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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#481

Post by nottorp »

smcin wrote: post #228
rchaud wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.

Searching for official manufacturer manuals/user guides for appliances is also another goldmine for third-parties.

But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#482

Post by benhurmarcel »

zeroq wrote: post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

I find it's still not that difficult to have that "special power", but you have to adapt your tools. Before the only tool you needed was Google, now you need to know which one to use for each type of request.

I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less).

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#483

Post by teekert »

LorenDB wrote: post #58
beckthompson wrote: post #20

Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.

You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.

It's solid, I use it 95% of the time, that 5% Google usually still disappoints.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.

Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#484

Post by DecentShoes »

zeroq wrote: post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

Google deliberately made search worse so users do multiple searches for each query so they can profit off showing more ads:

https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search...

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#485

Post by willtemperley »

alanh wrote: post #379
zeroq wrote: post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times

I don't disagree - yet their share price hit ATH this month.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#486

Post by benhurmarcel »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #449
ares623 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not. Does Kagi have a better localized experience?

> Does Kagi have a better localized experience? I'm in India and it works well. I can even search in Hindi and get good results. The only thing that doesn't work are local points of interests (restaurants, hotels, local businesses, etc). I still have to use Google Maps to look these up. Then again, even Apple doesn't have good local results for PoIs in India, so I don't expect Kagi to get this right either. That said…

I really like Kagi for this reason, the ability to choose whether I want "international" results or localized to a country (and choose the country, sometimes it's not mine).

I agree that for very localized results (not at country level but city level), I still use Google instead.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#487

Post by DecentShoes »

jameson wrote: post #115
amatecha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]: "Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit." [0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg

i feel sometimes it's best for the company to stay private

Case in point: Valve

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#488

Post by WhyNotHugo »

zeroq wrote: post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

> I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English.

You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either.

I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car.

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