^This is for anyone who doesn't know, click on the web button in the "More" drop down list after making a search to get the old style search results instead of the new ones. People mentioned this in the thread earlier so I thought I'd make it clear.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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It started when Search Engine Optimisation became a thing, so it's been a while. But it really went downhill a few years ago.
Don't think any engine is immune to SEO
A couple years ago I began getting frustrated. Last year I started to first go to Bing, google as failsafe. Now I gave up on everything so might as well go with Ecosia. When I NEED something, I'll go with bing/bing's chatGPT.
Pretty sure DDG, Ecosia and Bing all use the same backend?
Can confirm. I struggled to remember the name of the ancient website vampirefreaks after the concept came up in conversation and out of the big search engines only Bing's flavor of chatGPT could tell me what I was looking for.
The last few months have especially been bad.
I love when I search for a movie: New Life (2024) it'll give me IMDB results. I hate IMDB so I change my search to: New Life (2024) TMDB Google will give me the TMDB result as the first result and IMDB as the second result but it also has the did you mean "New Life (2024) IMDB" as an alternative search option. Makes me wonder if Amazon (which owns IMDB) is paying Google to push IMDB. Makes me feel like Google is trying to gaslight me.
Tbh the reason for that is probably just that IMDB is wildly more popular
Iβve found Google alternatives great for things that areβ¦ filtered (copyright etc), but honestly no matter what search engine I use, I swear none just give you the results for your query anymore. Iβve still been finding the Bing-based ones horrible quality for relevancy and defaulting to Google.
Maybe it's not only a search engine problem, but a content problem. There's less and less useful content on the web nowadays
Ehh I wouldn't say so. There's still plenty of good content around, especially if you're trying to learn. The issue is that there's also a lot of bad content, a lot from garbage ai generated nonsense and a lot from low quality content that plays the seo manipulation game.
This is what millionshort.com was supposed to help with, but now you need an account for it.
The proportion of good content to bad content has taken a steep nosedive to be sure.
I think since around 2016? Google changed their algos to prioritize mainstream media. This is actually a way to censor since MSM is all controlled by the CIA. Jacobin and NY post have the exact same opinions about countries the CIA and state department don't like.
Yikes. Found the gullible one or paid disinformation spreader.
please go back home, paid ccp actor
You have infinitely other options. search.brave.com, yandex, bing. And probably a lot of cool ones I don't know about.
All of them search more accurately your directly requested phrase instead of a blurry interpretation of your sentiment.
I've been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I've definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn't become a disaster, it's just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven't exactly loved DDG in comparison. It's okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It's more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I'd be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn't which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone's asked basically that exact or very similar question.
I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I'll persevere but I can't say it's been better.
I found that switch DDG to my default was good enough for ~80% of my searches. I'll only use Google as an alternative for shopping since that's where DDG legitimately just sucks at providing anything that's not "temu" or alibaba.
Google started getting really bad about a year ago
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