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.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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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.
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And here I thought Startpage was acting up...
Why have you not tried Kagi? If it's important to you to have good search and you don't like being spied on and having ads shoved down your throat, it's worth paying a small fee for quality instead of paying with your privacy for crap results. It's been a breath of fresh air. Searching is fun again. It also indexes Lemmy. Traditional Search has largely gone to crap, but I'm tired of everyone complaining that these mega companies offering 'free' services aren't holding their end of the deal instead of supporting the people that are doing something about it. I'm not optimistic things like qwant or searx will be sustainable or deliver high quality results, but by all means donate to them with time or money if you believe in them.
Kagi is the same as ddg 99% of the time.
Omg no. You have a diversified data set?
Kagi isn't free
If it's free then you're the product
And if you're the product then there's an interest to keep you on the site and show you ads which works best if the first result isn't the correct one and you need to scroll or even go to page two
It's literally the reason why Google got so much worse that they wanted to show more ads to users which wouldn't work if the best result is always the first
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The search problem is largely due to not being the actual customer.
Look at me. I’m the customer now.
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Neither is beer
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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.
DDG and qwant are basically bing
“Perplexity AI”
Yeah 100% agree. Especially for the type of search where you’re googling for an answer. This feels like what searches used to be when Google was young and forums still existed.
I wanted to make a joke about my first search engine, MetaCrawler, and then found out it's still around and still does search. Going down that rabbithole, it's changed hands a ton and was only relaunched kinda recently at some point. Is it any good? Nah, probably not.
I guess I'll just have to rely on my other aggregate search engine, SavvySearch (no, no the first search engine does not in fact still exist, much to my disappointment).
Not just you.
DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.
Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor
I switched to DDG right after Google added the ai answers to search and in baffled by how fast DDG seemed to go down hill. Just a few months ago it was still giving me on point results on the first try, now it almost feels like I'm using one of those malware search bars from back in the day.
yes - it’s a recent thing, no more that a few months I think
DDG still mostly fine for me, but anytime I use Google I'm reminded why I left. I wonder how much Googles beancounter enshittification has to do with that...
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