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Apparently Google hates us now

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Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#211

Post by aucisson_masque »

f4stjack wrote: post #127

Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…

> Google doesn't work

I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'.

For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google.

And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about other parts because I had a lot of issue and it was the first time removing the Gimbals and replacing the Gimbal head on that car.

Google is beyond infuriating, they are a tech company and behave like some old fashioned administration lady. Completely out of touch with real life.

On this last part, I'm convinced that it's because Google management must be completely out of touch with real life. Tech world is special, add millions on top of that..

The best that could happen to this company is to break it's monopoly so that they are forced to get rid of these lunatics.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#212

Post by throwway120385 »

zx8080 wrote: post #204
badc0ffee wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's. Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.

Gmaps always zooms out when I search. No idea of that happens for others or not.

Apple Maps always assumes I'm trying to get directions to a place from wherever I'm at, even if it's on another continent.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#213

Post by pooploop64 »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #211
f4stjack wrote: post #127

Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…

> Google doesn't work I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'. For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google. And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about othe…

I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#214

Post by xg15 »

ajkjk wrote: post #190
anigbrowl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does new content or content from new accounts get seen by anyone?

A feww options: 1. get some people who trust you to vouch for you when you join (similar to requiring an invite to join but maybe more flexible?) 2. some kind of induction process, maybe the algorithm surfaces your stuff and gets feedback, like the 'new' queue on HN 3. same as before but the AI tries to do it (scary though) 4. use the same account as on other sites, or otherwise tie it to a global reputation or somet…

I think the deeper problem is: How would legitimate new person with no reputation and no contacts be able to get a foothold at all if there are masses of bots pretending to be exactly such a person?

A system which looks more at the content that is posted (probably using AI) and tries to decide whether it is spam feels fairer to me than effectively pulling up the ladder on new users.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#215

Post by akersten »

WarmWash wrote: post #154
akersten wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I wish folks calibrated their E(I am actually wrong|downvotes). Have you considered what that value could be in this case?

Creators don't get compensation when people ad-block. Creators don't get compensation when LLMs scrape. It's totally, and completely, unambiguous. The internet just has collective brain damage from the grassroots morals of it being formed 30 years ago by teenagers. How surprising that a bunch of kids decided that the way to save the internet was to make it better for themselves, and worse for the people who make the…

> It's totally, and completely, unambiguous. The internet just has collective brain damage

The point that continues to be missed is that instead of taking downvotes as validation that people simply failed to comprehend the argument you're making (they didn't), you should take them as a check to reevaluate whether your conclusion is as unambiguous as you believe.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#216

Post by xg15 »

righthand wrote: post #20
hungryhobbit wrote: post #18

They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now. Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as…

Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.

I don't think so. "sleeper" accounts are a thing. A more sophisticated spammer could create a "high-reputation" account over some time that only posts useful info, then turn up the spam after the trust level is high enough - or even turn the tree system into a business opportunity and sell vouches to other spammers.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#217

Post by gtfiorentino »

Cider9986 wrote: post #199
yegg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd... ). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point,…

I find DuckDuckGo's search results to be terrible. I use Brave search and I find it to be the best. I've also tried Startpage and I like it better than DDG, but less than Brave. DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG. Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.

We’ll take a look at those two sites, thanks for reporting. We’re actively working to improve how we detect and remove scam sites, and getting specific reports is very helpful.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#218

Post by amelius »

ttoinou wrote: post #210
siva7 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com

Yandex is big and has probably good engineers

I suspect it has more to do with incentives.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#219

Post by gtfiorentino »

throwway120385 wrote: post #206
yegg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd... ). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point,…

I stopped using DDG because whenever I search for information on a topic like "plumber's bread" all I get are the same 1500 sites serving the same top-10 lists of the same Amazon Affiliate links. Kagi neatly avoids all of that and serves me the dumb forum articles from 2006 that I'm looking for that describe what plumbers actually do when they want to stop up a wet pipe. This is a problem with nearly every ad-support…

I searched for “plumber’s bread” on DuckDuckGo and this was the 3rd result which seems to match what you’re looking for - https://www.finehomebuilding.com/forum/plumbers-bread-sandwi.... I do see the other kind of results you’re talking about too, though.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#220

Post by alberto-m »

pooploop64 wrote: post #203
siva7 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com

This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics. There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts. It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the…

Yandex is not obscure, nor “lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap”. It has very good technology behind, though not the trillion dollars of investments Google can afford. Just because it does not come from California it does not mean it's a hobby project anyone could replicate.
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