51–60 of 242 posts
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What makes you think they ever waged a war? I never saw any indication.
Well, there were algorithm changes like Panda 12 years ago...
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Every google search has to have either "+reddit" or "+stackoverflow" depending on what I'm trying to accomplish. And EVERY search for products needs to say "-pinterest".
Another example: music videos may require "-reaction -reacting". But it's the same or worse with DuckDuckGo.
Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something useful. The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up.
Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
And some small pages seem to have gone missing entirely – some "humorous" typos that I distinctly remember used to return a small handful of pages now return nothing on Google, even though the page(s) in question still exist(s) and is/are still indexed by Bing.
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Typical ad blockers surely don’t filter out Google search results.
The search results are not the problem. The ads are. Ads are placed above search results, so users are more likely to be mislead by them. Installing an ad blocker removes the misleading ads, leaving only the legitimate search results.
Putting the keyword "download" after the name of software, ebooks, or music will lead into weird websites that distribute malware, and they rank very high.
I just tried searching for an old Game Programming book I happen to have. There's two piracy sites, then one site with a "Download" button that gives me a DMG with an executable. Those are above Archive.org, the official github repo of the book and the official website.
For music download, I searched some Bowie. There's Amazon... plus a few pages of of weird websites that I have no idea what they are, but look like "paid piracy", they either ask for credit card or give me a DMG which supposedly has a downloader.
For software I searched the one I made by the company I work at. There's stuff like Filehorse, Softonic (I don't even know if they're legit), then there's a few which look like those aggregators but end up giving you malware when downloading.
That's with ads blocked, and subscription to several lists.
In the end IMO this is terrible for small businesses, people will end up distrusting anything that's not Amazon or anything that they try to search organically, or they'll get malware.
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They pretty much lost the war against content farms already. I'm not sure the content indexing & crawling model they have is even adapted to the current web.
What makes you think they ever waged a war? I never saw any indication.
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> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something useful. The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up.
Of course, SEO blog spammers are learning to add these terms to their sites.
I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products.
And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.
Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed…
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And some small pages seem to have gone missing entirely – some "humorous" typos that I distinctly remember used to return a small handful of pages now return nothing on Google, even though the page(s) in question still exist(s) and is/are still indexed by Bing.
Bing used to be a joke, but nowadays they actually do a decent job for cases in which Google fails.