I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
It’s not just you. At some point, search’s primary purpose went from “finding the information you’re looking for” to “getting paid to put links in front of you”. Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.
The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.
Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.
Huh…Can’t replicate that claim (though I would believe it happening)
On the 20th Sep. I asked my Google Home if it would be raining.
It responded that it would rain. I asked when it would rain.
Home responded with “Today it won’t rain.”Like what? 5 seconds ago you said it would. No weather report reports rain. Where did you get the first response from??
And I could even replicate it (have it on video)I can’t get it to repeat it either but it was definitely an ai auto response thing from google ai overview or whatever it’s called
Now it’s giving distance from burner and everything lol. It’s learning 👀
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there’s not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.
And the AI is trained on the shitty search results. It just parses them many times faster than a human reader can, which does at least make it better at getting to the fucking point. Once paid advertising is fully integrated with LLM, it will be as shitty and useless as traditional search. And then the entire world will collectively hop to the next trend so it can get hyper-monetized/enshittified, too.
I’ve been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I’m looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).
My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
Right on
There’s an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you’ll never see another Quora article again.
Idr the name of the extension - I’ll check when I get home and follow up.
Follow-up?
It’s probably uBlacklist, available on both Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers. Filters websites and results for search.
It is, and it’s not just the search engines to blame.
The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn’t pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.
Spam sites laden with key words and massive SEO to farm advertising dollars from clicks long predated AI
It doesnt help that big search engines like google have realized people will go as far as page 2 or 3 to find the results, so intentionally worsen their search results to increase ads being served.
Kagi is good. I’m very happy with it.
Yes, it is a premium service, but it really works well.
It’s not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.
Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every “product” they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It’s not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.
I’m going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or “AI” tools predating the LLMs we have now.
I’ve found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.
Kagi is very good.
Thank god I can find everything I need in wikipedia and reddit
they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.
Yeah DDG is great. The only thing I find is its not good at local results but a quick !g on the end gets me the local results im looking for.
What does !g do? Add Google results?
Redirects your search to Google. You can put it anywhere in the search; for example
!g how do i shot web,how do i shot web !gandhow do i !g shot webwill all land you into Google.There are other 13k (yup) bangs like this. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Yahoo, Quora, most gaming wikis, etc. A few sites (like Google and Bing) have multiple bangs, that land you directly into a specific page (e.g. !bv searches Bing videos). More info here.
*how do i shot web
I’ll fix it! I forgot that this is like “an hero”, one of those memes where the error is part of the charm.
It’s an older meme, but it checks out.
If you’re using ddg without !bangs - you’re only having half the fun.
oh, good tip. I didn’t know about that.
you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?
Can be anywhere in the search.
“cute dogs !g” “!g cute dogs” “cute !g dogs”
Those all work the same, though clearly one is more cursed than the others. They have those for a bunch of other sites as well, for example if you want to search YouTube specifically/directly you can use !yt but I can’t kick the habit of just going to those sites first and then searching directly on there.
Yes DDG Bangs are a great fast way of getting around the web. Works really well with LibRedirect. Here’s a Full List of DDG Bangs.
That’s how I felt until about a month ago, now ddg is really useless
I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
Searching for R34 is on you. Naming something R34 is on Nissan. The popularity of R34 is on all of us.
R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”
So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.
Now I want to see some skyline porn
Rule 33
Here you go!
spoiler
Drake might have the Six, but I have the Eight, if you know what I mean
I mean my dicker
Thanks for making me feel inadequate…
I was very worried about zooming in on this expecting something bad. My innocence is lost… wait no I never had any. My bad.
Oh that’s naughty
News orgs clinging to tradition.
i use archive.is for anything I really want to read.
most news is fluffy bullshit anyway.
Agree. It’s an important part of media literacy these days.
For political news, I’m only interested in what was actually said, not what is reported to be said .
It’s just that Bing/DDG seem to promote news from these sites as if they’re sponsored links… but without the disclosure.
bummer.
I see all the labeled sponsored links on Bing, but I generally get high quality results outside of those.
You know that’s just Bing, right?
is it? that kind of makes sense, because I still use Bing occasionally while Google is completely out of rotation, although I don’t find Bing as good as duckduckgo.
edit: it is not! looks like the DuckDuckGo search engine is an aggregate of hundreds of search engines, including their own duck duck bot, excluding Google but including some Bing results.
Their FAQ hems and haws about that, but (in the past) I’ve done side-by-side tests and found identical results. Maybe something’s changed, maybe it hasn’t.
it must have done by now, then, I get different results from identical prompts in DuckDuckGo and Bing although both are usually relevant.
“DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.”
are you having trouble finding something specifically or you just don’t like the quality of the search results you’re finding in general?
definitely if you’re still on Google, stop using it.
It’s completely useless at this point.
