241–250 of 515 posts
Google seems to also have a heavy recency bias. I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up. Any tips on finding "historical" results?
Use a bookmark tool such as diigo.
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Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions. Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't…
(same poster) BTW, amazon.com is in my opinion even more infuriating. I just searched for "Odense Marzipan" (which is a 100+ years old brand serving the royal danish court) and they show me pictures of gamepads made out of chocolate along with a note: Your search "odense marzipan" was automatically translated into "odicht marzipan". Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I…
It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
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I've considered taking a stab at it, but I didn't for likely the same reason no one else has: no idea how to monetize it. Sure you can run ads, but your conversion rates will likely stink because you'd be selecting for non-suckers.
Not trying to spam but will mention devonagent once more in this thread, they just sell it, old fashioned perpetual license. respects boolean operators. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent#editions
I've been using it as my default search engine the last couple of months and it seems to do a pretty good job.
This is why today sites like Reddit mostly focused on adding app nag messages to their site and appending posts with distracting badges for additional revenue. It's also why companies like Google don't care about your thoughts when it comes to removing dislikes from YouTube and continue to promote paid search results and their own search content every year.
Usually when the product becomes so bad that people forgot why they use it in the first place a competitor will come along with a user-first approach and disrupt the market, but this is a process that is likely to take decades rather than years or months. In the meantime you can expect Google and other tech monopolies to continue making their products worse from a user's perspective.
I find myself using a mix of search engines these days. Google is still my primary when working (code-related searches still preform better imo), but typically use DuckDuckGo on non-work devices and very occasionally I'll use Yandex when I'm searching for things which might be influenced by political bias.
In the case of this specific question though I'm not sure whether Google consciously changed their search algorithm in a way they knew would result in poorer results. What it might suggest is that Google isn't putting as much resource into optimising the quality of their search results as they have previously. I know in recent years I've found myself increasingly using the "site:" modifier to return results from specific high-quality forums and sites which I trust. I find the vast majority of results for general queries these days link to ad-riddled, low-quality content farms.
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I'm using DDG for almost a year, and I'd say that DDG is slightly better because I have a bit more control. It's important when you're multilingual (common in Europe) to be able to de-localize results chose language etc. But it isn't MUCH better. DDG is just slightly better than Google, that has become infuriating.
I use it regularly but it is getting to be unreliable for technical searches. I often have to resort to using google when trying to track down information about programming problems.
It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
I don't get the appending reddit thing. I don't see why reddit is considered trustworthy, marketers have been planting "organic discussion" on reddit for years .
SEO blogs are full uncanny valley for me.
The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testi…
> hashbang Maybe it's just me but those always seem vastly gratuitous. Like shouldn't the engine figure that out automatically? It's like half its job.