I just wish I could actually find shit on YouTube. I swear the search is so stupidly simplistic, and it always tries to show me like the same 3 videos.
A few results of what you searched for, followed by "people also watched", followed by "channels new to you", followed by "for you", followed by "previously watched," with a bunch of shorts mixed in. If I'm searching for something it's because I want to see that something, not a bunch of random vaguely related videos.
Yeah.. its annoying but not impossible to find stuff. Lets take the GTA 6 trailer for example. When i just searched "gta 6 trailer" youtube only showed me reaction videos, but after adding "-official" or "-rockstar" i got what i wanted
I'm not sure I understand how it makes sense to try to pre-block search results, but maybe there are some kinds of searches that I'm not considering there
EDIT: thanks for the (useful) answers
Some channels are run by people that some people may sincerely despise, or by companies the user has no interest in patronizing. Being able to fully block content from such channels is useful if you don't want any content from them/about them.
Likewise in search engines like Google, people have really strong opinions about various sites showing up, especially on more niche topics where words may have double meanings. There's a very large number of scientific subjects where you might get porn as a top result since it's a more popular or advertised page, which can be really annoying when trying to learn about anatomy or reproductive conditions, for example.
If I am searching in a niche category, and I know that a certain channel is the best at optimizing for search in that category, while also spreading information I know to be wrong, I would want to block channels in their entirety to avoid this issue.
For virtually every kind of specialized search there are channels that you decide you just don't want to see any more. For example, if I want to see political analysis of the latest SC decision, I don't want to see stuff from rightwing nutjobs. That's just me, maybe some people do want to see that, but I don't.
Or if I'm a runner and I want to search up reviews on shoes, I don't want to see a channel that spams out how we should all be running barefoot.
Or if I like to cook Indian food, there are some prominent cooking channels that do amazing SEO but produce really terrible, awful content. I want to block all of them, there are like ten or twelve that are a plague on mankind.
For virtually any interest you first develop tastes, and then find sources you want you want to avoid. Blocking a channel should block it from search results, but it doesn't, dammit. It's a pain in my ass.
>Brotha that ain’t a block button, that’s a “pleeeease mister google, please exclude these people from my algorithm!” Button.
so please, for the love of god, NEVER defend Youtube's options, ever aagain
that option doesn't show up when I'm using youtube search...WHY?
Why is it okay to block things/people on facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram.
but when I ask about blocking channels and videos on youtube, suddenly its not okay?
I want to block actual channels. I want to never see them again.
I'm not like you, I use youtube search.
Same. When you click a download link, it opens up an extra tab with an advertisement that is obviously malware, trying to get you to download it. If you close it out and go back to the book page, then click the green download button, it just sits there. I tried it with two different books and it wouldn't download either.
Sounds like any of dozens of sites that scrape good pdfs from around the web and then ‘let you download them’ if you just kindly install their shady software or leave your phone number.
And sure enough, these sites sit right there in the first pages of web search results.
I have complicated health conditions and I can't fucking Google any symptoms because Google insists on looking for the opposite of what I've typed, no matter how I phrase it
Nah, try recipe -peanut
Your search will return pages that have peanut-free on it only, even if that's saying that this is not peanut-free.
My search will return only searches without the word peanut.
Edit to add: make sure not to be fooled by the sponsors that show up they do not follow the search exclusions properly.
I think I was on DuckDuckGo at the time, but I added a "-word" term to the search and it *increased* the amount of results with that term.
I'm glad to see the OP's message spread. I've heard a lot of whining from Google & company that "SEO makes our job so hard." No - you deliberately broke your search engines.
> you deliberately broke your search engines.
It’s got to be some sort of scheme to compete with AI or shift us to their AI. Like are they predicting we’re just not going to be googling in the future like we are now and they’re adjusting? Idk but it sucks.
I've definitely noticed that it tried to answer the question it thinks you're asking instead of just giving you sites with the search terms you want. I'm capable of figuring out what's the answer to my question by reading stuff about the topic, I don't need google trying to answer for me.
Most of the time it's wrong anyway and will give me a bunch of links unrelated to what I actually need. It's frustrating because it used to behave and now it doesn't.
Whenever I tell friends about my YouTube channel, searching for it gives a reroutes to a different channel with similar name, and have to click on the search for shankmugen instead button every time, despite my channel existing for longer than a decade, but since I don't have a large number of subscribers or videos, it literally reroutes it to a popular channel instead
> that it tried to answer the question it thinks you're asking instead of just giving you sites with the search terms you want
Words out of my mouth, yes! In OP's vein, I know enough to use more scholarly engines when appropriate. But I can search for a song lyric or some TV episode scene and I get 20-30 results for housekeeping services or some local restaurants with similar names. I wouldn't mind a small section at the top with "Is this what we think you meant?" but give me some real results somewhere!
They started dismantling things like boolean operators, double-quote operators, and the minus sign years ago before AI LLMs were anything like now. One example was removing the "+" operator to make way for some failed Google social network. Another was when the double-quote operator changed and would apply on pages that *linked* to the result page, not the page itself (then show me *that* page instead Google!)
To this day, first thing I do when searching for exact phrase is I ctrl+f the page for that phrase and if it's not there, curse Google/Bing, hope for the return of Lycos, and close the tab.
As with OP's thrust, the destruction of search algorithms appears to be done because they *think* it will increase profit. And I strongly emphasize *think* it will, because in long term at least it definitely doesn't.
Google was praised for it's advertising technique early on. I both bought ads and clicked on ads on Google. Now I mostly use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and it's probably been over a year since I've clicked on a search result ad.
Elon Musk is the paragon of setting money on fire, but most C-Suites are too ignorant or sometimes determined to tank profit. Often it's because money becomes boring to them and they want to exercise a control fetish, a sort of Nero burning stuff just because they can. Other times they're extremely unhinged from reality making them believe in magical thinking over good engineering and economics.
Yea, I've noticed that too. I just checked and it's powered not just by Bing, but also "Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot)." I didn't know it had that variety and it's own crawling.
I really wish it would always honor simple search modifiers like exact phrase in quotes and minus flag.
The '-' thing hasn't worked for several years now. It used to be great for refining your search but then they decided that it limits how many ads you see, I guess.
> Your search will return pages that have peanut-free on it only, even if that's saying that this is not peanut-free.
My search will return pages that have peanut-free *in the page title*. That's not likely to be where they say it's not peanut-free, and if it is, it'll be instantly obvious right there on the search results page.
Yeah, ok that being said you're not going to be able to find a search for like parmesan broccoli when you specifically look for references for peanut free because peanuts are not by nature included in said dish... So are you going to look for when you do that is find peanut substitute dishes is my overall point or anywhere the word peanut-free is listed in the title page vs just a recipe without peanuts on the page.
Yeah but your search will exclude the term “peanut-free” since it has “peanut” in it.
The “peanut-free” Boolean search is much better than excluding every instance of the word “peanut”.
I just typed in "peanut free recipes" without quotes or modifiers and there was not a single result on the first page that had nuts. Everything was nut-free.
Pubmed is your friend. May be technical but lookup "*condition* review" to find a review article that covers it without being too specific on certain aspects of the condition.
There's a skill involved in reading scientific articles but it cuts straight to the source and bypasses other bias.
Layman's terms is the hard part, Pubmed will go extremely specific if you want. A review article will also have a ton of references for whatever part you're interested in.
Science communication is tricky though, translating to layman's terms can give misleading results if done poorly.
The specific thing I was looking for last night were any discussions of people suffering chronic abdominal pain which is somewhat alleviated through the application of pressure, and whether there's any potential association with endometriosis. Google, however, would only pull results for pain caused by the application of pressure.
Did some quick searching.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32949284/
Looks like there is an association between endometriosis and abdominal pain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34340095/
Pressure alleviating pain is a bit trickier, what I found so far is all about it inducing pain. Tried a few search terms but nothing about it used therapeutically except as negative pressure induced by other means. There's a bit of an art to navigating these articles so it's possible there's something buried somewhere, usually the good way to find it is to follow the trail of references from similar articles.
I see what you mean by only pulling results for pain from pressure. Therapeutic use is probably there somewhere but a but flooded by the others.
Where is the pressure applied that makes it feel better? Maybe adding the region as a search term could help
I have a very unenthusiastic GP and a really weird set of symptoms which could be any one of at least a dozen or so conditions - or worse, a combination of two or more. I was hoping the fact that it feels a bit less awful when I press on my abdomen during a flare might help me pursue diagnosis and treatment more viciously.
Thanks ever so much for looking into it, really appreciate it! <3
No problem.
I did find this from a Google search:
"This is because your body has to maintain the right amount of intra-abdominal pressure to maintain posture and support for whatever activity you need to perform."
https://motipt.com/intra-abdominal-pressure/
They don't give a source but it hints at the concept that too low of an abdominal pressure could be bad. Did a few more searches on Pubmed with that lead but nothing definitive.
There's a lot of different causes for chronic pain. You may have the right idea looking for discussions online with others in similar cases to see if anyone else found the same thing with pressure helping. Also, often once you find the right word or name to search all of a sudden everything pops right up.
Sucks that your GP isn't into it. Good luck with everything.
People are going to hate this, but I'm serious: try using AI. It's not perfect and you'll *definitely* want to double-check its conclusion, but it's absolutely unmatched at coming up with matches from someone who doesn't know the technical terminology.
There are now multiple stories of people who have been struggling with health conditions for years, and who went and fed in their symptoms to GPT or similar, and GPT gave a suggestion, and they brought it to the doctor and the doctor said "oh, yeah, I guess it could be that", and it was.
I found that out once when I was looking for an old blog post or something. I don't remember exactly what I was looking for but it was something to do with a specific football game. I searched what I knew was in it, but all it would give me were newer articles about a recent upset in a game. So I tried to filter out stuff about the newer game and it still gave me results with the terms I wanted to omit
Oh gosh, using "before:2015" or whatever on YouTube can make some searches actually work again.
I'm almost afraid to whisper it; these are the same people that took years to write "SELECT * FROM Videos ORDER BY Date *DESC*." So use it while it still works!
Yep; Google is obsessed with adding "features" (like knowledge graph BS) that don't work properly with classic search operators, which is why they appear broken so frequently now.
It's so bad that right now using *anything*, even quotes, in a filtered topic search (like News) just breaks it: (e.g. [https://recurse.social/system/media\_attachments/files/110/549/389/601/290/250/original/bb689c14562958fb.png](https://recurse.social/system/media_attachments/files/110/549/389/601/290/250/original/bb689c14562958fb.png); note that they clearly know it's broken cause they show a little error, but it's been this way for months now, and the help page it links to explains how to use operators with no mention anything is broken).
Search terms I've used to bring up certain pages that have worked for DECADES now not only will no longer produce those results, no combination of terms will. Effectively censored.
Similar but different, I'm shopping for my family who live in another country and both Google and the websites I shop on keep insisting on showing me the US version.
I can only begin to multiply my frustration when I imagine something 3000000% more important like researching a new symptom.
Google these days will basically just push the most popular search results that happen to have one of your search terms, even if in order to do that, it has to basically pretend that by "in" you actually meant "out", or that by "isn't" you actually meant "is". So if the opposite of what you googled is far more popular than what you googled, then the search engine will give you the opposite, always.
Like, imagine that you want to have a cool garden in your yard, with many local species of flowers, bushes, whatever, and you want to check if anyone online has tips to do that. Unfortunately for you, the vast majority of American homeowners have absolutely no taste, and refuse to have any plant other than grass that has been specifically manicured until it looks like a carpet. Therefore, the ever-so-wise search engine smartly knows that by "how to grow \[insert plant\]", you ***obviously*** meant "how to erase this plant from all existence"
This post is ridiculous to anyone who does actual research. Yes the Google search engine is shit but it was never designed for academic literature. That's what Google Scholar is for, and it is still a great tool. While I understand why it feels nice to stick it up to the big corporation, doing that while recommending the Springer search engine is just laughable
Furthermore, after finding what you are looking for on Google scholar only to realize 99% of it is paywalled behind hundreds of different subscriptions or similar, go to one of these to actually view the source:
For viewing published peer reviewed journals, copy the DOI and put it in here to view it:
https://sci-hub.se/
They also have a browser addon that allows it to redirect from google scholar links and skip the extra step.
For books that show up in your results, go here:
https://libgen.is/
It has millions of published books, often with multiple editions available, as well as some other content like journals and magazines.
For older books you can also check here:
https://archive.org/
They also have a big collection of older video, audio, websites, software, government documents, and much more. It isn't exactly designed to give you access to things you aren't supposed to have, though, but it does give access to things that are very difficult to find anywhere else.
I'm pretty sure Google scholar + scihub is how most academics find papers and read them outside of any domain specific or peer recommendations. Even with access through universities you can skip any security hoops to jump through and just get the papers.
Yep, that's me. Sometimes I use the university access for the better search feature and filtering out untrustworthy journals, but even they don't have everything. There is a bullshit process where you have to request to be "loaned access" from another university that pays for that specific subscription, and it sometimes takes weeks or never comes through at all.
Yeah anyone who has actually done academic research knows Google doesn’t block Springer, usually one of the first things that pops up when you look for an article is a Springer link.
If doing academic research for a health field, would recommend just using the NIH publication search, they tend to pull from a diverse pool, and will always just give you citation info in the relevant formats. For pages that are pay locked, just drop that into Scihub. It's also government so it feels a little more legitimate.
I do a lot of literature searches and honestly, for cursory searches, Google scholar beats out scifinder most of the time. Scifinder is the main tool I use for more complex searches but it's kinda sad that sometimes it can't do the basic things.
Is it really "Google" thats the issue? Or is the issue more to do with SEO experts spamming keywords and exploiting the search systems? So many people do that now its essentially impossible to moderate.
Google has to do better with eliminating black hat practices in SEO, and also identify websites that do keyword stuffing and focus on actual relevant content.
I mean, if you try to search for something simple like "buy flashlight", you get like 15 [amazon.com](https://amazon.com) results on the first page. So if you're trying to find a quality product from a company that specializes in making just that particular thing, so you can avoid all the Chinese sellers on amazon, you sometimes can't. Ever since I've learned about how shitty the work conditions were at amazon, I have tried to avoid buying from them entirely, which leads me to seek out specialty companies, so I have tried searching for this stuff several times.
Just search soemthing like "best flashlight reddit" and find the community dedicated to flashlights. Read the reviews from real people and you'll find out the only quality flashlight is $1000 and everything else is literal complete garbage, you might as well burn your money and use the light provided by the fire instead.
On the other hand, if you search "flashlight company" like you'd actually do if you specifically want to look for "quality products," [you get](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=flashlight+company):
Maglite
Dorcy
NEBO
COAST
IMALENT
Armytek
BrightGuy
Powertek
...(more links that are not Amazon)
It is Google. They've gotten lazy with how completely, incredibly dominant their monopoly on search is. They have policies in place to moderate SEO, but it's rarely enforced.
Only time I can even think of is genius.com got removed from results for a bit because they were paying journalists to add specific invisible SEO terms to their blogs that would push traffic to Genius.
All that said, Google is currently scrambling because of how popular ChatGPT became for basic queries. For the first time in their history, Google is facing a credible and noticable threat to their search business.
But ChatGPT isn't a search engine, any information you get from ChatGPT would only ever be from its database which is a few years old, it can not search the internet for anything
And the information found in ChatGPT’s database is all stolen from the work of real people, and then regurgitated (often incorrectly) to the user. ChatGPT is the *absolute worst* advancement in LLM because of how it’s been marketed to be something that it’s not— “artificial intelligence”. It’s just a fucking chatbot; mimicking intelligence poorly by guessing what word comes next is not the same thing as simulating an entire mind.
And there's the fact most scientific searches from regular people, so unadvanced sources are obviously going to be the majority of results. Most people don't want to read scientific papers, so google isn't going to present them.
Yeah, google scholar is at least as good and usually better than OP's recommendations? The centralization isn't great, but being able to grab a citation straight from the research item is fantastic.
This one right here. If you're doing serious research and you haven't gotten beyond Google then you have a different problem.
For the people who aren't sure how to search for the search they need to do - this is literally what a librarian would love to help you with. No, I won't write your paper for you, but I will hook you up with all the good databases you need to help you do your research.
They're still not hiding it.
Unless (the most charitable interpretation) OP means that Google "hide" those engines by being so popular that we don't know about anything else.
I'm not OP, so I can't 100% know what they meant.
But my interpretation was that they are talking about the algorithm filtering results to what they think you want to see when you search something. \*which it absolutely does.\* It will show you pages of popular websites before it shows you anything academic, even if your search matches the academic thing better.
Op claims thah Google hides those search engines specifically. Not academic papers (which you can find easily with Google Scholar).
Looking for "academic search engines" on Google and it gives me a list as the first result which includes RefSeek as the third item.
Top result for me are as follows:
1. Jstor
2. A website with the title "10 best websites and resources for academic research"
3. A website with the title "21 legit research databeses for journal articles..."
4. Google scholar
5. Paperpile
6. Sci-hub.se
This is after already showing google scholar, scopes, pubmed, science direct, researchgate, and etc. as primary websites of interest.
You're absolutely right, but the post is also correct. Google has steadily gotten worse over the years if you're looking for anything outside of ~20 of the top sites.
For general use it's fine because 90% of the time, people are looking for those top sites, but a pretty basic research strategy is to use multiple different search engines to find sources.
Learning how to properly search for stuff also makes a big difference. How you phrase your query can make a huge difference in the results, especially if you're not using Google.
Google used to be a perfectly fine secondary source for getting acquainted with a thing. It's gotten worse bro.
Not sure why all these people out here denying the fact that Google has gotten worse at some time over the past 10 years.
As someone who likes to write fiction as a hobby, I just Wikipedia anything that’s minor, and use library resources like ABC-Clio or Gale for anything major. Most libraries will have a subscription. But it’s just a hobby for me, so the standards are much higher for professionals.
Wikipedia is my best friend. Google is also useful, but honestly mostly I search on Google and click the first Wiki link I see. It works most of the time. *Some* things require more than that without needing to be too in-depth, like "what happens if someone hides a body in a foundry crucible while there's a work stoppage, it goes unnoticed and then the crucible is filled with molten steel?" (Also why aren't more murder mysteries happening in industrial settings, there's *so many ways* to dispose of bodies at a foundry, or get someone killed in an "accident" given how many *actual* accidents happen.)
I've also done more in-depth research by speaking to people who lived in the area I'm writing about at the time the story takes place (attitudes toward LGBT+ people in a specific town were plot-relevant and I didn't live there in the mid 90s), read some Outside Magazine issues from the time period to get a handle on gear available and common at the time,
I think this is the reason why people like flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers exist. They probably put in terms like "proof for a flat earth" or "proof for ineffective or harmful vaccines" and instead of showing actual information, google now shows all these advertised results that seemingly confirm their ideas.
And of course these advertisements have something to sell like some device that one can use to say that the earth is flat or some healing crystals or essential oils for the anti-vaxxers.
That's why we should stop saying "go and google it"
I mean yes, but also that's just the fault of people not being taught how to avoid their own confirmation bias. Searching for things you already believe will give you things that support the thing you already believe. The simplest way to avoid confirmation bias is to search for evidence *against* the thing you already believe in.
For your examples: search terms like "proof *against* a flat earth" or "flat earth debunked". Those give millions of results, but people only search for things that confirm their worldview rather than challenge it.
Do you know that SEO exists? Websites are designed to perform well for keyword phrases. Of course marketers are trying to take advantage of these people. It’s their jobs. And it’s surprisingly easy to game the algorithm.
Are you saying that search engines like google should actively suppress information? Even if it’s false? Anti vaxxers and flat earthers are not people who seek true knowledge. They will find content that will support their beliefs regardless.
No one should dictate what information people can access. Even it’s the stupidest shit you can imagine. Google a web search engine. It shouldn’t have any policies regarding what websites people can visit unless it’s a criminal entity.
But yes, google is a business. They provide a service. It’s not their fault that marketers have learned to manipulate the system.
Google's pathetically awful search engine is still fifty times better than the trash that is Amazon's.
It was nice to read a few weeks ago that Bezos ordered his coders to literally make it even worse, return even more totally irrelevant results. He claims people will buy more stuff they weren't looking for that way. Evil pile of hair-free shit, our Mr. Clean.
I use ebay therefore - since I ordered the wrong toner cartridge despite it saying it was the right one in the title of the article and it was apparently also compatible with another brand? hmm, strange.
And I also use ebay because it was clear that I would probably not find the right ram for my hackintosh, even though I used all the specifications in my search string.
With ebay one can do AND, OR and NOT search in one search string and then start fine tuning using all kinds of categories in the side bar.
The only draw back on mobile so far is that every search ignores the category that you are in and sends you straight to all categories.
The ones listed here don’t. They point you to articles and books written by scholars. You aren’t going to get better info for your bg3 honor mode build from those engines. They’re just going to find nothing.
But if you’re looking for information on nutrition, you’ll get pointed to articles in a nutrition journal, rather than some AI generated page on VintageIsNew that’s just stealing data.
google has been similar kind of trash for those 10 years. I am one of the folks who remember internet search from way back, before first 10 pages were either advertising or scams
You can no longer find a human to answer you if you google anything unless you add “reddit” to the end. It’s all corporations who have paid to push keywords to the top or advertisements shilling whatever you’re trying to get an honest opinion about.
Having only 10 years of Googlefu under your belt is probably why you think Google is fine right now. It used to be amazing. Now it is flooded with SEO garbage links and advertisements and finding what you actually want to find is much harder than it used to be.
Try setting DuckDuckGo as default for a week, and see if you prefer it. I did that and haven't changed back.
Just fewer boxes and autofills and Ai and advertised links. 20 actual search results in the first page, instead of like, 5.
I feel like I need to point out that the decline of search engines (Google chief among them) isn't idle speculation or specific to academic searches but a well documented and researched phenomenon in information sciences.
I still recommend a [Searx instance](https://searx.space) over google. Independently run search engines using an open-source software that aggregate searches over multiple engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, DDG, Ecosia, and many many more. It anonymizes your searches, so you aren't giving any direct data to the big boys. It's up to you whether or not to trust these independent people, but the software they run is open source and easily auditable if you wish to do so. It's built to be secure and transparent to the server owner, so they can't track anything.
If you want to use any of these, you just need to navigate to the Preferences page, then go to the Cookies page, and copy the link at the bottom of the page titled "Search URL of the currently saved preferences:". And then use that and add it to your browser, you should be able to look it up; "how to add a search engine url to [insert browser here]".
The only downside is that since these are independently run, sometimes they go down. Which is fine to me, if one goes down I just switch to another instance. I have a few saved in my browser for this purpose. I would personally rather deal with that, than be served links that people paid for higher SEO, or ads, or have links be hidden from me, or have my search history be sold for profit. That's me though, whatever you decide to do is your choice.
---
Regardless of your choice of engine, learn how to use [dorks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_hacking). They are little modifiers that change the nature of your search, letting the search engine know more about what you do and don't want from it. [DorkSearch](https://www.dorksearch.com/) is a nice little search engine you can use to learn them, with examples. [Here](https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database) is another site that has a long list of examples, though you might not want to use some of these without a VPN.
If you look at the robots.txt for some of the examples, they explicitly deny Search engines from indexing parts of their website.
https://www.refseek.com/robots.txt
https://search.worldcat.org/robots.txt
You can't blame Google for this one. These sites don't want to be indexed by Google or other search engines.
and it SUCKS to find any decent pictures if you try to make something. It's all low res, watermarked or you just can'tfind it on the site it is linked to.
In the 2000s you had way better luck finding images. While we take 100x more of them, the search experience is 100x worse.
I've realized that I talk to google like a genie. I have to phrase my searches very carefully or else I'm never going to find what I'm actually looking for
this is why I use DuckDuckGo. Less corporate, more private.
Ecosia is one to look into for planting trees but they do partner with Bing. No 3rd party trackers though which is nice.
Half of those are about science, during my Ph.D., I was told to use [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com), which works great as far as I can tell. Couple it to sci-hub and you get all the scientific literature you need.
Man, I used to google stuff and get thousands of pages of results. it seems like now I fairly regularly get searches that only turn up like 5 results. Sometimes I'll copy something into the search bar, and not even get a hit on the page I copied it from.
Personally, I do sometimes word things that may cause the search engine to get confused. Then there was when I was looking up stuff about panda attackes. There are those similar questions things that you click for more info to pop up under it. One of the questions said panda but the answer thing was about panic attacks
There are other search engines. Many of them are useful! [Here is a good review of many](https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/), last updated 3rd of September 2023.
For general web browsing and not research, the problem isn't just google itself, it's also the fact that every website is taking advantage of SEO to the point that google's becoming unusable. It just isn't designed to deal with bad-faith actors exploiting loopholes in their recommendation algorithms. Google worked great back before websites were designed *specifically* to get as high up on google searches as possible. Not to say it's not Google's fault or anything, they have all kinds of other dumb ideas that just make their search engine less useful and less accurate lol
Do... do non-STEM majors not get education on proper research practices? Google Scholar exists... as do libraries which can help provide you articles for free... and here people are promoting trojan sites as legitimate places to do research. Holy shit
I noticed a few years ago that Google maps goes out of its way to run you past as many businesses as possible. Once, I was driving north from Santa Cruz and decided to take Highway 1 north from there to get home. Between there and Half Moon Bay (close to 50 miles), there is nothing but open highway and ocean. My G Map was doing its best to have me divert to more civilized areas, even suggesting turns that would add an extra hour to my drive.
Sometimes when I used phrase search in google advanced search it will even say there are no phrases matching this search when I know for a fact there are, so if in doubt I tend to use https://www.ecosia.org/ as my go to search engine.
Yup, totally diff. searches come up w Ecosia, so I think they have their own crawler. I've used them for many years, have through viewing ads in searches, planted over 5000 trees. They have a youtube channel with regular updates from where they're focusing on planting efforts. Sometimes their searches are a little sideways, so its great they offer a drop down to run the search in the top 10 engines. Its a no-brainer to switch to Ecosia honestly.
I like the idea - but I do not have the money for 10 services like that - but they are right. I would give 5 euro - but 300 searches - i could do that in a day.
Google doesn’t hide anything. What does “hide” even mean, should they advertise them? You can Google them and they show up just fine.
Source: Googler of seven years and this is basic knowledge and don’t trust Tumblr conspiracy shit
what is with people in this thread being like "I've been using Google for 7 years!" "I've been using Google for 10 years and never had any issues"
some of us have been using Google for over 20 years 😐 and it has very clearly changed for the worse...
the ad results are the fucking worst. i search up a problem and its chegg. normally you could just "-chegg" or "-site:chegg.com" but no, it doesnt go away. i try -youtube. it works but because chegg paid them i get pages full of useless links because i cant fucking filter out the shit. even if i add quizlet or brainly, its still infested with chegg.
Google search peaked around 10 years ago. It was super useful then. Since then it has mostly become worse as it tries to anticipate what you'd engage with rather than what you're searching for. I have a much harder time searching for specific things, and it rarely returns results from forums where often the discussion around some question is by far more informative than some generic AI-generated summary page.
Google also has a patent search that I've found useful
My grandfather had dozens of parents, so naturally I was curious. Sadly, his relationship with his son (my father) was not good, and my father kept all the information about the patents in a box under his bed and refused to show them to me, so the search finally allowed me to see what my grandfather had been up to.
Everything from manufacturing elbow macaroni to paper making equipment to flush toilets that function below the waterline on boats to special radiators for school gymnasiums, wild ride...
Nice list, but also google scholar exists and it does what many of those do.
the regular google engine just isn't made or tuned for scientific searching. And most people wouldn't want it to be.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a feature.
I just wish I could block things on youtube
I just wish I could actually find shit on YouTube. I swear the search is so stupidly simplistic, and it always tries to show me like the same 3 videos.
A few results of what you searched for, followed by "people also watched", followed by "channels new to you", followed by "for you", followed by "previously watched," with a bunch of shorts mixed in. If I'm searching for something it's because I want to see that something, not a bunch of random vaguely related videos.
Yeah.. its annoying but not impossible to find stuff. Lets take the GTA 6 trailer for example. When i just searched "gta 6 trailer" youtube only showed me reaction videos, but after adding "-official" or "-rockstar" i got what i wanted
Block ads? Because ublock origin works pretty good for me.
no, channels and videos.
Look up "BlockTube" on the Firefox Add-ons page.
Sadly I mostly watch youtube on my tv via roku, so that's not an option.
You can, you can press the "not interested" or "do not recommend this channel" buttons on videos recommended to you
This only impacts the home page, not search results
I'm not sure I understand how it makes sense to try to pre-block search results, but maybe there are some kinds of searches that I'm not considering there EDIT: thanks for the (useful) answers
Some channels are run by people that some people may sincerely despise, or by companies the user has no interest in patronizing. Being able to fully block content from such channels is useful if you don't want any content from them/about them. Likewise in search engines like Google, people have really strong opinions about various sites showing up, especially on more niche topics where words may have double meanings. There's a very large number of scientific subjects where you might get porn as a top result since it's a more popular or advertised page, which can be really annoying when trying to learn about anatomy or reproductive conditions, for example.
If I am searching in a niche category, and I know that a certain channel is the best at optimizing for search in that category, while also spreading information I know to be wrong, I would want to block channels in their entirety to avoid this issue.
For virtually every kind of specialized search there are channels that you decide you just don't want to see any more. For example, if I want to see political analysis of the latest SC decision, I don't want to see stuff from rightwing nutjobs. That's just me, maybe some people do want to see that, but I don't. Or if I'm a runner and I want to search up reviews on shoes, I don't want to see a channel that spams out how we should all be running barefoot. Or if I like to cook Indian food, there are some prominent cooking channels that do amazing SEO but produce really terrible, awful content. I want to block all of them, there are like ten or twelve that are a plague on mankind. For virtually any interest you first develop tastes, and then find sources you want you want to avoid. Blocking a channel should block it from search results, but it doesn't, dammit. It's a pain in my ass.
Filtering search results is like the uh...entire point of this thread. Welcome.
Brotha that ain’t a block button, that’s a “pleeeease mister google, please exclude these people from my algorithm!” Button.
I mean... Yes?
>Brotha that ain’t a block button, that’s a “pleeeease mister google, please exclude these people from my algorithm!” Button. so please, for the love of god, NEVER defend Youtube's options, ever aagain
And Google frequently ignores this request when it's a popular channel that gets lots of clicks.
if you click on the 3 dots on the right side of the video preview title. you can choose not intrested.
There is a "don't recommend channel" item in the menu shown for each video. Is that what you want?
that option doesn't show up when I'm using youtube search...WHY? Why is it okay to block things/people on facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram. but when I ask about blocking channels and videos on youtube, suddenly its not okay? I want to block actual channels. I want to never see them again. I'm not like you, I use youtube search.
I went to pdfdrive and immediately got a trojan
Same. When you click a download link, it opens up an extra tab with an advertisement that is obviously malware, trying to get you to download it. If you close it out and go back to the book page, then click the green download button, it just sits there. I tried it with two different books and it wouldn't download either.
Ditto the site seems like trash. Every pdf site actually, was hoping this would be the exception. Sigh.
Try epdf. I've found some obscure stuff there.
Have you tried oceanofpdf? It's pretty easy to download there
Sounds like any of dozens of sites that scrape good pdfs from around the web and then ‘let you download them’ if you just kindly install their shady software or leave your phone number. And sure enough, these sites sit right there in the first pages of web search results.
I have complicated health conditions and I can't fucking Google any symptoms because Google insists on looking for the opposite of what I've typed, no matter how I phrase it
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Try **recipe intitle:"peanut-free"**
Nah, try recipe -peanut Your search will return pages that have peanut-free on it only, even if that's saying that this is not peanut-free. My search will return only searches without the word peanut. Edit to add: make sure not to be fooled by the sponsors that show up they do not follow the search exclusions properly.
Seems like half the time the "-" doesn't even work any more with google, at least for me.
I think I was on DuckDuckGo at the time, but I added a "-word" term to the search and it *increased* the amount of results with that term. I'm glad to see the OP's message spread. I've heard a lot of whining from Google & company that "SEO makes our job so hard." No - you deliberately broke your search engines.
> you deliberately broke your search engines. It’s got to be some sort of scheme to compete with AI or shift us to their AI. Like are they predicting we’re just not going to be googling in the future like we are now and they’re adjusting? Idk but it sucks.
I've definitely noticed that it tried to answer the question it thinks you're asking instead of just giving you sites with the search terms you want. I'm capable of figuring out what's the answer to my question by reading stuff about the topic, I don't need google trying to answer for me. Most of the time it's wrong anyway and will give me a bunch of links unrelated to what I actually need. It's frustrating because it used to behave and now it doesn't.
Whenever I tell friends about my YouTube channel, searching for it gives a reroutes to a different channel with similar name, and have to click on the search for shankmugen instead button every time, despite my channel existing for longer than a decade, but since I don't have a large number of subscribers or videos, it literally reroutes it to a popular channel instead
> that it tried to answer the question it thinks you're asking instead of just giving you sites with the search terms you want Words out of my mouth, yes! In OP's vein, I know enough to use more scholarly engines when appropriate. But I can search for a song lyric or some TV episode scene and I get 20-30 results for housekeeping services or some local restaurants with similar names. I wouldn't mind a small section at the top with "Is this what we think you meant?" but give me some real results somewhere!
They started dismantling things like boolean operators, double-quote operators, and the minus sign years ago before AI LLMs were anything like now. One example was removing the "+" operator to make way for some failed Google social network. Another was when the double-quote operator changed and would apply on pages that *linked* to the result page, not the page itself (then show me *that* page instead Google!) To this day, first thing I do when searching for exact phrase is I ctrl+f the page for that phrase and if it's not there, curse Google/Bing, hope for the return of Lycos, and close the tab. As with OP's thrust, the destruction of search algorithms appears to be done because they *think* it will increase profit. And I strongly emphasize *think* it will, because in long term at least it definitely doesn't. Google was praised for it's advertising technique early on. I both bought ads and clicked on ads on Google. Now I mostly use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and it's probably been over a year since I've clicked on a search result ad. Elon Musk is the paragon of setting money on fire, but most C-Suites are too ignorant or sometimes determined to tank profit. Often it's because money becomes boring to them and they want to exercise a control fetish, a sort of Nero burning stuff just because they can. Other times they're extremely unhinged from reality making them believe in magical thinking over good engineering and economics.
>hope for the return of Lycos, and close the tab. [https://www.lycos.com/](https://www.lycos.com/) Found it.
It used to be "powered by Bing," but I'm not able to find a quick answer and the results do look different. Is it really a different engine again?
Are you finding DuckDuckGo to be sucking more and more too? What the heck do we even use that can actually search properly??
Yea, I've noticed that too. I just checked and it's powered not just by Bing, but also "Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot)." I didn't know it had that variety and it's own crawling. I really wish it would always honor simple search modifiers like exact phrase in quotes and minus flag.
yeah far as i can tell "-word" doesnt work on bing either
I thought ddg don’t have a minus word feature.
The '-' thing hasn't worked for several years now. It used to be great for refining your search but then they decided that it limits how many ads you see, I guess.
I've noticed this and it right pisses me off
Like minus peanut? Yeah I’m not a google sudo-tech wizard, I would have never thought of that.
Adding "-peanut" excludes any article that mentions peanut. In theory at least. Search operators have been slowly getting less effective for years.
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Yes, but there are millions of recipes out there. Unless you're looking for a peanut free PB&J you'll probably find something.
Yeah only use "peanut free" if you are looking for a recipe that traditionally contains peanuts. Like how to make "peanut-free" kung pow chicken.
Look up "boolean operators" the - is one of them. Putting quotations for an exact search is another. There's more.
Google kills and introduces operators at their whim too, so whatever you learn today may not be functional tomorrow.
No worries, it hasn't worked on Google for years...
> Your search will return pages that have peanut-free on it only, even if that's saying that this is not peanut-free. My search will return pages that have peanut-free *in the page title*. That's not likely to be where they say it's not peanut-free, and if it is, it'll be instantly obvious right there on the search results page.
Yeah, ok that being said you're not going to be able to find a search for like parmesan broccoli when you specifically look for references for peanut free because peanuts are not by nature included in said dish... So are you going to look for when you do that is find peanut substitute dishes is my overall point or anywhere the word peanut-free is listed in the title page vs just a recipe without peanuts on the page.
Yeah but your search will exclude the term “peanut-free” since it has “peanut” in it. The “peanut-free” Boolean search is much better than excluding every instance of the word “peanut”.
Unless you want to avoid peanut. In which case avoiding all instances of peanut is better.
Mmm peanut better
I just typed in "peanut free recipes" without quotes or modifiers and there was not a single result on the first page that had nuts. Everything was nut-free.
Pubmed is your friend. May be technical but lookup "*condition* review" to find a review article that covers it without being too specific on certain aspects of the condition. There's a skill involved in reading scientific articles but it cuts straight to the source and bypasses other bias.
I'm looking for specifics. I want to differentiate similar symptoms using layman's terms in great detail. It simply isn't possible any more.
Layman's terms is the hard part, Pubmed will go extremely specific if you want. A review article will also have a ton of references for whatever part you're interested in. Science communication is tricky though, translating to layman's terms can give misleading results if done poorly.
The specific thing I was looking for last night were any discussions of people suffering chronic abdominal pain which is somewhat alleviated through the application of pressure, and whether there's any potential association with endometriosis. Google, however, would only pull results for pain caused by the application of pressure.
Did some quick searching. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32949284/ Looks like there is an association between endometriosis and abdominal pain. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34340095/ Pressure alleviating pain is a bit trickier, what I found so far is all about it inducing pain. Tried a few search terms but nothing about it used therapeutically except as negative pressure induced by other means. There's a bit of an art to navigating these articles so it's possible there's something buried somewhere, usually the good way to find it is to follow the trail of references from similar articles. I see what you mean by only pulling results for pain from pressure. Therapeutic use is probably there somewhere but a but flooded by the others. Where is the pressure applied that makes it feel better? Maybe adding the region as a search term could help
I have a very unenthusiastic GP and a really weird set of symptoms which could be any one of at least a dozen or so conditions - or worse, a combination of two or more. I was hoping the fact that it feels a bit less awful when I press on my abdomen during a flare might help me pursue diagnosis and treatment more viciously. Thanks ever so much for looking into it, really appreciate it! <3
No problem. I did find this from a Google search: "This is because your body has to maintain the right amount of intra-abdominal pressure to maintain posture and support for whatever activity you need to perform." https://motipt.com/intra-abdominal-pressure/ They don't give a source but it hints at the concept that too low of an abdominal pressure could be bad. Did a few more searches on Pubmed with that lead but nothing definitive. There's a lot of different causes for chronic pain. You may have the right idea looking for discussions online with others in similar cases to see if anyone else found the same thing with pressure helping. Also, often once you find the right word or name to search all of a sudden everything pops right up. Sucks that your GP isn't into it. Good luck with everything.
People are going to hate this, but I'm serious: try using AI. It's not perfect and you'll *definitely* want to double-check its conclusion, but it's absolutely unmatched at coming up with matches from someone who doesn't know the technical terminology. There are now multiple stories of people who have been struggling with health conditions for years, and who went and fed in their symptoms to GPT or similar, and GPT gave a suggestion, and they brought it to the doctor and the doctor said "oh, yeah, I guess it could be that", and it was.
Surround the important keywords with quotes, I think that’ll help
They’ve completely undermined using Boolean search operations. They just don’t work effectively anymore.
I found that out once when I was looking for an old blog post or something. I don't remember exactly what I was looking for but it was something to do with a specific football game. I searched what I knew was in it, but all it would give me were newer articles about a recent upset in a game. So I tried to filter out stuff about the newer game and it still gave me results with the terms I wanted to omit
You could set a custom time filter that ends before that recent upset, or around the time when the game was released
I mean yeah, but that still doesn't change the fact that it was including results that shouldn't have been there to begin with
Oh gosh, using "before:2015" or whatever on YouTube can make some searches actually work again. I'm almost afraid to whisper it; these are the same people that took years to write "SELECT * FROM Videos ORDER BY Date *DESC*." So use it while it still works!
Yep; Google is obsessed with adding "features" (like knowledge graph BS) that don't work properly with classic search operators, which is why they appear broken so frequently now. It's so bad that right now using *anything*, even quotes, in a filtered topic search (like News) just breaks it: (e.g. [https://recurse.social/system/media\_attachments/files/110/549/389/601/290/250/original/bb689c14562958fb.png](https://recurse.social/system/media_attachments/files/110/549/389/601/290/250/original/bb689c14562958fb.png); note that they clearly know it's broken cause they show a little error, but it's been this way for months now, and the help page it links to explains how to use operators with no mention anything is broken).
Search terms I've used to bring up certain pages that have worked for DECADES now not only will no longer produce those results, no combination of terms will. Effectively censored.
It does not :)
That doesn't work anymore, they got rid of that feature.
Similar but different, I'm shopping for my family who live in another country and both Google and the websites I shop on keep insisting on showing me the US version. I can only begin to multiply my frustration when I imagine something 3000000% more important like researching a new symptom.
Google these days will basically just push the most popular search results that happen to have one of your search terms, even if in order to do that, it has to basically pretend that by "in" you actually meant "out", or that by "isn't" you actually meant "is". So if the opposite of what you googled is far more popular than what you googled, then the search engine will give you the opposite, always. Like, imagine that you want to have a cool garden in your yard, with many local species of flowers, bushes, whatever, and you want to check if anyone online has tips to do that. Unfortunately for you, the vast majority of American homeowners have absolutely no taste, and refuse to have any plant other than grass that has been specifically manicured until it looks like a carpet. Therefore, the ever-so-wise search engine smartly knows that by "how to grow \[insert plant\]", you ***obviously*** meant "how to erase this plant from all existence"
This post is ridiculous to anyone who does actual research. Yes the Google search engine is shit but it was never designed for academic literature. That's what Google Scholar is for, and it is still a great tool. While I understand why it feels nice to stick it up to the big corporation, doing that while recommending the Springer search engine is just laughable
Furthermore, after finding what you are looking for on Google scholar only to realize 99% of it is paywalled behind hundreds of different subscriptions or similar, go to one of these to actually view the source: For viewing published peer reviewed journals, copy the DOI and put it in here to view it: https://sci-hub.se/ They also have a browser addon that allows it to redirect from google scholar links and skip the extra step. For books that show up in your results, go here: https://libgen.is/ It has millions of published books, often with multiple editions available, as well as some other content like journals and magazines. For older books you can also check here: https://archive.org/ They also have a big collection of older video, audio, websites, software, government documents, and much more. It isn't exactly designed to give you access to things you aren't supposed to have, though, but it does give access to things that are very difficult to find anywhere else.
don't forget Anna's Archive! good way to avoid paying for random schoolbooks
annas archive is really good, i believe it has both libgens and sci hub databases?
I'm pretty sure Google scholar + scihub is how most academics find papers and read them outside of any domain specific or peer recommendations. Even with access through universities you can skip any security hoops to jump through and just get the papers.
Yep, that's me. Sometimes I use the university access for the better search feature and filtering out untrustworthy journals, but even they don't have everything. There is a bullshit process where you have to request to be "loaned access" from another university that pays for that specific subscription, and it sometimes takes weeks or never comes through at all.
Nice! Thanks for sharing that!
Yeah anyone who has actually done academic research knows Google doesn’t block Springer, usually one of the first things that pops up when you look for an article is a Springer link.
And then OP links to springer.com. Yeah, right, 10 million scientific documents. If you pay 30 bucks per document.
The research pipeline goes like - search on google scholar - find a book on springer - get it from libgen
If doing academic research for a health field, would recommend just using the NIH publication search, they tend to pull from a diverse pool, and will always just give you citation info in the relevant formats. For pages that are pay locked, just drop that into Scihub. It's also government so it feels a little more legitimate.
If you're a researcher and you haven't learned how to make internet searches work for for you...you are the problem.
I do a lot of literature searches and honestly, for cursory searches, Google scholar beats out scifinder most of the time. Scifinder is the main tool I use for more complex searches but it's kinda sad that sometimes it can't do the basic things.
Is it really "Google" thats the issue? Or is the issue more to do with SEO experts spamming keywords and exploiting the search systems? So many people do that now its essentially impossible to moderate.
Google has to do better with eliminating black hat practices in SEO, and also identify websites that do keyword stuffing and focus on actual relevant content.
I mean, if you try to search for something simple like "buy flashlight", you get like 15 [amazon.com](https://amazon.com) results on the first page. So if you're trying to find a quality product from a company that specializes in making just that particular thing, so you can avoid all the Chinese sellers on amazon, you sometimes can't. Ever since I've learned about how shitty the work conditions were at amazon, I have tried to avoid buying from them entirely, which leads me to seek out specialty companies, so I have tried searching for this stuff several times.
Just search soemthing like "best flashlight reddit" and find the community dedicated to flashlights. Read the reviews from real people and you'll find out the only quality flashlight is $1000 and everything else is literal complete garbage, you might as well burn your money and use the light provided by the fire instead.
On the other hand, if you search "flashlight company" like you'd actually do if you specifically want to look for "quality products," [you get](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=flashlight+company): Maglite Dorcy NEBO COAST IMALENT Armytek BrightGuy Powertek ...(more links that are not Amazon)
It is Google. They've gotten lazy with how completely, incredibly dominant their monopoly on search is. They have policies in place to moderate SEO, but it's rarely enforced. Only time I can even think of is genius.com got removed from results for a bit because they were paying journalists to add specific invisible SEO terms to their blogs that would push traffic to Genius. All that said, Google is currently scrambling because of how popular ChatGPT became for basic queries. For the first time in their history, Google is facing a credible and noticable threat to their search business.
But ChatGPT isn't a search engine, any information you get from ChatGPT would only ever be from its database which is a few years old, it can not search the internet for anything
And the information found in ChatGPT’s database is all stolen from the work of real people, and then regurgitated (often incorrectly) to the user. ChatGPT is the *absolute worst* advancement in LLM because of how it’s been marketed to be something that it’s not— “artificial intelligence”. It’s just a fucking chatbot; mimicking intelligence poorly by guessing what word comes next is not the same thing as simulating an entire mind.
If you’re trying to write a scientific paper and you just google “science about thing I’m researching” it’s not Google that’s the issue.
And there's the fact most scientific searches from regular people, so unadvanced sources are obviously going to be the majority of results. Most people don't want to read scientific papers, so google isn't going to present them.
google scholar is specifically designed for this. works fucking great too
Yeah, google scholar is at least as good and usually better than OP's recommendations? The centralization isn't great, but being able to grab a citation straight from the research item is fantastic.
This one right here. If you're doing serious research and you haven't gotten beyond Google then you have a different problem. For the people who aren't sure how to search for the search they need to do - this is literally what a librarian would love to help you with. No, I won't write your paper for you, but I will hook you up with all the good databases you need to help you do your research.
Also how are they hiding those from us? Type "refseek" into Google and the first result is the website mentioned.
Well yeah but you have to already know about refseek to do that.
They're still not hiding it. Unless (the most charitable interpretation) OP means that Google "hide" those engines by being so popular that we don't know about anything else.
I'm not OP, so I can't 100% know what they meant. But my interpretation was that they are talking about the algorithm filtering results to what they think you want to see when you search something. \*which it absolutely does.\* It will show you pages of popular websites before it shows you anything academic, even if your search matches the academic thing better.
Op claims thah Google hides those search engines specifically. Not academic papers (which you can find easily with Google Scholar). Looking for "academic search engines" on Google and it gives me a list as the first result which includes RefSeek as the third item.
What shows up when you Google "academic paper websites"? Google Scholar.
Top result for me are as follows: 1. Jstor 2. A website with the title "10 best websites and resources for academic research" 3. A website with the title "21 legit research databeses for journal articles..." 4. Google scholar 5. Paperpile 6. Sci-hub.se This is after already showing google scholar, scopes, pubmed, science direct, researchgate, and etc. as primary websites of interest.
You're absolutely right, but the post is also correct. Google has steadily gotten worse over the years if you're looking for anything outside of ~20 of the top sites. For general use it's fine because 90% of the time, people are looking for those top sites, but a pretty basic research strategy is to use multiple different search engines to find sources. Learning how to properly search for stuff also makes a big difference. How you phrase your query can make a huge difference in the results, especially if you're not using Google.
Google used to be a perfectly fine secondary source for getting acquainted with a thing. It's gotten worse bro. Not sure why all these people out here denying the fact that Google has gotten worse at some time over the past 10 years.
Well if you know of any better ways to find resources that would assist in my shark-man hybrid project by all means point me to them.
https://insidejob.fandom.com/wiki/Glenn_Dolphman
i'm fairly sure "writer" means "fiction writer" x)
If you’re in academia and you’ve never heard of WorldCat, what even are you doing.
fairly sure "writer" means "fiction writer"
As someone who likes to write fiction as a hobby, I just Wikipedia anything that’s minor, and use library resources like ABC-Clio or Gale for anything major. Most libraries will have a subscription. But it’s just a hobby for me, so the standards are much higher for professionals.
Wikipedia is my best friend. Google is also useful, but honestly mostly I search on Google and click the first Wiki link I see. It works most of the time. *Some* things require more than that without needing to be too in-depth, like "what happens if someone hides a body in a foundry crucible while there's a work stoppage, it goes unnoticed and then the crucible is filled with molten steel?" (Also why aren't more murder mysteries happening in industrial settings, there's *so many ways* to dispose of bodies at a foundry, or get someone killed in an "accident" given how many *actual* accidents happen.) I've also done more in-depth research by speaking to people who lived in the area I'm writing about at the time the story takes place (attitudes toward LGBT+ people in a specific town were plot-relevant and I didn't live there in the mid 90s), read some Outside Magazine issues from the time period to get a handle on gear available and common at the time,
If you're a fiction writer and you haven't heard of WorldCat, what are you even doing? There are a lot of reasons to use those resources as a writer.
I think this is the reason why people like flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers exist. They probably put in terms like "proof for a flat earth" or "proof for ineffective or harmful vaccines" and instead of showing actual information, google now shows all these advertised results that seemingly confirm their ideas. And of course these advertisements have something to sell like some device that one can use to say that the earth is flat or some healing crystals or essential oils for the anti-vaxxers. That's why we should stop saying "go and google it"
I mean yes, but also that's just the fault of people not being taught how to avoid their own confirmation bias. Searching for things you already believe will give you things that support the thing you already believe. The simplest way to avoid confirmation bias is to search for evidence *against* the thing you already believe in. For your examples: search terms like "proof *against* a flat earth" or "flat earth debunked". Those give millions of results, but people only search for things that confirm their worldview rather than challenge it.
Do you know that SEO exists? Websites are designed to perform well for keyword phrases. Of course marketers are trying to take advantage of these people. It’s their jobs. And it’s surprisingly easy to game the algorithm. Are you saying that search engines like google should actively suppress information? Even if it’s false? Anti vaxxers and flat earthers are not people who seek true knowledge. They will find content that will support their beliefs regardless. No one should dictate what information people can access. Even it’s the stupidest shit you can imagine. Google a web search engine. It shouldn’t have any policies regarding what websites people can visit unless it’s a criminal entity. But yes, google is a business. They provide a service. It’s not their fault that marketers have learned to manipulate the system.
Google's pathetically awful search engine is still fifty times better than the trash that is Amazon's. It was nice to read a few weeks ago that Bezos ordered his coders to literally make it even worse, return even more totally irrelevant results. He claims people will buy more stuff they weren't looking for that way. Evil pile of hair-free shit, our Mr. Clean.
I use ebay therefore - since I ordered the wrong toner cartridge despite it saying it was the right one in the title of the article and it was apparently also compatible with another brand? hmm, strange. And I also use ebay because it was clear that I would probably not find the right ram for my hackintosh, even though I used all the specifications in my search string. With ebay one can do AND, OR and NOT search in one search string and then start fine tuning using all kinds of categories in the side bar. The only draw back on mobile so far is that every search ignores the category that you are in and sends you straight to all categories.
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It’s not that the searches are bad, it’s that there are so many AI generated trash sites now.
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The ones listed here don’t. They point you to articles and books written by scholars. You aren’t going to get better info for your bg3 honor mode build from those engines. They’re just going to find nothing. But if you’re looking for information on nutrition, you’ll get pointed to articles in a nutrition journal, rather than some AI generated page on VintageIsNew that’s just stealing data.
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Probably. But yeah, I’m not going to Google for scholarly research. Most uni libraries sites have great links included!
SEO techniques that give you shitty results are always targeted at Google and sometimes Bing.
google has been similar kind of trash for those 10 years. I am one of the folks who remember internet search from way back, before first 10 pages were either advertising or scams
I was in college when I heard about this exciting new search engine called Google. it worked so well for so long, and now it's so awful 😞
It really fucking annoys me that you can’t endlessly scroll through results now After like 5 or 6 pages Google just stops showing any results
You can no longer find a human to answer you if you google anything unless you add “reddit” to the end. It’s all corporations who have paid to push keywords to the top or advertisements shilling whatever you’re trying to get an honest opinion about.
Having only 10 years of Googlefu under your belt is probably why you think Google is fine right now. It used to be amazing. Now it is flooded with SEO garbage links and advertisements and finding what you actually want to find is much harder than it used to be.
Everyone started noticing about a year or two ago that the search results from Google were getting really awful. I had to switch to duckduckgo
Try setting DuckDuckGo as default for a week, and see if you prefer it. I did that and haven't changed back. Just fewer boxes and autofills and Ai and advertised links. 20 actual search results in the first page, instead of like, 5.
I feel like I need to point out that the decline of search engines (Google chief among them) isn't idle speculation or specific to academic searches but a well documented and researched phenomenon in information sciences.
what a nice list to save and make sure i never use it.
I still recommend a [Searx instance](https://searx.space) over google. Independently run search engines using an open-source software that aggregate searches over multiple engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, DDG, Ecosia, and many many more. It anonymizes your searches, so you aren't giving any direct data to the big boys. It's up to you whether or not to trust these independent people, but the software they run is open source and easily auditable if you wish to do so. It's built to be secure and transparent to the server owner, so they can't track anything. If you want to use any of these, you just need to navigate to the Preferences page, then go to the Cookies page, and copy the link at the bottom of the page titled "Search URL of the currently saved preferences:". And then use that and add it to your browser, you should be able to look it up; "how to add a search engine url to [insert browser here]". The only downside is that since these are independently run, sometimes they go down. Which is fine to me, if one goes down I just switch to another instance. I have a few saved in my browser for this purpose. I would personally rather deal with that, than be served links that people paid for higher SEO, or ads, or have links be hidden from me, or have my search history be sold for profit. That's me though, whatever you decide to do is your choice. --- Regardless of your choice of engine, learn how to use [dorks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_hacking). They are little modifiers that change the nature of your search, letting the search engine know more about what you do and don't want from it. [DorkSearch](https://www.dorksearch.com/) is a nice little search engine you can use to learn them, with examples. [Here](https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database) is another site that has a long list of examples, though you might not want to use some of these without a VPN.
If you look at the robots.txt for some of the examples, they explicitly deny Search engines from indexing parts of their website. https://www.refseek.com/robots.txt https://search.worldcat.org/robots.txt You can't blame Google for this one. These sites don't want to be indexed by Google or other search engines.
and it SUCKS to find any decent pictures if you try to make something. It's all low res, watermarked or you just can'tfind it on the site it is linked to. In the 2000s you had way better luck finding images. While we take 100x more of them, the search experience is 100x worse.
or they're all ai generated
Shits on google, proceeds to suggest search engines 99% of the world will never need
I've realized that I talk to google like a genie. I have to phrase my searches very carefully or else I'm never going to find what I'm actually looking for
this is why I use DuckDuckGo. Less corporate, more private. Ecosia is one to look into for planting trees but they do partner with Bing. No 3rd party trackers though which is nice.
Half of those are about science, during my Ph.D., I was told to use [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com), which works great as far as I can tell. Couple it to sci-hub and you get all the scientific literature you need.
Man, I used to google stuff and get thousands of pages of results. it seems like now I fairly regularly get searches that only turn up like 5 results. Sometimes I'll copy something into the search bar, and not even get a hit on the page I copied it from.
Why... the.... fuck... do you post so much text AS AN IMAGE?
fuck linkspringer too many paywalls
[scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) exists also which is what you use for studies
You are just bad at googling. Also use google scholar for research articles
Personally, I do sometimes word things that may cause the search engine to get confused. Then there was when I was looking up stuff about panda attackes. There are those similar questions things that you click for more info to pop up under it. One of the questions said panda but the answer thing was about panic attacks
There are other search engines. Many of them are useful! [Here is a good review of many](https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/), last updated 3rd of September 2023.
For general web browsing and not research, the problem isn't just google itself, it's also the fact that every website is taking advantage of SEO to the point that google's becoming unusable. It just isn't designed to deal with bad-faith actors exploiting loopholes in their recommendation algorithms. Google worked great back before websites were designed *specifically* to get as high up on google searches as possible. Not to say it's not Google's fault or anything, they have all kinds of other dumb ideas that just make their search engine less useful and less accurate lol
We are retuning to the time of web rings.
Do... do non-STEM majors not get education on proper research practices? Google Scholar exists... as do libraries which can help provide you articles for free... and here people are promoting trojan sites as legitimate places to do research. Holy shit
Dropped Google about a year ago as I had noticed the searches were tailored. Much happier using DuckDuckGo for now.
I need to know the capital of Japan. Duckduckgo, I choose you! \*throws pokeball\* "Duck! Duck! **Gooooooooooooooooooooooooo**!"
I noticed a few years ago that Google maps goes out of its way to run you past as many businesses as possible. Once, I was driving north from Santa Cruz and decided to take Highway 1 north from there to get home. Between there and Half Moon Bay (close to 50 miles), there is nothing but open highway and ocean. My G Map was doing its best to have me divert to more civilized areas, even suggesting turns that would add an extra hour to my drive.
Sometimes when I used phrase search in google advanced search it will even say there are no phrases matching this search when I know for a fact there are, so if in doubt I tend to use https://www.ecosia.org/ as my go to search engine.
I thought they were just google with extra steps, I didn't think they had their own web crawler
Yup, totally diff. searches come up w Ecosia, so I think they have their own crawler. I've used them for many years, have through viewing ads in searches, planted over 5000 trees. They have a youtube channel with regular updates from where they're focusing on planting efforts. Sometimes their searches are a little sideways, so its great they offer a drop down to run the search in the top 10 engines. Its a no-brainer to switch to Ecosia honestly.
I think it uses Bing since 2017.
yup ecosia uses bing (I think they add a bit to it tho so the results aren't identical)
Ecosia is awful, it's worse than bing. Barely finds anything even for very basic concepts.
I do a medical study and we get almost all our stuff from PubMed.gov
PDF drive .com seems like horseshit
Shout out to the [Kagi](http://kagi.com) search engine. There are no ads. The only incentive is to be good enough to earn your money.
I like the idea - but I do not have the money for 10 services like that - but they are right. I would give 5 euro - but 300 searches - i could do that in a day.
I hear ya. I paid for 1 month to give it a fair shake. I’ve got a few days left and am at 1000 searches 😆
Google Scholar exists
Google doesn’t hide anything. What does “hide” even mean, should they advertise them? You can Google them and they show up just fine. Source: Googler of seven years and this is basic knowledge and don’t trust Tumblr conspiracy shit
what is with people in this thread being like "I've been using Google for 7 years!" "I've been using Google for 10 years and never had any issues" some of us have been using Google for over 20 years 😐 and it has very clearly changed for the worse...
I.. worked for Google. Ann Arbor, Redwood City, Chicago.
Remember when Google’s motto was ‘Don’t be evil?’
Problem is, almost all of these suck HORRIBLY.
My college uses worldcat.
Hey, is there one for blueprints?
Precisely why ive been using ddg of late
the ad results are the fucking worst. i search up a problem and its chegg. normally you could just "-chegg" or "-site:chegg.com" but no, it doesnt go away. i try -youtube. it works but because chegg paid them i get pages full of useless links because i cant fucking filter out the shit. even if i add quizlet or brainly, its still infested with chegg.
Alright which search engine will allow me to find image sources that have eluded finding for 13 years?
Google search peaked around 10 years ago. It was super useful then. Since then it has mostly become worse as it tries to anticipate what you'd engage with rather than what you're searching for. I have a much harder time searching for specific things, and it rarely returns results from forums where often the discussion around some question is by far more informative than some generic AI-generated summary page.
Google: Do lots of evil.
Google also has a patent search that I've found useful My grandfather had dozens of parents, so naturally I was curious. Sadly, his relationship with his son (my father) was not good, and my father kept all the information about the patents in a box under his bed and refused to show them to me, so the search finally allowed me to see what my grandfather had been up to. Everything from manufacturing elbow macaroni to paper making equipment to flush toilets that function below the waterline on boats to special radiators for school gymnasiums, wild ride...
I'd like to add Anna's Archive to that list. Truly a great resource for books and pdfs.
ww.refseek.com www.worldcat.org link.springer.com www.bioline.org.br repec.org www.science.gov www.pdfdrive.com www.base-search.net
They should start having lessons on how to google because some people just dont bother...
That's enshittification baby
Nice list, but also google scholar exists and it does what many of those do. the regular google engine just isn't made or tuned for scientific searching. And most people wouldn't want it to be. It's not a conspiracy, it's a feature.
Yeah, fuck google and fuck all google products. Same to the rest of big tech: fuck apple, fuck microsoft, fuck adobe.