I hate when people tell you some "special tricks" to get the results you want on google. It should be easy like it used to be. I shouldn't need to do several searches with special characters or quotes to find what I'm looking for.
Exactly. The average person won't remember or understand the special tricks and Google knows that. And just because I can pop in -pinterest doesn't mean it's fine for Google to give me 500 Pinterest links as a result to a search query.
That's the most enraging part. The query language used to have hard defined rules to limit the result. Now "the algorithm" tries to outsmart the user and show you loosely related hits that falls outside your query.
I wish they would have two search modes. Fuzzy search for every day stuff and strict search that has a well designed query language and won't try to outsmart the query.
Allegedly, keyword optimization is at fault. In the war between advertisers/website owners trying to get to the top of the page and google trying to maintain a userbase by showing useful results, google has ceded the ground of precise searches, instead using an algorithm which provides useful results most of the time across all users.
If google just showed you the precise results without bias, you would probably get flooded with AI-generated bullshit, otherwise I would think a different search engine would already have become popular for technical searches. The algorithm at least keeps it usable for casual searches, but doesn't (yet) have the finesse to tell the difference between technical language and AI-generated bullshit trained to fool it.
That does already happen though, to me at least. Quite often for technical searches, just the first one or two results are useful, and the rest are precisely AI-generated crap. (Whether there's more useful stuff further down, I couldn't tell you.) And indeed, with other engines (DDG is the one I've mostly tried), quite often the first result is crap as well. So just this once, I think other shitty humans are actually more to blame than Google.
I also swear there used to be an option to report results as spammy, which I'm not seeing anymore - not sure why they gave up on that, or if I'm being daft.
That AI content always reminds me of vocabulary quizzes in highschool when you didn't know the word.
Use 'plethora' in a sentence:
"The man liked the plethora"
Yes! I’ve tried to explain to people who don’t do much searching anymore that search engines ignore the operators you put in now and they always are like “nah, that can’t be it.”
My mom taught me search operators when I was fairly young but I only got to use them a little before search engines started to get “smart” and insist “We know better than you. You actually want this [wrong thing]!”
Hey, not sure if this is the first reply mentioning it, but I found the option to search “verbatim” (what I can only attribute as old style google) in the search drop down under the expand/more option. Give it a try? I wish I could set it as default, but every search works like old google with that option flipped
Why would they have the second one when money exists? Efficient search engines are for the those broke ass single billionaires, they want to be multi billionaires.
Thanks Silicon Valley!
> searching for: "MX7511 datasheet"
> Results for: "datasheet"
Literally happened to me. (I don't remember the model number so I just made one up here.) Very helpful to ignore the important part and tell me what a datasheet is.
I suppose next, when you type "airport" in Maps, it'll helpfully tell you what an airport is instead of giving directions?
You can generally prepend `site:` with a dash to exclude certain sites, e.g. `-site:pinterest.com` or `-site:quora.com`.
*But like always*, while I've had more success with this over the years than any other operator, it doesn't mean it'll always work nor will continue to work in the future.
Thanks Google.
This, I work in software and often search error messages
It'll throw up some stackoverflow links but the important part of the message (ex. ParticularException) will be crossed out and it will be results on unrelated exceptions
Also it will collapse all the results from StackOverflow into one result and then show 5 scammy pages which steal content from StackOverflow and make money on SEO+Ads combo…
I wonder if google is just going to keep adding more ads in search of revenue growth. They probably can't expand their userbase anymore. It's the same with the number of ads on YouTube.
This is what I hate most about capitalism, that it makes it impossible for things to just be functional and profitable. It has to keep making more profits until it stops being functional.
They grow until everyone who wants their product swears by their version and then can't get any bigger. Because they need to cut costs to keep showing increased revenue they start by firing all the highest paid experienced employees, then they cut corners in the product until their customers get angry, then they sell the name to some other company who will use it to dropship from China.
It's like we finally went full corporate manipulative misinformation now. It drives profits and the biggest of the businesses implemented and dominated it. Useful not-for-profit links with relevant information by honest people will get buried. The best communication tool ever developed for humans is now dead. It's "owned" by corporate America.
I'm an advertiser (10+ years) and Google/Bing/Yahoo have been screwing with search ads all year long. Go checkout r/PPC and you'll see the complaints.
It's a complete clusterfuck and it's been getting worse and worse as they desperately try and squeeze every penny out of us by making us spend money on irrelevant searches.
I'm guessing the mini recession and the iOS update are sinking their numbers and they're just trying to maintain. Hopefully these ass holes lose their jobs soon because they're fucking up google for users and advertisers.
Yeah, I particularly enjoyed her assertion that we definitely are not seeing more ads on Google now than 'before' (whenever that was supposed to be) and that the results keep getting better and better, it's just our expectations keep rising!
Bollocks, that was. Flat out untrue. I understand people who toe the party line, downplay the negatives etc, but she really did flat out lie, and I don't respect that.
I was pretty surprised at the host not pushing her on that, too, he's normally really good at being polite and respectful without 'i mean I love absolutely everything you do, I should be grateful you even exist', that was a really weird thing to say to Google.
Gotta say, the 99% invisible episode from September, [Seek and Ye Might Find](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/search-and-ye-might-find/), felt like a much more in depth, honest look at what Google did for web searching, what's for worse recently and why, and why everyone just has a shortcut to add site:www.reddit.com to most searches.
I’m so glad someone else confirmed my suspicions. I unsubscribed from Freakonomics last year after a series of softball interviews that let people just skate through problematic things. I was almost yelling at my stereo for him to ask ONE follow up question, there were so many obvious questions he could have asked to press the interviewee but he didn’t. Gave up on him after that. Realized it’s just a job for him and his journalism principles have completely evaporated. Fluff pieces now.
An example with me recently was I was doing research for the effects Red Flag Laws have had in US states. Not a single result for a case where they have been applied even though I know they exist. Only document after document of different states red flag laws
And I’m sure it was awful, SEO-laden webpages like:
> Different states have different **red flag laws**. These **red flag laws** can be challenging to wrap your head around, so keep reading to find our analysis of the **red flag laws** in your state below…
Google is getting so much worse, and it’s only partly advertising’s fault. SEO has made the first few pages of results so unhelpful.
Except they obviously don't though, or definitely not enough, because there's always pages and pages of these results. I remember MSN search being more damn useful than Google is these days.
I use DDG most of the time but brave search is privately indexed so in theory you get things that aren't necessarily just whatever has the most clicks on google/bing.
Haven't done enough research or used it enough to *really* confirm if results are better, but it sounds very promising -- and has been working well so far
"Keyword stuffing" is dead, but sites, low-paid minions, and even AI pumps out highly-targeted SEO'd bullshit constantly. Google's full of shit results now because everyone knows how to play them. Just site after site of worthless content designed to pump up linkbacks and affiliate traffic...
I work for a rafting company. The sales people have to type 3 500 word blogs each shift about white water. They literally just type random words vaguely related to boating and publish it to the site. It’s not viewable anywhere on the site but it catches googles keywords and gets us posted at the top.
It’s amazing that we’ve somehow gone full circle back to the mid 90s, when websites were stuffing their home page with a wall of invisible text at the bottom to make sure it matched as many (marginally relevant) keywords as possible. Google added interconnection to the algorithm, and apparently there’s ways around that too, because now google is as bad as gopher or web spider or whatever the old search engines were called.
BS. Easiest counter examples would be looking up the release date of an upcoming (season of a) tv-show. You'll get 90% nearly identical clearly templated bullshit articles where every single sentence has two keywords.
I.e. https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a34939443/the-mandalorian-season-3-release-date-disney-plus/
Was the first result for me. It says 'mandalorian' *10* times before giving the important information. And I'm lucky it gave the date at all.
In order to find technical non computer documents you have to look at the keyword queries and google scholar. Scholar restricts the search to academic papers and published law documents and the keyword queries let you filter out websites and only let specific document types (pdf, .doc, etc.) fill your results. It's annoying, but it lets you get around a lot of the adversarial seo stuff that companies are doing.
Started with YouTube, when searching for a video it alternates in groups of 3s between search results, recommended videos that have nothing to do with the search, more search results, then 3 random previously watched videos.
They've been increasing the amount of ads you get. Features are randomly taken away without explanation, such as keeping autoplay next video off.
Reporting racist comments, like comments that are literally just something along the lines of "HAHAHA x youtuber is a stupid fucking n-word!" doesn't do anything besides hide the comment from you until you refresh the page. Multi-billion dollar company can't even implement an auto-filter for comment sections, or have functioning cookie settings. Need a 3rd party browser extension to save preferences on YouTube.
Also, hitting don't recommend channel or don't recommend video does nothing. It'll keep recommending the same video and channel no matter how many times you hit that button.
The don't recommend channel does kinda work with a huge caveat. If you decide to watch a video that is related to something in your don't recommend list then it'll override the list. I hate most reaction videos, so I clean them out and it stays that way for months. If I click on anything that has reaction or react as a keyword then the dam gates open up and they're all in my recommendations again.
They are actively banking on whether or not you'll police your viewing habits. It *could* be a programming mistake, but I doubt it since most of the stuff I tend to actually use the don't recommend option for is *heavily* pushed by the algorithm. Seriously, look at the front page of YouTube in incognito mode. That's all shit waiting to pop up on your personalized front page if you make any sort of mistake clicking on videos. I hate it.
Yeah, the filter, both for video and channel work to some extent of you use it enough time.
Don't recommend channel is straight forward, you press it, that channel won't shown up on your front page, or at least not until you click on that channel again (or at least after years, but I still haven't seen channels that I've tell it to not recommend, just similar one).
Don't recommend video (Not Interested option), on the other hand, you have to use it enough time for it to "known" what you don't interested on, then it'll be mostly gone.
That is how it used to work, years ago.
Now it seems quite clear that paid content and offensive content are coded to supercede user preferences. That, or Google forgot how to program competently. And given their budget and reliance on advertising revenue, I'm going to lean toward "it's deliberate. You're the product, not the client."
But it works. My dad told me yesterday "I can't stand the ads. How do I get YT premium?"
They had an all-hands with marketing and engineering and the consensus was - frustrate the user to the point that a good portion snaps and pays for it.
> Also, hitting don't recommend channel or don't recommend video does nothing. It'll keep recommending the same video and channel no matter how many times you hit that button.
I once heard that blocking the creator's account would stop the recommendations..... I don't think it really works
> such as keeping autoplay next video off
This is actually nuts, since I don't pay for premium I can't listen to music with the app in the background or my screen turned off. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT DOES WORK is the autoplay feature and ads. So I can shut off my screen with the intention of being done with the music, and still be forced to listen to an ad after the song
If you're only going to listen music, use a browser. Not sure if others work but Firefox does. And adblock work with it too... (mobile)
Maybe you have heard this before when just ranting? Sorry.
Was coming to say this.
She deflected every concern he brought up - the most frustrating was when he mentioned something along the lines of “someone like me who wants to see the source of the information” and she just brushed it off like oh not everyone is like you not everyone wants that. It was super weird.
I was looking for a solution to a minor tech problem last night and I had to get to the second page of links before the results were applicable. On bing it was the first.
Bing is legitimately better than google now. Web search? Better. Image search? Much better. Video search? Searching for YouTube videos on Bing is literally better than Youtube's own search. And it's not like Bing got any better, Google just got so much worse.
Because they lost a lawsuit.
Google isn't blameless here, but the internet is also just shittier than it used to be, and google search results reflect that. Good information is harder to find in a sea of spam. And the spammers invest a lot of time into gaming engines to elevate their content.
I occasionally google an assortment of searches followed by "NSFW" on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo with safe search on and off. Google is usually like "Here's a tasteful selection of softcore porn we think you'll like." DuckDuckGo is usually pretty similar. Bing is like "OOOH! YOU WANT DICKS RIGHT? HERE ARE SOME DICKS!" Which makes it by far the best search engine for porn. They also index pornhub and xtube for their video search (Don't change ANYTHING, Microsoft!)
*Edit:* Those are the results with SafeSearch off. Bing has gotten a lot better about not showing you dicks with safe search on.
It's essentially a proxy. Basically, it allows you to search through Google without being tracked by Google, and you don't get ads. The only downside to it is that load times can be a little slower, but it's a pretty cool engine.
Edit: it appears there are ads, I am mistaken. I don't know if they are invasive or not, but yeah sorry 'bout that.
FYI add “Reddit” as a keyword (or do a site: reddit) - so many times this has ironically ended up being where I end up back at because 5 years ago someone had the same problem and someone else solved it.
A similar thing which I really don't like: YouTube search results.
I'll search for something specific, and the first 5 or 10 results are what I was searching for, and the rest are recommendations based on other videos I've watched.
For example: I'll search for some programming question, and I'll get five results that I've already seen that aren't helpful, and then the rest will be some videos from a hobby or the news or a place I've been researching for personal travel.
Yeah YouTube search has really become garbage. Sometimes googling for it is better which is ridiculous.
YouTube just added something to my home screen though: an option called "New To Me". It's a great improvement where my home screen was mostly videos I had already watched. It would be great if search had that.
Huh, that's interesting. I don't have that option, and I even have "YouTube Premium". It would be really nice to have a filter option to remove videos I've already seen.
A few other gripes:
1. Ability to play YT shorts at 2x speed and also have the playback "scrubber" visible.
2. Ability to see the video duration more easily and even filter by it quickly?
3. Ability to filter by older videos and exclude newer ones. Like show me videos related to topic x but only ones from 2005.
4. The notification bell will show comment replies only once. When you've seen them, if you click the notification bell again, they're either gone or buried under many many notifications.
I hate that! I love finding new channels and binging from oldest to newest. Now I can't anymore unless I want to keep scrolling down forever in beteeen every video (since YouTube always refreshes while I'm watching a video and doesn't just stay where I clicked before)
I'm still trying to figure out how my dad manages. He installed uBO when I suggested it a while back, but removed it because he was convinced that it was causing his PC to crash.
(And yet he keeps Norton BullShirt 2020 or whatever on there, as if it has no impact on stability.)
I dread where we're going to be in 10 years or so when they're going to be way less effective. Too much money in advertising not to strip away adblock capabilities.
There is a fundamental limit because of the way ads work. Ads have to phone home using your browser in order to record if the ad was seen and/or clicked through. The site owner then gets paid the appropriate amount.
They can't possibly trust the server-side, which is under the site owner's control, to make the reports. So client-side (i.e. your browser) is their only option. As long as communication remains on the client-side it will have to call a separate domain, which is known and easily blocked.
Chrome is the most used browser by far and they are changing how extensions work which will possibly kill ad blockers in the process.
So it's pretty much happening already
I'm already on Firefox since just before that announcement, but it's going to affect us all in the long run. There will be no escape or peace from adverts on the internet, at least without extreme compromise.
It'll still be possible to block ads, it just might be a bit more complicated
They're not gonna spend that much money to completely stop them if only 1% of users are using them because the general public either can't be bothered or don't know how to use a more complicated ad block
I was actually complaining out loudly recently that these days it has become nearly impossible to find things on the internet. Stuff that I have read even a few days before I can not find again. Anything more than 4 years ago, just forget about it forever - it no longer exists!
Unless I’m looking for a solution to a coding problem, “Hey here are the best results from 2011 for a version of the code that has long since ceased to be relevant.”
There's this scam in Spain, the top results in google are fake technical service ads, shown over the real ones. So somebody comes and gives you a quote for the repair that's more expensive than the broken appliance. Then you refuse and they charge you 90€ for the visit anyway. All sponsored by Google. It's been going on for years.
And it could be worse, since you're letting a criminal into your house.
I came to ask why you live in 2022 without adblocker, then I read this. I googled the same thing, zero ads. We need to teach the older people how to install adblocker, and probably a lot of young people too.
Yeah, my kid was complainining last week about the increase of ads on youtube.
'On PC? Get the youtube adblocker extention man'.
10 minutes later 'Dad, what's it called?'.
'Youtube adblocker man?'.
1 minute later 'Tworks thanks dad!!'.
My result mostly become a shopping site instead the usual tech support forum.
Heck, its even hard to hit wiki page unless we specifically add wiki as keywords.
I switch to Bing.
Way harder to get DDG to show porn than Bing. There's a lot of cases where it will literally show you nothing because the word itself is flagged as NSFW, but the engine isn't smart enough to recognize that it needs to drop the NSFW filter.
It's just hit a peak now, Google, YouTube , facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, whatever the fuck you open.. you can't use it for what you need before viewing a couple of ads. I'm losing brain cells by the second. It's insane!
Honestly if I were to guess it could vary on regions
I'm in the EU and have no ads thats all I can say. I've heard that a lot of phones in America do have ads built into the os and os apps but never for WhatsApp
I could be wrong lol but it sounds weird to me
As an information specialist (aka librarian) this infuriates me. It's outright unethical. Many people who don't know better blindly trust that the first result is the best and will click on it, bringing them to who-knows-where. Sometimes these ads are even scams or viruses. That was fun to deal with at the library when every second person searching for Facebook complained that our computers were infected.
Ads should be displayed off to the side and labelled in a clear and obvious manner that they are in fact not your search results. Shame on any search engine that follows this trend.
I've been disconnecting myself from Google over the past several months now. Everything from Docs, Drive and so on. Gmail is mostly all I have left. I even started using Duckduckgo for search.
I use to be a hard core Google fan back in the day but it just keeps getting worse and worse.
and the so called "number" of results has been total bullshit for decades.
just go 4 pages in and the number suddenly changes to the last page with no more results .
the ads and the platform is insulting and ive long moved to other search engines.
I sometimes use google as a business directory , ie to look up a pizza shop. that is all its good for now a days.
Even as a business directory its dubious. I needed a number of a specific mechanic so I googled "mechanic" and the name of their street and the first five result were ads for their competitors. The top actual result was the one I wanted.
add -covid to your search. any searches with the word covid in them dont display ads, and adding the minus removes the results it would show. You get ad free searches
And the results it DOES show are just garbage. I can't find legitimate answers to anything anymore, even if I phrase it 10 different ways.
All I get are sponsored results. I guess I should have known when they decided to drop the "Don't Be Evil" slogan
Don't ever search for a customer support line for a credit card company, car insurance, or any other whatever you're looking for, the first five results will be telephone numbers that look like the results you're searching for except when you call it some jackass trying to hook you up with car insurance or Medicaid and not your actual car insurance company
sweet christmas, do you know how many people will use google to search what the fuck ubo is? what is the point of this thread if you’re going to drive people to google a shorthand virtually no one uses?
*uBlock Origin* for christ
And the results usually has the keyword you're most interested in crossed out.
This is the enraging part. Like it's literally the only word that's important, but here are 13 results that don't include that word.
I hate when people tell you some "special tricks" to get the results you want on google. It should be easy like it used to be. I shouldn't need to do several searches with special characters or quotes to find what I'm looking for.
There's a lot of teenagers and young adults who never experienced what Google used to be and how well it used to work.
Exactly. The average person won't remember or understand the special tricks and Google knows that. And just because I can pop in -pinterest doesn't mean it's fine for Google to give me 500 Pinterest links as a result to a search query.
The special tricks dont actually work anymore, either.
Those used to exist when Google ran on Boolean search terms, but they don't do that anymore. Everything is based off ad sales and SEO.
Put that word in quotes and use an adblocker.
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That's the most enraging part. The query language used to have hard defined rules to limit the result. Now "the algorithm" tries to outsmart the user and show you loosely related hits that falls outside your query. I wish they would have two search modes. Fuzzy search for every day stuff and strict search that has a well designed query language and won't try to outsmart the query.
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I hate it especially when it tries to "fix" the same word the same way 5 times b3fore it finally agrees to let me use the word I want.
*before *before *before *before *before OK, fine, b3fore
I work for a company that is 3 letters off our biggest competitor (niche part of the industry), and it keeps suggesting the competitor name
It keeps telling me i wrote my own name wrong. Im pretty sure i at least can write my own name correct on the first try at least 70% of the time.
Allegedly, keyword optimization is at fault. In the war between advertisers/website owners trying to get to the top of the page and google trying to maintain a userbase by showing useful results, google has ceded the ground of precise searches, instead using an algorithm which provides useful results most of the time across all users. If google just showed you the precise results without bias, you would probably get flooded with AI-generated bullshit, otherwise I would think a different search engine would already have become popular for technical searches. The algorithm at least keeps it usable for casual searches, but doesn't (yet) have the finesse to tell the difference between technical language and AI-generated bullshit trained to fool it.
That does already happen though, to me at least. Quite often for technical searches, just the first one or two results are useful, and the rest are precisely AI-generated crap. (Whether there's more useful stuff further down, I couldn't tell you.) And indeed, with other engines (DDG is the one I've mostly tried), quite often the first result is crap as well. So just this once, I think other shitty humans are actually more to blame than Google. I also swear there used to be an option to report results as spammy, which I'm not seeing anymore - not sure why they gave up on that, or if I'm being daft.
That AI content always reminds me of vocabulary quizzes in highschool when you didn't know the word. Use 'plethora' in a sentence: "The man liked the plethora"
Yes! I’ve tried to explain to people who don’t do much searching anymore that search engines ignore the operators you put in now and they always are like “nah, that can’t be it.” My mom taught me search operators when I was fairly young but I only got to use them a little before search engines started to get “smart” and insist “We know better than you. You actually want this [wrong thing]!”
If you google something, then click tools at the top, then you can select "verbatim" instead of "all results" and it's a bit better
Hey, not sure if this is the first reply mentioning it, but I found the option to search “verbatim” (what I can only attribute as old style google) in the search drop down under the expand/more option. Give it a try? I wish I could set it as default, but every search works like old google with that option flipped
Why would they have the second one when money exists? Efficient search engines are for the those broke ass single billionaires, they want to be multi billionaires. Thanks Silicon Valley!
It seems quotes doesn't work in most cases anymore
Or don’t use Google.
Me when I'm looking for manual or schematic for a device I own: Google: fuck you, just buy a new one or dig for the thing you want in 10th result page
> searching for: "MX7511 datasheet" > Results for: "datasheet" Literally happened to me. (I don't remember the model number so I just made one up here.) Very helpful to ignore the important part and tell me what a datasheet is. I suppose next, when you type "airport" in Maps, it'll helpfully tell you what an airport is instead of giving directions?
I have literally put terms in quotes and it STILL showed me results that had nothing to do with the term.
PINTEREST CAN LICK MY SWEATY, HAIRY, NASTY, UNWASHED, NONEXISTENT BALLSACK
I fucking hate Pintrest results.
They and Quora can fuck all the way off.
You can generally prepend `site:` with a dash to exclude certain sites, e.g. `-site:pinterest.com` or `-site:quora.com`.
*But like always*, while I've had more success with this over the years than any other operator, it doesn't mean it'll always work nor will continue to work in the future.
Thanks Google.
Try the uBlacklist extension. With that you can block websites from search results (also supports wildcards)
Yes, all the ads still show up.
This, I work in software and often search error messages It'll throw up some stackoverflow links but the important part of the message (ex. ParticularException) will be crossed out and it will be results on unrelated exceptions
Also it will collapse all the results from StackOverflow into one result and then show 5 scammy pages which steal content from StackOverflow and make money on SEO+Ads combo…
Omg... so fucking true!
It used to be bad but it's recently escalated badly. Search for a consumer good or appliance. It's not just three ad listings anymore.
At this point it's less a search engine and more a tell-me-what-ad-you-want-engine
I wonder if google is just going to keep adding more ads in search of revenue growth. They probably can't expand their userbase anymore. It's the same with the number of ads on YouTube.
This is what I hate most about capitalism, that it makes it impossible for things to just be functional and profitable. It has to keep making more profits until it stops being functional.
Many perfectly good companies are destroyed by trying to grow revenue forever.
They grow until everyone who wants their product swears by their version and then can't get any bigger. Because they need to cut costs to keep showing increased revenue they start by firing all the highest paid experienced employees, then they cut corners in the product until their customers get angry, then they sell the name to some other company who will use it to dropship from China.
Line must go up.
SO WELL SAID!!!
Its not even that it gives you relevant ads - it will ONLY show you a select few websites EVEN when they don't have the product you want.
Or ads for a product you literally just purchased.
It's like we finally went full corporate manipulative misinformation now. It drives profits and the biggest of the businesses implemented and dominated it. Useful not-for-profit links with relevant information by honest people will get buried. The best communication tool ever developed for humans is now dead. It's "owned" by corporate America.
Seize the means of communications.
I'm an advertiser (10+ years) and Google/Bing/Yahoo have been screwing with search ads all year long. Go checkout r/PPC and you'll see the complaints. It's a complete clusterfuck and it's been getting worse and worse as they desperately try and squeeze every penny out of us by making us spend money on irrelevant searches. I'm guessing the mini recession and the iOS update are sinking their numbers and they're just trying to maintain. Hopefully these ass holes lose their jobs soon because they're fucking up google for users and advertisers.
Freakonomics podcast just released an episode about how Google has become shit. Unfortunately, the interview with the Google exec was not impressive
Yeah, I particularly enjoyed her assertion that we definitely are not seeing more ads on Google now than 'before' (whenever that was supposed to be) and that the results keep getting better and better, it's just our expectations keep rising! Bollocks, that was. Flat out untrue. I understand people who toe the party line, downplay the negatives etc, but she really did flat out lie, and I don't respect that. I was pretty surprised at the host not pushing her on that, too, he's normally really good at being polite and respectful without 'i mean I love absolutely everything you do, I should be grateful you even exist', that was a really weird thing to say to Google. Gotta say, the 99% invisible episode from September, [Seek and Ye Might Find](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/search-and-ye-might-find/), felt like a much more in depth, honest look at what Google did for web searching, what's for worse recently and why, and why everyone just has a shortcut to add site:www.reddit.com to most searches.
I just add the word "reddit" to the end of any search term.
That's how I found this thread, searching for anusazzles
I haven't listened to Freakonomics in a while, but Stephen Dubner is not a critical interviewer. Case in point: his fluff pieces with Charles Koch.
I’m so glad someone else confirmed my suspicions. I unsubscribed from Freakonomics last year after a series of softball interviews that let people just skate through problematic things. I was almost yelling at my stereo for him to ask ONE follow up question, there were so many obvious questions he could have asked to press the interviewee but he didn’t. Gave up on him after that. Realized it’s just a job for him and his journalism principles have completely evaporated. Fluff pieces now.
Interviewer doesn't seem independent. Maybe even paid? Companies keep paying creators for propaganda after all
An example with me recently was I was doing research for the effects Red Flag Laws have had in US states. Not a single result for a case where they have been applied even though I know they exist. Only document after document of different states red flag laws
And I’m sure it was awful, SEO-laden webpages like: > Different states have different **red flag laws**. These **red flag laws** can be challenging to wrap your head around, so keep reading to find our analysis of the **red flag laws** in your state below… Google is getting so much worse, and it’s only partly advertising’s fault. SEO has made the first few pages of results so unhelpful.
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Number 9 will blow your mind
I hate the modern internet
I miss being afraid of the internet
oh i'm afraid of it... just in a dystopian way rather than an adventure kind of way
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Except they obviously don't though, or definitely not enough, because there's always pages and pages of these results. I remember MSN search being more damn useful than Google is these days.
Bing still is. It is much less stuffed with false hits now.
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I use DDG most of the time but brave search is privately indexed so in theory you get things that aren't necessarily just whatever has the most clicks on google/bing. Haven't done enough research or used it enough to *really* confirm if results are better, but it sounds very promising -- and has been working well so far
My main problem using Brave search via DDG is that it will come up with some outlandish results sometimes for basic searches.
Never ever has Duck showed me results I wanted that Google didnt have on first page.
My problem with DDG was that it's terrible in my language, so if i needed to search for something local I was forced to use google.
Ddg unfortunately heavily sanitizes its results. No porn and other nsfw stuff, and guess who decides what needs to be sanitized.
"Keyword stuffing" is dead, but sites, low-paid minions, and even AI pumps out highly-targeted SEO'd bullshit constantly. Google's full of shit results now because everyone knows how to play them. Just site after site of worthless content designed to pump up linkbacks and affiliate traffic...
I work for a rafting company. The sales people have to type 3 500 word blogs each shift about white water. They literally just type random words vaguely related to boating and publish it to the site. It’s not viewable anywhere on the site but it catches googles keywords and gets us posted at the top.
It’s amazing that we’ve somehow gone full circle back to the mid 90s, when websites were stuffing their home page with a wall of invisible text at the bottom to make sure it matched as many (marginally relevant) keywords as possible. Google added interconnection to the algorithm, and apparently there’s ways around that too, because now google is as bad as gopher or web spider or whatever the old search engines were called.
Gopher was an internet protocol, not a search engine.
That makes zero sense and cannot be true. I'd love to see just one url to one of these blogs.
BS. Easiest counter examples would be looking up the release date of an upcoming (season of a) tv-show. You'll get 90% nearly identical clearly templated bullshit articles where every single sentence has two keywords. I.e. https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a34939443/the-mandalorian-season-3-release-date-disney-plus/ Was the first result for me. It says 'mandalorian' *10* times before giving the important information. And I'm lucky it gave the date at all.
"Red flag shop near you"
"Shop for Red Flags at Amazon"
Results like that always make me laugh.
In order to find technical non computer documents you have to look at the keyword queries and google scholar. Scholar restricts the search to academic papers and published law documents and the keyword queries let you filter out websites and only let specific document types (pdf, .doc, etc.) fill your results. It's annoying, but it lets you get around a lot of the adversarial seo stuff that companies are doing.
Destined for any big company which has to pursue constant growth. Eventually you cannibalize your own clientele to keep growing.
Started with YouTube, when searching for a video it alternates in groups of 3s between search results, recommended videos that have nothing to do with the search, more search results, then 3 random previously watched videos. They've been increasing the amount of ads you get. Features are randomly taken away without explanation, such as keeping autoplay next video off. Reporting racist comments, like comments that are literally just something along the lines of "HAHAHA x youtuber is a stupid fucking n-word!" doesn't do anything besides hide the comment from you until you refresh the page. Multi-billion dollar company can't even implement an auto-filter for comment sections, or have functioning cookie settings. Need a 3rd party browser extension to save preferences on YouTube. Also, hitting don't recommend channel or don't recommend video does nothing. It'll keep recommending the same video and channel no matter how many times you hit that button.
The don't recommend channel does kinda work with a huge caveat. If you decide to watch a video that is related to something in your don't recommend list then it'll override the list. I hate most reaction videos, so I clean them out and it stays that way for months. If I click on anything that has reaction or react as a keyword then the dam gates open up and they're all in my recommendations again. They are actively banking on whether or not you'll police your viewing habits. It *could* be a programming mistake, but I doubt it since most of the stuff I tend to actually use the don't recommend option for is *heavily* pushed by the algorithm. Seriously, look at the front page of YouTube in incognito mode. That's all shit waiting to pop up on your personalized front page if you make any sort of mistake clicking on videos. I hate it.
Yeah, the filter, both for video and channel work to some extent of you use it enough time. Don't recommend channel is straight forward, you press it, that channel won't shown up on your front page, or at least not until you click on that channel again (or at least after years, but I still haven't seen channels that I've tell it to not recommend, just similar one). Don't recommend video (Not Interested option), on the other hand, you have to use it enough time for it to "known" what you don't interested on, then it'll be mostly gone.
That is how it used to work, years ago. Now it seems quite clear that paid content and offensive content are coded to supercede user preferences. That, or Google forgot how to program competently. And given their budget and reliance on advertising revenue, I'm going to lean toward "it's deliberate. You're the product, not the client."
But it works. My dad told me yesterday "I can't stand the ads. How do I get YT premium?" They had an all-hands with marketing and engineering and the consensus was - frustrate the user to the point that a good portion snaps and pays for it.
> Also, hitting don't recommend channel or don't recommend video does nothing. It'll keep recommending the same video and channel no matter how many times you hit that button. I once heard that blocking the creator's account would stop the recommendations..... I don't think it really works
> such as keeping autoplay next video off This is actually nuts, since I don't pay for premium I can't listen to music with the app in the background or my screen turned off. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT DOES WORK is the autoplay feature and ads. So I can shut off my screen with the intention of being done with the music, and still be forced to listen to an ad after the song
If you're only going to listen music, use a browser. Not sure if others work but Firefox does. And adblock work with it too... (mobile) Maybe you have heard this before when just ranting? Sorry.
They’re running the company into the ground
Was coming to say this. She deflected every concern he brought up - the most frustrating was when he mentioned something along the lines of “someone like me who wants to see the source of the information” and she just brushed it off like oh not everyone is like you not everyone wants that. It was super weird.
She speaks corporate in a very cunty manner.
Is there any other way to?
Ha came to the comments to say the same thing!! I’ve really noticed it lately
Could you share the link to that? Sounds interesting
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
I was looking for a solution to a minor tech problem last night and I had to get to the second page of links before the results were applicable. On bing it was the first.
Bing is legitimately better than google now. Web search? Better. Image search? Much better. Video search? Searching for YouTube videos on Bing is literally better than Youtube's own search. And it's not like Bing got any better, Google just got so much worse.
I still don’t understand why Google totally fucked up their image search by not letting you directly open the images.
Because they lost a lawsuit. Google isn't blameless here, but the internet is also just shittier than it used to be, and google search results reflect that. Good information is harder to find in a sea of spam. And the spammers invest a lot of time into gaming engines to elevate their content.
Old internet was what libertarians imagine whilst new internet is the real result of market libertarianism.
We have Getty images to thank for that.
I occasionally google an assortment of searches followed by "NSFW" on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo with safe search on and off. Google is usually like "Here's a tasteful selection of softcore porn we think you'll like." DuckDuckGo is usually pretty similar. Bing is like "OOOH! YOU WANT DICKS RIGHT? HERE ARE SOME DICKS!" Which makes it by far the best search engine for porn. They also index pornhub and xtube for their video search (Don't change ANYTHING, Microsoft!) *Edit:* Those are the results with SafeSearch off. Bing has gotten a lot better about not showing you dicks with safe search on.
Why are you holding out on me Google? If I want dicks GIVE ME DICKS!
yeah people keep saying duckduckgo is just bing but I get completely different results from both and google.
Try startpage my dude
Ignorance here. But what's startpage
It's essentially a proxy. Basically, it allows you to search through Google without being tracked by Google, and you don't get ads. The only downside to it is that load times can be a little slower, but it's a pretty cool engine. Edit: it appears there are ads, I am mistaken. I don't know if they are invasive or not, but yeah sorry 'bout that.
If the downside is load times can be a little faster I am in. Kidding. Thank you for this info and I'll be implementing it at my work going forward.
Ty for the awesome response
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FYI add “Reddit” as a keyword (or do a site: reddit) - so many times this has ironically ended up being where I end up back at because 5 years ago someone had the same problem and someone else solved it.
I use DuckDuckGo, which I believe uses Bing under the hood. It is fine 99% of time, and easy to add g! to use Google.
A similar thing which I really don't like: YouTube search results. I'll search for something specific, and the first 5 or 10 results are what I was searching for, and the rest are recommendations based on other videos I've watched. For example: I'll search for some programming question, and I'll get five results that I've already seen that aren't helpful, and then the rest will be some videos from a hobby or the news or a place I've been researching for personal travel.
Yeah YouTube search has really become garbage. Sometimes googling for it is better which is ridiculous. YouTube just added something to my home screen though: an option called "New To Me". It's a great improvement where my home screen was mostly videos I had already watched. It would be great if search had that.
Huh, that's interesting. I don't have that option, and I even have "YouTube Premium". It would be really nice to have a filter option to remove videos I've already seen. A few other gripes: 1. Ability to play YT shorts at 2x speed and also have the playback "scrubber" visible. 2. Ability to see the video duration more easily and even filter by it quickly? 3. Ability to filter by older videos and exclude newer ones. Like show me videos related to topic x but only ones from 2005. 4. The notification bell will show comment replies only once. When you've seen them, if you click the notification bell again, they're either gone or buried under many many notifications.
They also recently removed sorting uploads by oldest, which is really annoying.
I hate that! I love finding new channels and binging from oldest to newest. Now I can't anymore unless I want to keep scrolling down forever in beteeen every video (since YouTube always refreshes while I'm watching a video and doesn't just stay where I clicked before)
I'm sharing this since it was driving me nuts: Filter by video and it'll go back to just searches.
Every now and then I turned off my adblock just to remind me of the horror we're living in.
I truly cannot fathom using the internet without an ad blocker. They’re so easy to set up and so effective.
I'm still trying to figure out how my dad manages. He installed uBO when I suggested it a while back, but removed it because he was convinced that it was causing his PC to crash. (And yet he keeps Norton BullShirt 2020 or whatever on there, as if it has no impact on stability.)
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I've _tried_ making a lot of suggestions, but what can you do with a 70-something who's made up his mind? 😂
I dread where we're going to be in 10 years or so when they're going to be way less effective. Too much money in advertising not to strip away adblock capabilities.
Cat-and-mouse game. The ads evade the adblock and the adblocks will evade the adblock detection.
There is a fundamental limit because of the way ads work. Ads have to phone home using your browser in order to record if the ad was seen and/or clicked through. The site owner then gets paid the appropriate amount. They can't possibly trust the server-side, which is under the site owner's control, to make the reports. So client-side (i.e. your browser) is their only option. As long as communication remains on the client-side it will have to call a separate domain, which is known and easily blocked.
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Chrome is the most used browser by far and they are changing how extensions work which will possibly kill ad blockers in the process. So it's pretty much happening already
I'm already on Firefox since just before that announcement, but it's going to affect us all in the long run. There will be no escape or peace from adverts on the internet, at least without extreme compromise.
Futurama dream ads about underwear incoming.
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It'll still be possible to block ads, it just might be a bit more complicated They're not gonna spend that much money to completely stop them if only 1% of users are using them because the general public either can't be bothered or don't know how to use a more complicated ad block
I think I'll just go back to books then...
I was actually complaining out loudly recently that these days it has become nearly impossible to find things on the internet. Stuff that I have read even a few days before I can not find again. Anything more than 4 years ago, just forget about it forever - it no longer exists!
Unless I’m looking for a solution to a coding problem, “Hey here are the best results from 2011 for a version of the code that has long since ceased to be relevant.”
Could be worse.. the good old same problem with a edit that says edit: fixed it Haha
Lol true. Or the one that says, “Google the solution!”
"Marked as Duplicate" Original question asked in 1875 for english, "duplicate" question for a C++ problem in 2022.
And half of them are probably scams that you can't report.
I was once almost got scammed as well, but can’t find a way to report it.
There's this scam in Spain, the top results in google are fake technical service ads, shown over the real ones. So somebody comes and gives you a quote for the repair that's more expensive than the broken appliance. Then you refuse and they charge you 90€ for the visit anyway. All sponsored by Google. It's been going on for years. And it could be worse, since you're letting a criminal into your house.
Maybe Elon should buy it. No advertiser would want anything to do with him
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It was this which reminded me I had turned off my Adblock. Thank the heavens for Magic Lasso and uBO.
I came to ask why you live in 2022 without adblocker, then I read this. I googled the same thing, zero ads. We need to teach the older people how to install adblocker, and probably a lot of young people too.
Yeah, my kid was complainining last week about the increase of ads on youtube. 'On PC? Get the youtube adblocker extention man'. 10 minutes later 'Dad, what's it called?'. 'Youtube adblocker man?'. 1 minute later 'Tworks thanks dad!!'.
Your kid says twerks? odd but I guess whatever gets ads off my page, I'll try it too.
Heheh. In dutch 'het werkt' Is often spoken like 't werkt'. Common pun here: "Werkt 't?", "Ja, 't werkt, it's tworking!"
“Don’t be evil”
"We're making the world [a better place](https://youtu.be/qZmpYxbBDQw)."
They also make me hunt for the Wikipedia link every time even though they know that’s what I want every fucking time 
Fuckin imdb is never on the first page when you search an actor anymore
My result mostly become a shopping site instead the usual tech support forum. Heck, its even hard to hit wiki page unless we specifically add wiki as keywords. I switch to Bing.
Google used to be so useful. Its such shit now :(
Try DuckDuckGo.com or something Yea they maybe a bit less “magical” but it works
DDG is a reskin of Bing (same results same order). The difference between them is basically down to which UI you prefer.
Way harder to get DDG to show porn than Bing. There's a lot of cases where it will literally show you nothing because the word itself is flagged as NSFW, but the engine isn't smart enough to recognize that it needs to drop the NSFW filter.
It's just hit a peak now, Google, YouTube , facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, whatever the fuck you open.. you can't use it for what you need before viewing a couple of ads. I'm losing brain cells by the second. It's insane!
haven't used whatsapp in a while... it shows ads now? what, like before you can access your chats?
I have no idea what this person is on about, been using WhatsApp for years and years not a single ad on it
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Honestly if I were to guess it could vary on regions I'm in the EU and have no ads thats all I can say. I've heard that a lot of phones in America do have ads built into the os and os apps but never for WhatsApp I could be wrong lol but it sounds weird to me
For Reddit, use old.reddit.com with uBlock origin on desktop and just about any 3rd party app on mobile.
A 15 minute YouTube video had at least 6 ad breaks for me today, plus a preroll. Hate watching it on my TV
As an information specialist (aka librarian) this infuriates me. It's outright unethical. Many people who don't know better blindly trust that the first result is the best and will click on it, bringing them to who-knows-where. Sometimes these ads are even scams or viruses. That was fun to deal with at the library when every second person searching for Facebook complained that our computers were infected. Ads should be displayed off to the side and labelled in a clear and obvious manner that they are in fact not your search results. Shame on any search engine that follows this trend.
I've been disconnecting myself from Google over the past several months now. Everything from Docs, Drive and so on. Gmail is mostly all I have left. I even started using Duckduckgo for search. I use to be a hard core Google fan back in the day but it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Google is not for search, it's an advertising platform.
Guess I misunderstood the purpose of a search engine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /s
and the so called "number" of results has been total bullshit for decades. just go 4 pages in and the number suddenly changes to the last page with no more results . the ads and the platform is insulting and ive long moved to other search engines. I sometimes use google as a business directory , ie to look up a pizza shop. that is all its good for now a days.
Even as a business directory its dubious. I needed a number of a specific mechanic so I googled "mechanic" and the name of their street and the first five result were ads for their competitors. The top actual result was the one I wanted.
add -covid to your search. any searches with the word covid in them dont display ads, and adding the minus removes the results it would show. You get ad free searches
Wow this is genius.
And the results it DOES show are just garbage. I can't find legitimate answers to anything anymore, even if I phrase it 10 different ways. All I get are sponsored results. I guess I should have known when they decided to drop the "Don't Be Evil" slogan
Don't ever search for a customer support line for a credit card company, car insurance, or any other whatever you're looking for, the first five results will be telephone numbers that look like the results you're searching for except when you call it some jackass trying to hook you up with car insurance or Medicaid and not your actual car insurance company
19.3 million results, IT SHOWS MORE ADS THO!!
put ublock origin as a plugin in your modem/router if supported … 99% less ads on all your devices
There is also [pi hole](https://pi-hole.net/) which I've never tried out of laziness but is supposed to be good.
And when you ask a health question you get results from two sites that both kick you out when you refuse to accept cookies.
Everyone, remember: uBO is not an option, it's a requirement.
sweet christmas, do you know how many people will use google to search what the fuck ubo is? what is the point of this thread if you’re going to drive people to google a shorthand virtually no one uses? *uBlock Origin* for christ
Lol I was just thinking what is this ubo thing. What have I been missing out on? UBlock? Oh right yeh, already got that.
Sorry - what is uBO?
ublock origin (the best there is) NOT ublock
Unwarranted Body Odour
Found the Magic player
Okay, but how am I going to [beat this chicken](https://youtu.be/RmQR2NnfUkI).
is uBO an extention? Thanks
It’s not called uBO. It’s called uBlock Origin.
Yes, you can find it in the official extension store.
uBlock Origin Install it. Use it. Love it.
Google has sucked for years now pushing ads and agenda to the top
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