No Stupid Questions

The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.

I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in... And then it just... Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to "crawled but not indexed" for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.

I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising... I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn't even care to explain themselves.

I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for... Its dead. Killed by capitalism.

Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.

What do you do? Maybe we're can hate it in solidarity

You *think you use Google with modifiers, but now your modifiers are even modified or nulled by Google

The modifiers haven't seemed to work for a long time.

They also can't. The algorithm is a black box to them, so figuring out why a given SEO tactic works is a fool's errand.

It's a cat and mouse game, where a working tactic will rapidly proliferate.

You can get a degoogled phone but they all seem under par with flagships.

I was looking at the fairphone5 but I'm on the fence. I might just stick with my current phone which is like 4 years old.

Use Ublock Origin to block all ads. Takes 20 seconds to install, and works on all browsers

I came here to say this. Partly due to behavioral changes on my part, DDG's results have been closer to what I'm looking for. At school, they block DDG on the WiFi, so I use Google there and I have to flick past many ads and results that look good from the summary, but have nothing to do with what I'm looking for when load the page.

You're saying Bing has better results than Google?

I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi's 100 free searches, and decided that it's worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.

I don't blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.

Kagi

Does it personalise the result based on your tastes, pages you visit and previous searches?

I tried duck duck go but I don't like how u personal are the results. This last month I switched to bing and it was better. Some years ago I wouldn't belive that bing could be better than Google.