Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error
It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
The evolution of Google search has been wild to live through. I remember being able to tell people to google search certain terms to show them esoteric (or funny) things on the internet, because everyone got the same results. Then they started personalizing results and it got creepy good at it. I use Linux a lot, so I look up things about Linux a lot. I needed to SSH into a Linux box from a Windows 8.1 laptop. No native SSH client, because Windows can’t actually do anything. Okay, I needed to download PuTTY. So I googled ‘putty’. And Google did not hedge its bet, every single result I got was about the TTY client. No plumbers putty, no silly putty, nothing.
Now it seems Google can’t find its ass with both hands and a flashlight.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.
What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.
It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers
What were you searching?
An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)
Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause
Wow that’s pretty awesome, I’ll have to give bing a try
I’m a beta tester for Google’s Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it’s easy to see that Google’s focus on its AI seems to be search results.
PS: It’s also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.
Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.