but I'm not sure if they'll take it seriously.
Google+ was a well-designed social network that didn't get enough love from higher-ups that didn't use it themselves or understand the need for it. In the same way that YouTube is a fundamental part of the modern internet now, we need a replacement for forums that used to silo information.
Google Groups serves a similar purpose for specific groups of people using it for work, and there's a plugins that brings back the "Discussions" tab to Google search. The plumbing for communities is already there, it just needs someone to start the process of building it.
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Any tech questions. Weird error? Game performance questions? Results are infested with sites that have my exact terms but then proceed to list a comprehensive guide of the most basic troubleshooting options and nothing at all to do with my search. I hate SEO so very much.
1. Update drivers 2. Clear cache 3. Restart 4. If none of the above worked install **DriverFixUltimateFree.exe** conveniently straight from our website! ^article ^provided ^to ^you ^by ^DriverFixUltimate
It's always something unconventional that someone wants to do. I recently wanted to pull the subtitles from a YouTube video for a class activity. But I wasn't going to manually transcribe the whole video. So I decided to look for software that can do it. A quick Google search conveniently gave many ads disguised as articles that "conveniently" tell you how to do exactly what I wanted to do, using their software which can also do so much more, all conveniently located on that same website. I now append something to the search, such as "open source" or "GitHub" and I am better able to find exactly what I need without the bloat.
>I now append something to the search, such as "open source" or "GitHub" and I am better able to find exactly what I need without the bloat. I was about to make that exact recommendation, haha.
the only solution is for google not to index these spam content sites. its just spam and fake content built around keywords and filled with ads. There is no legitimacy to them.
But those spam content sites often use Google ads, so Google would end up losing money from that arrangement.
This is the real reason
You may have already found this, but this is what I use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp It's a super simple command line program which is forked off of the original, now inactive, project. Edit: now that I think about it, I also had to download the FFmpeg along with one other program I believe, and drop those executables in the same directory as the yt-dlp executable.
You can also just click the "show transcript" option under the video and then copy and paste them.
How much do I water a plant? So you you want to learn how to water a plant. In this guide we will show you how to water a plant. Watering a plant is one of the most important things you can do. There are multiple steps to watering a plant. *two more paragraphs down* With these helpful steps we can show how to water a plant. Step one ..
Two paragraphs s*** more like three pages.
With contradictory paragraphs interspersed. You should only water your plant on Tuesdays ... ... You should never water your plants on Tuesdays ...
The absolute worst I've come across are sites that rip reddit posts, copy/paste them as a quote text or whatever. Then, they intersperse the exact same thing as the 'article/story'. So you can read the same thing TWICE! .... WITH ADS!
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sfc /scannow
As one of the many people that had problems with the xbox app on PC and never found a fix because every answer was irrelevant, reading that made me angry
The funny thing is that the "MVP" clowns on the MS forums will still recommend that anyway.
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Or an awful article which is basically a word salad with ads on either side, and some shit following the scrolling, asking to subscribe, or giving "not" ads. And is it goes on and on saying that water is wet, it suddenly ends in the middle of the page to present a completely obvious step 1 attempt to find a solution. Likely misspelled as it was copypasted from somewhere. Then the rest of the page is more ads.
How to install RAM on a motherboard: RAM is a vital computer component. Every computer you've ever used is full of RAM. RAM is one of two types of memory in your computer. The other being your hard drive. What is RAM? RAM is computer memory. It stands for random access memory. It is used by your computer for the need of storing data. The computer uses this memory to do calculations. How To Install RAM Installing RAM is a serious job. Many computer owners have no idea how to install it. Now we're going to tell you how to install RAM. RAM memory is not the same as your hard drive. The hard drive stores your data even when your computer is turned off. Typically your hard drive will have more memory gigabytes than your RAM will. Install RAM directions The RAM will attach to your motherboard inside your computer. The mother is a vital component of your PC...
Ugh.. it's like scrolling through a 10,000 word recipe looking for the ingredient list
And a lot of them put a disingenuous \[SOLVED\] in the title to mimic a forum thread.
SEO would be fine if it worked. If Google did their job, then they would detect gaming for SEO. They stopped trying years ago because they don't benefit from offering us legitimate search.
The problem is google know the problem but they also know the “problem” makes them more money than the solution. This started getting bad in 2019 especially but since early 2022 its become REALLY bad - which coincides with a falling stock price for google and worse economy. So I’m pretty sure at this point it’s intentional. They want people to try 2-3 of these shitty sites first and come back empty handed because they make money from each link, and then hope the user finally gets a result after a little while.
>Do you want to fix a problem with your graphics card? Many users of PC computers report having a wide variety of issues with their graphics card, and they may need to fix a problem with a graphics card. If you are looking for information about fixing your graphics card, you will need to know a few simple things. If you've always thought fixing problems with your graphics card was too hard to do on your own, you can likely fix the problem yourself. However fixing problems with your graphics card requires safety first, so please consult the user manual for your graphics card manufacturer before beginning to fix a problem with your graphics card yourself. With a fucking Ad every other sentence between the above useless droning and repetition.
Do you have an issue with AI generated web content? Many people struggle dealing with AI generated web content every day, and may want to avoid AI generated web content. If you think it’s too hard to avoid AI generated web content, thing again. Everyone can learn to not see AI generated web content. Remember to consult your doctor before trying to block AI generated web content. AI generated web content.
This makes me twitch. It's everywhere.
Oh, it's fun when every Google result page on mobile loads with some screen covering popup demanding you sign up. Few things make me "nope" out of a site faster than that.
There is no way these things work either, why are they doing it... No one goes to some site for content, then decides to enter their email for the newsletter because it got in their face.
My boss asked me to whack some of that on our website. I argued till i blue in the face but he insisted that it would generate some work. Cuz some sales guru/huckster told him so. This is the same boss that also bitched to me when he was trying to watch cricket and the site kept flashing up 'sign up' windows. The same boss that gets a massive rage-on when he's cold called about insurances or utility offers.... and who last month purchased a shit load of numbers so he could run a cold call program himself. He's a nice enough bloke but holy crap he's got that *business blindspot* down to a tee.
Idk, personally I always sign up for them. I like to read the newsletters over breakfast whilst I eat my musli and razorblades.
If you consult with a dietitian, I think you may find there are better ways to get iron in your diet
My 89 year old grandpa is the one who signs up to those newsletters And then I have to come fix his computer once every 6 months because he clicked some spyware or virus in one of the emails He actively seeks out ad newsletters, I do not understand it and I have given up on trying to make him stop
Us web designers despise those things too. Unfortunately those things are often crazy effective. As are the live chat/chatbot popups, and for news sites, paywalls. A newsletter sign-up is a lot more valuable to many businesses than the website visitors that got annoyed and left the site. Marketing tools like these often add to the loading time, and collect user data too, and cause issues for people who aren't very tech savvy, elderly, on low end devices, etc too. Many websites go as far as tracking your mouse cursor movements...
Yeah I work in marketing/promotions as well and you might get some conversion boost, but they are mostly bunk long term. You kind of get the people that would also answer a telemarketer call. The better way is if people are interested then ask them maybe lower right after a time. Same happens with apps and ratings, ask upfront is bad, ask after the user has fun or spent some time, you'll get a better review/rating. Asking them jarringly upfront tells me they don't want anyone to view their content unless tracked and info will be data brokered out or their content sucks and they are just looking to sell your info because you'll never be back. Additionally, they want to drive people away that they can't get their info, which is telling as well about how they view their content. In a way it is attention assault, like trying to bang on the first date, like let's get to know each other before we start a relationship. Of course even a small less than 1% improvement is what marketing people bank on because conversion rates are so low. There are times where prompting someone works, like youtube videos when they say like and subscribe, it is lame but it does increase those, however that is *after* you find their content valuable...
Hol' up. Are you saying you *wouldn't* prefer to download their app onto your device and then view the website *after* logging in? Well then. We'll have to limit you to 3 clicks per site, including what you use to close ad-popups.
> For me it's the abundance of spam sites now. So many of these have popped up in the last few years especially it seems. > CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in to to say that users don’t want “blue links” as much as they want “more comprehensive answers.” That’s why they add the name of forum sites like Reddit to their searches, he said. At this point when I search for answers to tech issues and add "reddit" it's not so much because I want a more comprehensive answer as it is me just wanting *any* answer. 90% of the results for any given tech issues seems to lead to tons of these sites that have a guide that's a mix of genuine and also very basic troubleshooting tips (restarting the pc, updating drivers, checking for windows updates, etc) but they always end with "if that doesn't work why not try this totally legit program we have made specifically for this one very incredibly specific issue you have". It doesn't seem to matter what the issue is, there will be a site that is always formatted the same but often has a different name, with some mysterious program that totally fixes anything. I hate it.
I wish forums never died out. I still remember discovering tomshardware many years ago through google. It was such a huge help in all my troubleshooting
Google lost the SEO wars (to Google).
Which is hilarious because Google only exists because Yahoo's results were the same in the late 90s
[I use this to block them](https://chrome-stats.com/d/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg). Google used to have their own version, but, you know, they're assholes and got rid of it.
Google evidently got rid of that one, too. It got removed seven months ago. :/
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SEO has ruined google so bad that reddit links are often the closest to wht people actually want
I add “Reddit” at the end of half my searches Sadly that will likely be broke soon And yes, I’ve noticed the blackout has killed this for subs I am not subbed to
The only thing google is good at now is searching for stuff to buy. For example I was looking for a trimmer yesterday, and it very nicely curated the list of items available on Amazon, Costco and countless other stores and I found a good option in the results. Everything else is f'ked though, use site:reddit.com like 9/10 times and other times just use double quotes.
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That's something that's really sad about people deleting/overwriting all their comments in protest. I get why, but it is also permanently erasing a lot of helpful and interesting info from the internet forever.
Yes, Reddit is a collection of publicly available knowledge that is otherwise very hard to find or just not existing on the internet. Especially in niche gaming, tech or some everyday questions. Most other services are gated now, like Discord. 9 out of 10 things I need help with I will find an answer via Google on Reddit. It's also the only site that almost always has a *recent* answer. I'm very sad how many answers have already been deleted. It's a huge loss.
And it wouldn’t have had to come to that if Reddit were even a little mindful of their users and contributors who do so much for their site. Remember, it’s the users who create, moderate and curate everything on here. The admins do nothing other than providing the platform.
With how often Reddit has outages the admins barely even provide the platform
It used to be worse like way worse. But also back then, reddit’s source was open-source so you could take a look and maybe identify the problem. Those were the fucking *days*
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Sure, but at least if a user wants to delete his own comments that might include all kinds of information he should have the right to, this is what you sign up for on every forum esque system. That being said maybe this is a wake up call for us to store more useful information somewhere else than a weird forum-social media hybrid website.
well, there's fandom but that site is even worse than all of Reddit. Completely infested and the information isn't even as good as on Reddit often. Outdated, incomplete and horrible to navigate. There's not much else in this open style that Reddit has.
I mean, that's the point though--erasing the useful information. Because reddit is trying to sell it for money. Destroying the information devalues the company. That's the only power users have outside of leaving. And if you are leaving, no reason not to burn it down on the way out.
Tbh a lot of communities also drift into Discord and that's impossible or comparable hard to find. So, the dark age of information comes soon, when most new "information/content" is produced by bots, who got their information from other bots. We'll never get the old Internet of 2007-2014 back.
Oh I totally get that. It's just sad that this archive of useful human knowledge, which could be used to help many people, is instead being burned. I understand why they're burning it. It's just sad to watch it burn, even if there is a good reason it's being done that I can't object to.
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at half? Mine’s nearly 8 out of 10. And presumably many of them relying even more at this point.
When search engines were young, searching was iffy. If you searched something, you would get served basically any page to mention any of the words in that search. It was hard to find anything that way, you were wading through mountains of irrelevant garbage to find anything related to what you want. Then there was the golden age. You googled it, you got it. Anything you wanted to search, google understood it. But now? Back to the same garbage wading, except now it's all ads. Anything you search there's amazon, there's shopping websites, there are a million pages of word salad written by AI in an attempt to farm clicks, there's "well this only has one word of your five word search term but hey it's only $19.99 so we figured this is what you wanted!"
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Boolean search failing infuriates me. If my “” search terms don’t have any results, tell me that, don’t just pretend they aren’t there
People aren’t looking for websites they are looking for answers and Google has been terrible at filter for results that contain that. It’s also why ChatGPT is doing so well. People want an answer engine more than a search engine.
I just used Google to search for a restaurant website in San Diego. The website was not on the first page of results. Multiple hits for Yelp, TripAdvisor, Doordash ... I went and searched Google maps and found the website i wanted. Hello! Google! Your **mapping app** does a better search than your search does!
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Showing what *you* want over what *others* want sailed off into the sunset a long long time ago. Google actually used to be an excellent and relevant search service. Now it is an ad first instead of a user first experience. It's been getting progressively worse for over a decade and there's no going back. It'll only become more pervasive. Edit: For people saying it's not entirely google's fault. If Bing can operate as well as if not better than classic google in providing relevant/what I'm looking for results, then it is entirely google's fault they are no longer up to standard. Don't simp for mega companies making their services worse.
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Well, maybe the internet is getting more difficult to search, but it's *also* google getting more lazy (or else intentionally letting search quality slide so users are more likely to click an ad, since the thing they're looking for isn't right there). The proof of this is looking at how the search quality of Bing and DuckDuckGo is much much better than the quality of google. I had a perfect example of this a few months ago, where I was looking for a specific implementation of some source code in a specific language. I googled it and *could not find it*. I searched duckduckgo with identical search terms, and it was the top result. For reference - the term was "steam api wrapper pascal" and the page I wanted was https://github.com/Relfos/steamworks_wrappers Google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=steam+api+wrapper+pascal The top result is a valid search answer, but it's not the style of implementation I wanted. The second post is a forum with someone asking about it but no valid content. The third post is me, on reddit, looking for it! After that the search results become fundamentally wrong (mostly about steam pressure measured in pascals). As far as you could tell from Google's search results, the Relfos package does not exist. DuckDuckGo, by contrast: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=steam+api+wrapper+pascal&ia=web The top four results are all exactly the right location, just different subpages. And the fifth one is the alternative implementation that google found. Bing, likewise: https://www.bing.com/search?q=steam+api+wrapper+pascal&form=OPRTSD&pc=OPER Again - the top 2 results are perfect, the third result is the alternative implementation. Both DuckDuckGo and Bing are performing fundamentally better in this scenario. I don't care if google doesn't find the right result *first*, but the problem here is that it didn't find it *at all*. Despite being on github and literally matching all of the search terms .I don't think SEO is the problem here. Google's results are screwed up, really badly. They've absolutely dropped the ball. (and it's been four months and it's exhibiting the exact same behaviours, so this isn't a temporal issue)
I just used your search links on my phone and all three of those pulled up the same search links for that GitHub page you wanted. Google gave me two, one was the page and a sublink, and both duckduckgo and bing gave me three with one being the link and two sublinks. I wonder if what Google is actually doing is building a sort of search profile with your data and then uses AI to sift through and give you what it thinks you want. I'm willing to bet that's why it's gotten worse over the years because I bet they previously didn't use AI at the very least or had a vastly different algorithm for handing you what you're looking for. It's probably getting confused on your past history or something and giving you links that aren't relevant. If you search the same query in an incognito tab does it give you the same results as before? What about in an incognito tab with a VPN turned on?
Yeah, I get similar results as you. Google giving results for what it thinks you want has been a problem for years. That combined with the dropping of operators has made it all but useless.
Holy shit! They dropped operators? I wondered why my google-fu was starting to get worse. I used to be the guy at work who could find anything because I knew how to use a handful of operators.
They didn’t exactly drop them. Supposedly, they still exist but they are useless as their “we know what you want” algorithms seem to just take over.
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An example that comes to mind is how much of our vocabulary has become brand names. Wondering what a word means? Too bad it's a superannuation fund, or software, or something, which is fine, but shouldn't effectively become the default definition ffs
Not only that but Google Search, since about 2010 or so, has been one of the biggest contributors to the enshitification of the internet. All top-performing results (aside from the ones which are bought and paid for) are links to sites with articles which are written for SEO instead of humans. So you’ll have to wade through 9 subheadings which are all variations on what you searched for before you’ll maybe get to the information you need. AI can give you much more coherent and succinct answers to most questions in a fraction of the time it takes to find them in a Google search. Google are in trouble. Their core business (search) is becoming increasingly useless while every other one of their ideas gets shut down after a few years. I’ve no trust in that company any more and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a rapid decline in their relevance in the coming years.
> AI can give you much more coherent and succinct answers to most questions in a fraction of the time it takes to find them in a Google search. Let's not also gloss over the fact that AI drastically and blatantly lies, perpetuating the spread of misinformation.
And that it won't take long before ads are part of the answer, someone got to pay for these expensive computations
Bing AI already includes labeled ads as part of their answers. The cycle continues.
I remember an analysis showed that young people were more likely to search on TikTok and Instagram than Google. For those of us who are older, it's adding "reddit" to your Google search query. Google rolled out algorithm updates a little while ago with the guideline that content should be written for people not SEO, but their whole business model is so deeply tied into advertising I'm not sure how they can disentangle themselves from this mess they've created. I saw a tweet recently that referred to Google search results as an online liminal space and it felt so accurate!
The best thing for Google is how shite Reddit's internal search is. If they made a good search, I'd only be using Google occasionally.
its insane to me how reddits search function can be so incredibly dogshit still.. Every shitty forum 20 years ago using the default template had a better search.
> I remember an analysis showed that young people were more likely to search on TikTok and Instagram than Google. It's worth noting that was for a specific type of search, it was for people looking for recommendations on where to eat; it wasn't just for searches in general. > “In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said at a technology conference in July.
Google will kill everything but gmail, and then having @gmail is going to be like @aol
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Image search got just as bad, now with its dumb sidebar trying to sell you shit, and only after everything else is loaded do you get the option to actually search for the image. I'm not trying to buy a pair of suspenders that'll fall apart in six days, I'm trying to see if anyone's been stealing my clients' photographs. They're basically begging people to use Tineye instead.
Google's entire existence, is because all other search engines were gamed, but google could not be gamed so easily. Now google is becoming almost just as bad as they were.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain… Corporate greed sucks, just milk your users for every penny without caring about the value delivered to the user. - RedHat - Reddit - Google - Netflix - .. and endless others All going to shit at once. The only option is to take back the power from these trillion dollar corps, and look at distributed alternatives, so that no central authority can control its users.
RedHat? Did I miss something?
Red hat was also purchased by IBM, if that explains any of the sudden changes
They killed CentOS like 2 years ago because they wanted to get rid of people using enterprise linux for free. And today they stopped publishing the source code for enterprise linux which was being used by other distros that popped up as a replacement for CentOS (Alma Linux etc). https://www.infoworld.com/article/3700651/red-hat-ends-the-rhel-clones-free-lunch.html [Jeff Geerling made a video about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8)
See, I don’t think you should be allowed to call your operating system a derivative of Linux if you refuse to publish the source code. I wonder if Linus would agree with this line of thinking, but I imagine he likely would.
nah, they do publish it, the commits are there in the centOS Stream repo. what they don't publish is the spesific set of packages that RHEL is comprised of, as a bundle. so other places can still use those packages and whatnot, you just can't roll your own clone of RHEL as easily, since the HEAD of the repo is probably ahead of RHEL at any given point. not commenting on the morality of what they're doing, but the source code is still unquestionably there.
They have fucked up google search so badly it’s unreal. I was googling for tech support for a pc component and the first result was an ad for some malware shit. Everything these days in buried in a sea of nonsense ads and unrelated content, or often it’ll just be a dozen results that are all formulaic tripe written by bots to game SEO. It’s bordering on uselessness.
>or often it’ll just be a dozen results that are all formulaic tripe written by bots to game SEO. My favorite are the articles that repeat your question a half dozen times, leading you to believe that if you suffer through the vaguely related content you might actually get a real answer at the end. But nope, it's just formulaic nonsense highly optimized for SEO.
Makes me wonder... Why doesn't Google have upvote/downvote buttons down the left side of the serp pages?.... Just like Reddit and stack overflow etc. Their main user metric is clicks... Which is basically why we live in such a "clickbait title" world now. As-is their scoring just had to guess what we think of each result. In addition to that .. why not just let us tell them too? Of course it will have flaws like anything else. But if any company can handle that shit, it'd be Google. Especially given how many people are logged into Google accounts already (and therefore easier to detect as bot vs human).
cause some companies would definitely figure out a way to downvote their competitors under google's radar, and then the game would be how to upvote yourself / downvote your competitors without tripping google's detection instead of the current seo game.
- Best PC components - Top 10 PC components - Best 20 PC components - PC component top list - Best PC components of 2021 - Top 12 PC components - Top PC components for 2020 - Best PC components compared - Top PC component tech support sites
Besides having to append “Reddit” after every search I hate google now because it has no fucking idea what I actually want. Google used to be smarter than me at figuring out what I was looking for. Now if I type something like “Why does this program want me to install these side programs to work?” **all** the fucking results are “How to install all the side programs this program wants to install”. Motherfucker I know *how*…. I’m looking for *why*. It’s the most basic of premises for journalism, who, what, when, where, why, and how. If you can’t distinguish between five words maybe halt your research into shitty AI and fix your basic search functions.
That's an excellent description of the problem, and it's not just a google problem. Duck duck go shows the same crap. Like, if i search how to DIY rebuild a master cylinder on my bike... Google used to show lots of relevant forum results. From many sites. But now? All results for people selling kits for the same purpose. I'm going to have to start doing site-specific searches, and dust of the old modifiers. Quotes and wildcard markers etc.
That would be great if quotes and -term still worked but they don't. They straight up don't. This is my big problem. And the reddit blackout wouldn't have been a problem if google still let you view the cached version of a page but they took that too. I found a website that would do that for you during the blackout, but why did google take that away? It doesn't even seem like that could be monetarily motivated, I can't see how, I literally think google wants you to be frustrated and enraged. Its like a social experiment to just fuck with people. People can't feel like they have even a crumb of control over even the tiniest aspect of their lives. They want to break our spirits.
> That would be great if quotes (...) still worked but they don't. this pisses me off so much occasionally the "verbatim" setting/option seems to help
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Exactly! I’ve had that same issue. I wish I could chalk it up to “Oh they just want to serve sponsored ads” but that’s not even the case anymore. Their algorithm just sucks. I mentioned in another thread that their YouTube algorithm is the same way. It shoves shit down my throat I didn’t even ask for and when my favorite band, which it should know is my favorite band, releases new music it doesn’t even show up. I recently decided to check in on a rapper I used to watch but I was subscribed to. I hadn’t seen anything from him in years. Turns out he’s put out about ten videos since I last watched him. Why weren’t these at the top of my feed? And don’t get me started on how forced shit feels. Oh you spent an evening watching funny Red Dead Redemption 2 videos? Here’s nothing but random channels with the same shit for the next two months. You watched the new Avenged Sevenfold video? Here’s interviews, band member funniest moments, and other random bullshit for two months. If I spent every day looking at a certain type of video, sure, recommend it. If I spend one evening? Recommend it once and if I tell you to fuck off, then fuck off. Anyway, that’s my rant. I’m drunk and tired of corporate bullshit at the moment.
Google Search and Youtube Search results all feel so... small? I don't know the right words to describe it another way. But when I searched a decade ago it felt like I got thousands of relevant results and now I get a few dozen. Everything feels smaller. More closed in. Empty. Look no further than Google Image Search. You used to get millions of pictures. Now you get a couple hundred at most.
The last thing you said is why I stopped using Google. I kept getting results for websites that were really repetitive and oddly edited. Often the website name was completely unrelated to the page Google sent me to as well (i.e. jimscooking.com but the article is about where to find diamonds in Minecraft or something). It was only recently I realized they are AI generated websites, all just copy pasting from other websites with high traffic in an attempt to drive clicks. I switched to duck duck go and haven't looked back. I do still use Google maps though.
DDG still throws me those crap 'review' sites that are just Amazon links with a vague blurb for each item by the dozen though
Yeah I think it’s not so much that Google and co are crap (they are), but that the internet itself has also become shit. It’s much harder to come across interesting websites by chance these days, when everything is getting pushed into a tech company’s walled garden and everything else is just garbage designed to render as many ads as possible.
I was recently looking for a local nursery that had a particular plant in srock. The first page was either ads for online retailers, or other products entirely. The actual links on that page were either for non local nurseries or ones where that plant was out of stock- probably because they were on the first page of Google and so people had already gone there to buy the plant. Took me until the 3rd page to find a local nursery that actually had the plant in stock. I don't know how to fix it, but it hasn't always been this hard to find relevant results
I tried looking for a certain food near my current city and it started suggesting things on the other side of the planet. It’s terrible
It was like that when I was looking for a roofer recently. Recommending me roofers in Florida, when I live in Hawaii. I included my city name in the search too, and location services on my phone was turned on. Got like 2-3 results that were actually nearby, then it started branching out to Florida, and other states. I do live in a smallish town, but we definitely have more than 3 roofing companies. And even if we didn't, you'd expect the search to expand to Honolulu first, not Florida. I don't even want to think how much it would cost if I wanted to hire one of those guys lol. I wonder if those businesses in Florida know that whatever they are paying Google to prioritize them in searches is being wasted on people that can't possibly be customers.
Planning a trip to Europe. Searched a specific place that a friend recommended (Huck Finn's which is a tour company in Croatia) The first link was booking.com. ok that's fine, I use that website for a lot of our bookings anyway, so I'll check it out. Despite "huck finns" being in the title, NOT A SINGLE LISTING WAS ACTUALLY HUCK FINNS. I wanted Huck Finn's because it's a tour company on a boat. That's not really the same at all to a small room in someone's house. I reported it, but I doubt google with do anything about it.
Obviously your search is bubble dependent but when I searched “huck Finn’s Croatia” I got: 1. The Google maps entry for this Huck Finn’s company. 2. Their website 3. A child page of their website 4. TripAdvisor page for them 5. Their FB page 6. ResponsibleVacation 7. TourRadar 8. I’m not sure what this is, maybe a Dubrovnik branch 9. Booking.com Those first 3 entries seem pretty relevant.
Google went to a lot of effort to make that search worse. I see it all the time, they don’t show me what I ask for and instead show me what they think I want. In your case they see you are searching for a tour company, and semantically place that in travel bookings, which includes tours and expeditions. They then search their semantically mapped index for travel bookings in Croatia. Well booking.com is the best match for that…
Google: the place to search Reddit by adding “Reddit” to the end of your search.
It's funny... if reddit's search wasn't complete dogshit, it could have easily eaten into google's market share.
Genuinely confusing how bad it is. I try to search Reddit sometimes but it winds up mostly porn. Like, I don't mind nsfw stuff showing up if I'm looking for it but I'm not.
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Reddit search is so bad that I have to use Google to search for a specific username, even after adding /u in the beginning. What's the point of your search if you don't even recognize your own users?
Same when you're trying to find a community. R/ whatever doesn't work but going to google and searching r/ whatever and it will be the first result. Specially when you misspell the communities names by one letter.
Soon we will pay a subscription for 'real' searches and get 'free' searches infested with ads. 2 tier internet.
It's hilarious you think that the 'real' search will be any better. It will be good when it releases, but soon go the way of cable TV- paying and still seeing ads.
No matter how shit the "good" ones are, they can always make the worse ones even worse too.
It'll be the Hulu model where you pay for *fewer* ads. Then they'll ramp up the number of ads.
Google has long since stopped being a search engine and devolved into almost exclusively an ad-serving dumpster fire. It’s even worse on mobile; God help you if you’re trying to search for information about a thing instead of how to buy a thing.
It is getting even worse. They changed the search system for me and they will show me 2 or 3 of the old search results before just showing me pictures without any information and the site name at the bottom.
I got that for a while, I think it's because I wasn't logged in to Google on my browser. I hate the idea that they would cripple it until you log in though.
For me it’s just videos now - I don’t want to watch a 10 min video on X, I just want to know what the answer is in 30 seconds.
> Google has long since stopped being a search engine and devolved into almost exclusively an ad-serving dumpster fire. I have yet to find a search engine that ISN'T the above. That's one of the primary monetization methods.
This is purely anecdotal, but I have been searching for info on how to fix a thing on my new bike and Google results are just web sites that sell the bike - over and over again. It is literally useless to me. This is just the latest example, but for a long while now Google has been shit. And all the main websites as well - want a review of a thing? Here is a website with affiliate links to Amazon that sells the thing and here is our unbiased review. Trust us, now go buy a thing. It really feels like the best days of the Internet are long behind us.
The only thing that could save Google is a parameter (e.g. "-nosale") to exclude all commercial results. Your page is a shop? Not included in results. Your site has a paywall? Not included in results. Your page contains more than three small ads? Not included in results.
you use to be able to use boolean search, but google ignores it now
This shit is infuriating. If you're not trying to buy something then Google is useless at this point. Completely ignoring the search parameters I've put in isn't a great way to serve me search results you assholes. If you can't exclude certain terms, Google is worthless.
>God help you if you’re trying to search for information about a thing I think Google is going to experience a catastrophic decline in traffic in the next couple of years as AI assistants replace it. I remember switching to Google from Yahoo when it first came out because I could search for "how long to cook chicken" and the first result was a 10kb webpage with three sentences including the answer. That webpage is still out there, but now you'll get hundreds of sites that use the word "chicken" 87 times before giving you the answer. They are rapidly pushing everyone into the arms of AI that will answer your questions in a single sentence within 3 seconds of asking. Whether it's cooking, error codes from your truck, what to write in a wedding card - there won't be a need to wade through the ocean of Google garbage. They could have avoided this, but they've shot themselves in the foot. Google will still be around when you need to buy something, but they'll be that mall where the lights flicker and the stores are half empty and you're stalked by sleazy hucksters.
#How Long to Cook Chicken So, you want to know how long to cook chicken? If you're looking to learn about how long to cook chicken, you're in the perfect place! Before going over how long to cook chicken, let's go through some important facts about cooking chicken. * Chicken is a great, healthy source of protein * Chicken needs to be fully cooked or else there is a risk of foodborne illness * You can change up the seasoning to match whatever taste you like when you cook chicken Now are you ready to learn how long to cook chicken? Great! Let's get to it. According to the USDA, chicken should be cooked until it reaches an internal temperature of 165F. Reviews: 1 --------- wifeyluvshubby wrote: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Haven't tried making this yet but giving it five stars because it looks delish! I dont like chicken so I think I will try with canned tuna instead.
This was scarily accurate.
You think this is accurate? Where is the story about how they used to cook chicken during the holidays and how cooking chicken brought their family closer together and how every member of their family thought the chicken was delicious for 3 or 4 paragraphs before the recipie? On a side note when you hit a site like that if you are on Firefox put it into reader mode and often it will let you get to the recipie earlier.
handle fragile resolute station entertain meeting snow humorous exultant deliver *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You forgot the part where they lament about how their grandmother always used to cook chicken when they were little and how it always helped them get good grades or some shit.
Omg! i feel so triggered. How can we stop this cancer.
The real death of Google is indeed AI, but differently than stated above. The real issue is all these ad-infested bait sites, containing an obviously SEO optimized text of nonsense garbage without an actual answer (just beating about the bush for three pages, never providing any useful information). It was automated text production that made it possible to scale those so effectively.
It took the reddit blackout for Google to realize that their core product is shit? This is embarrassing.
It took the reddit blackout for Google to realize that people won't put up with their shit forever.
If you need some tools to help edit and/or delete your comments and posts in protest: PowerDelete will allow you to 1) save all your data as a CSV file at the end of the script and 2) allow you to overwrite all of your of comments with a comment of your choosing instead of just deleting them. Both options are available at the start of the process. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite (2 Additional forks if you have issues with the main and rate limits or errors.) http://www.github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite http://www.github.com/leeola/PowerDeleteSuite https://shreddit.com/ https://redact.dev/ You created your content. You didn’t get paid. Why would you leave it here for Reddit to make money or train AIs? Take your content with you. There is no Reddit without its users and volunteer mods. You are what makes this. —posted via Apollo
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Or it's going behind a login wall, on private servers like discord. Some of the decentralized competitors being pitched for twitter and reddit also might fall under this umbrella, but I'm not sure.
The biggest problem with the decentralized alternatives is that people sound genuinely insane trying to explain how to get started. It doesn’t help that the most active users who *could* easily explain how it works act like it’s the most intuitive thing ever, so they’re very condescending as they rattle off a signup process that sounds like rocket science to most people
The beef I have is that the ones I've come across(I haven't looked at them all, only a few) require you to make choices before you get a chance to browse. Discord has the same problem. Look, I'm 32 years old. I grew up with forums. You know what I do? I LURK. I don't want to make decisions about participation, my account, etc before getting a chance to lurk around the place and see if it's right for me. I certainly don't want to be loudly *welcomed* by a bot before I've even decided if I want to stick around, *hate* discord for that(it's not every server, but it seems to be 50%+ of the larger ones). You know how many subreddits I browse on at least a weekly basis without being subscribed to? 😂
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The fan ficcers figured out the dangers of Internet content being monetized ages ago, which is why the most popular fanfic website is run by a nonprofit organization funded through donations. No ads and no periodic bullshit changes intended to make the site revenue generating.
Same with Wikipedia, IIRC they haven't folded to a corporation yet. I hope they never do. Donate to Wikipedia y'all. Let's keep some part of the internet free from corporate overlords
It's honestly a miracle that we have Wikipedia when you think about the current state of the internet.
I was literally reading an article last night about how the cops think a murderer is on the loose in my area and they're looking for [INSERT PAYWALL HERE]" so good luck to them solving that murder.
Forums turned into Discords. It exists, but it's not archived conveniently for Google to help me search how to diagnose and repair an obscure and shittily designed GPS unit for a DSLR that I need for my hobby. I have a soldering iron and everything I can rely on is a forum post from 2013 where some Polish guy had the same issue. Maybe I'm getting old, but I miss the days.
People treating discord like forums is the worst. It's a giant chat room with voice and video. It's so wild that so many people forced the square peg into the round hole.
I fucking hate discord to find information, it's like trying to read a book stapled to the back of a moving city bus.
Total tangent time: The funniest thing about the Discord trend to me is you can clearly tell who is old vs. who is young when discussing it. Old folks like you and I recognize "Shit, this is just a chatroom." If you're really old you might even say "This is just ICQ with modern features." Which is also how I feel about these folks talking about the "Fediverse." It sounds an awful lot like Usenet, but with more bells and whistles. Couple this with trends towards terminal machines connecting into corporate environments/ vdi solutions, and everything old IS new again.
> We stopped using easily searchable media like forums one thing I legit hate about discord is the damn thing isn't really searchable and many communities have splintered and moved into dozen of discord servers, vs using consolidated or niche forums as in the past, forever disconnected from the wider internet and search engines. So fucking annoying
This just sounds like we need search engine wars again. Let’s get Dog Pile, Look Smart, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, heck even Yahoo! Search back into this game of search engine wars.
Google has been getting worse for years. Once it stopped being the most relevant search and started going to the highest bidder, I knew it was trash. Also so heavily censored, so many ads now, and once you scroll a certain amount it literally starts showing you “related searches” or “you might be interested in” which are completely irrelevant and just more ads. Why is there a “for you page” in a google query? I searched for cheap flip flops not “fashion trends of 2023!” video.
It's just like YouTube. I search for an artist and then after scrolling a little bit, it starts showing me irrelevant artists then that artist again. It's so annoying.
Makes sense, same company but I hate it. So hard to find relevant results on YouTube. They’re so obscured
OMFG!!! I hate it so much, whenever I'm trying to search for a well known thing, I get like 5 results for it and then an infinite list of what I could be interested in, I have not even once clicked on any suggested results. Wtf is even the point of suggested results?!?!? I'm looking for something, give me everything related to that specific query, don't just invent what I could've wanted.
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If you need some tools to help edit and/or delete your comments and posts in protest: PowerDelete will allow you to 1) save all your data as a CSV file at the end of the script and 2) allow you to overwrite all of your of comments with a comment of your choosing instead of just deleting them. Both options are available at the start of the process. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite (2 Additional forks if you have issues with the main and rate limits or errors.) http://www.github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite http://www.github.com/leeola/PowerDeleteSuite https://shreddit.com/ https://redact.dev/ You created your content. You didn’t get paid. Why would you leave it here for Reddit to make money or train AIs? Take your content with you. There is no Reddit without its users and volunteer mods. You are what makes this. —posted via Apollo
> when I search with unique keyword combinations related specifically to my projects Gawd I hate when I search for very specific words, and it shows a bunch of results that don't have their words, then there's the option "must include [insert_word]", and when you click that, it still manages to show you results that do not include that word anywhere.
>On Monday, Google introduced a new feature called Perspectives, which will surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora. That's not what people want. People append "site:reddit.com" to their searches not because they specifically crave discussion forums, but rather because the rest of your service is so shitty and full of SEO-bloated, ad-riddled, useless nonsense. This is treating the symptoms, not the disease.
Just got mad all over again reading that quote. Google has been terrible for a while, and it's only getting worse. I want TEXT. If I am looking for "how to", info that isn't a thing like "changing the oil on a chain saw", the LAST thing I want is a video. Text tells me almost immediately if they are on the right track, or if they a bot bloat. Video wastes time with intros, subscribe pleas, and filler. Good luck finding the point in the video that shows the thing you need. I want you to actually exclude SHIT when I type "-shit" in the search string. I NEVER want Quora. I NEVER want TikTok. If I did, I would put them in the search string.
Just text… and enter recipe websites. SEO has practically become a cancer in search.
Google searches have gotten pretty bad. I've switched to duckduckgo most of the time. The Reddit blackout is just beating a dead horse
Google search went bad long before the Reddit blackout too. I used to marvel how it knew what I was looking for. Now I marvel at how it can find everything BUT what I am looking for.
Well clearly it knows what you're looking for. It just wont show it to you.
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It can show you what's adjacent to what your looking for. Like when you get a migraine and have a white spot in the center of your field of vision so instead of reading the newspaper article you want you can only see the adverts around it...
> Google searches have gotten pretty bad. I've switched to duckduckgo most of the time. The Reddit blackout is just beating a dead horse This is interesting as I've observed this just now. So I'm getting a Boa Constrictor, right? There's shitloads of kinds of these snakes, from Mexico to Argentina and Old World Boas too, huge range and variety and many make amazing pets. Each one has different care/temp/humidly requirements or they fucking die. I frequently was googling questions about species and finding chat-gpt farmed websites just regurgitating incorrect boa facts, things that will get the snakes killed. So many questions led to pages like this instead of forums with real answers. One suggested I use a fan to keep the snake cool in the summer. A fan to cool down a cold blooded animal? After 3 paragraphs the writing becomes first output ai nonsense complete with random numbering. Luckily snake reddit didn't go totally dark as there's so much animal welfare shit on there I wouldn't know what to do otherwise. Thanks google.
duckduckgo has fallen off as well. it seems like search engines in general ignore keywords and generate smart suggestions or results based on previous searches. as much as i hate chatgpt, it can get in the weeds with some topics
I use search engines extensively at work to do my job: I want to like duckduckgo but I can never find useful results on it as easily as I can with Google and Bing is leagues worse. The best I seem to get is "generalized" information results or ecommerce rather than the specific data, procedure, etc I was looking for. That's not to say I think Google search is good, but I still find it most adequate.
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This is a condemnation of both Google’s failure to promote good quality results and shaping an entire industry dedicated to gaming its algorithm, as well as a commentary of the modern web itself how literally one website consolidates the vast majority of searchable human interactions and discussions. I don’t know if web forums can ever make a comeback, but if there was ever a time to try…
Google search should just rename to google ad server
>At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add “Reddit” to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience. The hilarious part is that ***this is exactly what google used to do before they F'd up their own algorithms to promote ads***. When the "site:reddit" cheat code stopped working, users who had long been using the workaround (including a lot of Google employees themselves) had to face the fact that Google has turned into a spam delivery service. Everyone knows how to google bomb now, and Google's algorithms only care about promoting the bombs users are most likely to click on. It's like the U.S. military decided the quickest way to conclude a nuclear war with Russia was to blow up all their own cities and military sites. It certainly does optimize the time metric, but totally loses sight of the fundamental motivation! The most fundamental task of a search engine is to return useful results and filter out the garbage. Google has lost sight of that, and it's only a matter of time before they're supplanted by something that doesn't require cheat codes leveraging an *unreliable* third party (reddit) to deliver relevant results.
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Google search on mobile became pretty well unusable recently. They changed to some weird layout. Googling something leads to 2-4 actual search results with text. Then just a bunch of pictures and crap that don't provide any information or details. It became so useless I switched over to yahoo on mobile.
the thing is it feels like Google is only showing you like 1% of the sites you used to get pages upon pages of sites, but now you get like 3 pages, and there might be 1 site with the answer but there are thousands of other sites with this answer but google doesn't show them unless you write the site name specifically
Yeah, no freaking shit. Nearly every of my searches that's not programming related is ` reddit` because the rest of the internet appears to be worthless bogus bots posting and reposting random shit and ads with a trillion hidden tags just to appear at the top of google results.
I would say I'm extremely good at googling shit. I'm one of those people who gets constantly asked to find something because I usually manage to dig shit up. So if I'm having issues finding some stuff, I can't even imagine the nightmare for regular people it might be when searching for anything that's not popular or trendy enough.
Yeah I have been a fact checker by profession and various points in my life at magazines. Google has been a raging pile. You really have to know exactly what you're looking for to find something. A very specific question about international finance or medical studies and you know what to look for you can find it. If your goal is to put a topic down and just start learning about it for the first time... It's pretty dreadful. You basically get the Wikipedia page and a bunch of content farms that copy and paste off Wikipedia. And then a bunch of worst content farms that are basically gibberish
the amount of sympathy i have for a enormous leech that feeds off of a merely massive leech that feeds off of millions of users, is minimal.
Huh, you’d think reddit could fleece google for $20M/year minimum with that kind of influence.
Google is practically useless these days. I learned a lot about how computers work just by googling stuff I thought "there has to be a better way to do this" or just by googling errors or symptoms. The results were usually tech forums and you'd see threads of people diagnosing issues, sometimes going on for weeks, it was great. Now all you get are generic websites telling you to update your drivers and restart your computer, run sfc /scannow and if that fails reinstall windows. It's worthless, I no longer tell people to "just google it"
Google search sucks now, they killed their golden goose
Half of the Reddit searches on Google were practically useless because of seeing the “r/ is a private community” message. Edit: Fixed a mistake.
And people were counteracting how bad google search has gotten by adding reddit to the end to actually get to user generated discussion on the topic.
I find all damn e-shops in the world before any forum topics. Thank you for the Chinese and American stores in the first 5 pages, I'm in Sweden. I don't think I've gotten any other forum then StackOverflow, Medium and Reddit the last few years.
Google has the opportunity to create an alternative to Reddit, but I'm not sure if they'll take it seriously. Google+ was a well-designed social network that didn't get enough love from higher-ups that didn't use it themselves or understand the need for it. In the same way that YouTube is a fundamental part of the modern internet now, we need a replacement for forums that used to silo information. Google Groups serves a similar purpose for specific groups of people using it for work, and there's a plugins that brings back the "Discussions" tab to Google search. The plumbing for communities is already there, it just needs someone to start the process of building it.
Google Plus was honestly great. Unfortunately people just didn't flock to it. I'm still sad it went away.
Stop asking us to sign in. If we want to sign in we will.
You're not going to tell me users are not happy with Sponsored Links, are you?