for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and “phrases”
It was a necessary move to incorporate support for Google+ profiles. /s
So wait, the search operators don’t work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless
And if it limits the results too much they just ignore them to cram more ads in.
Can’t have the bottom of the page spelling gogle.
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They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.
I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.
To be clear, we’re talking about the actual search results themselves and not labelled advertisements or any of google’s godawful widgets that take up half the first page?
Do you have an example of a search that returns excluded keywords?
Not trying to be confrontational lol I’m genuinely curious. There was an article I think last year where they demonstrated that everything was still working, but pages essentially just embedded thousands of keywords which effectively ruined the system
They still work but they search the entire page, not just what’s visible in your browser. A search for
"term"does not implicate you being able to findtermon the results’ rendered pages.So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?
A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it’s difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there’s likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.
It’s far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.
I think you can still use the operators if you select “verbatim” under “search tools.” On mobile, you need to scroll to the right past images/videos/news/etc
Same.
Google is crap now.
Google is no longer a search engine.
It’s a storefront.
Yes. And your consciousness is the product.
Yes. If you do a search on this site for posts about google, you’ll find multiple threads about this. Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO, and new LLM bots are mostly responsible.
Basically it seems that google is losing the arms race against SEO[…]
What does this mean in particular?
Companies are better at getting their shitty product/spammy pages to the top of search results than Google is able to find high quality pages to show you.
Google has to create algorithms to judge pages based on their content and get good results , companies only have to fine tune their pages to match the algorithm.
IIRC Google penalizes sites if they are detected to be abusing the SEO system. Not sure how effective the detection is though.
Poor, if my google search results are anything to go by
It’s actually very tricky to implement because people have used it to do “negative SEO”. Which is essentially making it seem like your competitors are abusing the system to get their results lowered.
People with mediocre content using SEO to get themselves higher in the search results than sites with actual information on them. That way when searching for something you need to dig through the shit to get to the nugget of actual useful info.
Search engines tried to rank pages based on how big the chance is the info the user is looking for is actually on that page. SEO makes it so that pages with a lower chance of containing the right info, are ranked before pages with a higher chance. This leads those pages to get more hits and thus marketing thinks it’s done their job. But in reality it just pisses off users, blaming the dumb sites that do this and more often the search engine. Search engines are trying to fight this, but SEO is big business, so they are losing the battle.
Now these days there are more issues, like search engines not having access to a lot of info in so called walled gardens. So more good info gets created in places where it can’t easily be found. Also search engines have become more and more advertisement machines instead of search engines and with this shift in priorities, the user experience deteriorates.
But yeah SEO sucks and has always sucked.
Search Engine Optimization. Not providing the best search result, but tricking the search engine into thinking you have the best result.
It means if you search for anything, your first 3 pages of hits are the same useless websites that exist to push ads vaguely related to your search rather than real info. Trying to research a broken TV used to return things like AVForums or reddit threads or samsung support sites. Now it’s “TEN BEST TV’s IN 2024” that are nothing but sponsored content and affiliate links to tvs on amazon.
Google can’t figure out how to tell the difference between the former and the latter, and isn’t motivated to because they get paid for the ad clicks, and not for the forum clicks.
Oh they know, they just choose to shovel the shit for money.
If google detected continuing searching after a page visit, then that page you looked at was probably not having the right answer, right?
SEO solution : make super long pages with the history of what you are looking for and adding mumbo jumbo stuff to bloat out the page so you stay there longer. Now google thinks you found what you looked for.
And a lot of other crap ofc.
Ahhh, that’s the goal behind those overly long explanations about how Jimbo Jimboson invented the spoon when I just want to look up soup recipies.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.
Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google’s search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing ‘relevance’, ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.
This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.
SEO (search engine “optimization”) is how a search engine ranks its results. The more webpages link to a certain result (as determined by a webcrawler), the higher it is displayed. That is why bloggers are often paid by bad actors to publish editorials that link to a scam, virus, or gambling website.
Google popularized the concept in its early years, back when SEO was an organic indicator of a result’s popularity. It made them the single best choice. Then, capitalism happened, and SEO became a resource to exploit.
Google chose to ignore the SEO arms race. Winning it is trivial, if you detect anything even remotely grey-hat, blacklist the entire domain. Forever. Then SEO stops being a thing because no one wants to risk toeing the line.
What incentive does Google have to even put up a fight? Worse results = more time searching = more “traffic” = more ad revenue. It’s not like they really have to worry about search engine competitors. Please do not try to recommend DDG to me. It is just a different flavor of garbage.
It was bad before LLM spam became widespread, it’s just even worse now.
Yes, there’s a great article I read a while back about how and why recipe web sites became so bad and frustrating. Basically, a good website would show you the recipe, you would read it and leave. However, since you didn’t spend much time on the site, google would rank it much lower.
On the other hand, if you encountered a long rambling story that you had to read through and scroll through ads, before getting to the useful information, then google would rank the site higher because you spent more time on it. That’s why there are so many memes about how bad recipe website are.
And of course, even before LLMs, it was trivial to implement a copy paste bot to create a massive number of web sites.
I live in central Canada.
I am reading the comments, and I am noticing that other people’s experiences are very different than mine.
For me, Google Search has reached the point where it will not even give me results for my search terms. I say this without an iota of hyperbole.
It’s so coincidental that this conversation comes up, but I actually sat there yesterday agog, looking at my desktop Firefox browser window… Scrolling through the entire search results page and realizing that not a single thing was even close to what I searched
It is noteworthy because I have been observing a steady decline, but it was the very first time I could make use of literally nothing that they gave back. In an unsettling way, the gravity of it hit me emotionally right there.
imo deserved for being a Saskatchewaner. Can’t be helped
Don’t associate ME with those banjo-pickin’ inbreds.
edit: I had referred to the people of Saskatchewan as a bunch of banjo-pickin’ inbreds. I was wrong to make such a statement, and I’d like to apologize. The vast majority of the people in Saskatchewan have no idea how to play the banjo.
Canada doesn’t exist in Google…It is a the proverbial happy tone/hue couple…sorry, if I that wasn’t oblique enough
Canada is trying to de-google itself by “Search Engine Optimization” death by inviting a Nazi.
Google any image for happy >tone/hue< couple
Google (Kinda) Apologizes After Woke AI Gemini Exposed As Anti-White Racist
This reads like an incoherent AI-generated rambling. I’m sorry if you actually have a point you’re trying to make, but all I see is broken English, lack of direction, and an unrelated link at the end. If you are in fact not a bot, then please slow down and quality check before posting.
I’m only a farm tool, don’t shoot…your dominance is noted
Google search was so legendary when it came out, it was able to find me perfect results when I would even type in almost gibberish, it somehow predicted what I actually meant. Over time the results were worse and worse, then nothing but products would show in the results a few years ago. Buy this, buy what,etc. no more research, just trash products in the search results. Google greed killed itself.
The Search Engine became a small part of Googles operations, and then Google became a small part of Alphabets operations.
Turns out advertising is where the money is.
Sales.
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Ars had an article about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
It’s not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
They’re also not particularly motivated to try harder. They don’t have a lot of competition, and they make a lot of money this way. And their leadership are idiots.
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.
Yeah, the first measurements are rolling in and not looking great: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
Basically, imagine someone built a machine that made it trivial to generate an infinite number of realistic-looking articles (=LLMs). And there’s a monetary incentive to do so (=ad money).
So, I have to imagine, all search engines are absolutely being blasted with spam content, and they have to filter out realistic-looking articles to make their search results worthwhile at all, but as a result, some real search results will also get filtered out or ranked badly.Huh. I hate advertising and think it’s brainwashing that harms our minds, increases consumerism and causes massive environmental damage and biases all content and news production.
Affiliate links are just another form of advertising.
So the solution is very easy, outlaw affiliate links. Or advertising in general. Amazon and others should no longer be allowed to offer affiliate systems. Or remove any page with affiliate page or linking to pages with affiliate pages from search results.
You can’t create rules and structures that prioritize profit and expect positive results.
Rip INTERWEBZ 2023 just preserve it how it was before it got sick
I don’t say this to be dismissive, but Google’s search results have been getting worse for the better part of a decade now, and they’re still far above anyone else. While I do think that engines like Bing are closer to Google’s quality than most give them credit for, Google is still the only game in town. There are other search engines that people use, but they are niches in niches, and are probably used for belief reasons over an improvement in quality.
Frankly, I think that for the first time in history, the search market is open for competition. There is an argument to be made whether Google either doesn’t care about their search quality, or that it’s simply a hard problem to solve for anyone. If the former is true, then a competitor could make a very real case for overthrowing Google, given the right backing and hype behind them.
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.
That’s heartbreaking but not an uncommon story - it does seem like Google has the power of life and death over websites and it seems very fickle and opaque.
Have you thought about restarting it on the Fediverse?
Thats so sad, especially as someone who regularly tries to find small forums like that. But i always have such a hard time finding them unless i already know the site name :(
Its so hard now for a regular person to find content made by other people without it being tarnished by the profit motive. Forums are all pretty much on reddit or dead. Even a good blog that isnt just seo trash is hard to find now days. Social media sites are mostly influencers trying to sell products and attract followers.
I just wanna see the cool stuff other humans are doing and thinking without ads and low effort garbage 🥺
I wont lie, it hurt to shut The Den of Amateur Writing down. That place was a product of the heart. So many good memories.
Yeah, it’s not so much that the search results declined, but that the spammy content farms really got the hang of SEO and now all the results are shit and they all have one thing in common in that they’re covered in ads. Google does have an incentive in giving you links filled with their ads, but I’m not convinced that is responsible for the mountains of shit sites. And LLMs are only going to make this worse.
Google got outsmarted. I feel like there’s maybe a few dozen companies where if you blocked all their sites, your search results would improve massively.
What is a good search engine these days? I use DuckDuckGo but I don’t find it’s very sensitive to local content, like if I’m looking up an obituary I end up switching to Google. Any more precise and privacy oriented search engines?
I just started using this one today: https://docs.searxng.org/ and it did a great job for what i needed. I never heard of it before, but found the link on an old Lemmy post.
I don’t know how it would work for other people with other needs, but i needed to find graphic designers to help me with a project. DuckDuckGo kept giving me hundreds of results from a handful of big companies, but i wanted small companies and individuals. Found exactly what i needed on the first search using this engine.
I’m a big fan of Kagi.
I don’t care how good it is, but I’m not paying for a search engine.
Your loss because it’s actually good. There’s also a free version.
The entire internet has drastically declined for me.
Not just Google. Duck duck go was good for awhile but now also getting worse. Assume this is Ai and other tools screwing with how their web crawlers collect data. Expect it to get worse before it gets better.
DDG recently started to exclude terms from my search query and returns more random garbage and a “search only …” link. So often I search, find nothing, then realize DDG messed up again. Really not sure why it’s doing that.
General intelligence slowly taking over, curating everything to the point we won’t be able to tell that it needs to be unplugged when the time comes.
But I enjoy the content it gives me about the content I don’t like being incorrect. And I’ll be damned if I ever say I wish I was born 30 years earlier.
In general yes. I’m not going to pull exact numbers up but I think it started declining around 2018.
I’ve heard it said they switched to whatever was most profitable rather than what was actually useful or relevant. I still find good results when looking up niche tech issues, but if it’s more mainstream I get really weird results, so that might indeed be what’s happening.
Looking up niche stuff gets harder and harder it seems. It always seems to “translate” my very specific request into a very general search and giving me useless results. It highlights search terms in the results, which aren’t even in my original search query. Google just thinks it knows better and it never ever does.
Don’tBe Evil.
Also, google images sucks now. Try googling for anything specific, like “sand in pc” or “red carb on plate” - all AI generated
How can you tell? Do you think it’s on purpose, or just the result of so much AI art being pumped into the interwebs for the last year?
I have absolutely no idea. But I’ve found out that, the more specific of an image you search for, the higher the chance of it being AI-generated.
Yes. I’m using the same search methods I’ve always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I’ve noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn’t go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.
Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it’s totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn’t for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I’d probably be done with them entirely.
Use Ublock Origin to block all ads. Takes 20 seconds to install, and works on all browsers
Also switch to Firefox, it has built-in protections that Google Chrome (of course) doesn’t have
I am using Ublock Origin in Firefox, it still somehow slipped an ad in there.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Read Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode. You still have to manually block the ads, but you can block it across every website.
Well, for now I just right click my YouTube search results and open them up in YouTube instead where Ublock is already working fine.
Technically it takes a while to setup tho
No, it does not. I end up installing Firefox multiple times a week and it takes less than a minute to add uBlock origin ande enable all the extra filters that it offers
When I was new to using uBlock it took me a while to search and read what to do. It definitely took me more than a minute to watch the tutorial video that was linked from the Github. It just sucks when people share these unrealistic expectations with total newbies. I was on the receiving end, too. I just installed it without knowing how to set it up properly, and I kept on hearing “Hard Mode” without knowing that you can actually do it on mobile.
If you say that it takes 20 seconds to install and nothing more, you’re just encouraging someone to just install it and expect it to be the only thing you have to do. You’re not even telling them that you had to configure it to totally block social media trackers and ads on websites!
And ffs, this place is becoming like reddit. I’m being downvoted just because I said something that would’ve been realistic for someone who is new to uBlock, that it has to be set-up and it will take a while.
Bro, it works fine with the defaults, no need to make it hard
There is another comment that said their default settings still let an ad slip in. Same thing happened to me before enabling Dynamic Filtering, then found out some trackers and ad servers are persistent. Plus, hard mode allows you to block trackers more.
Yes
In 5 years and 5 devices, I’ve never changed the defaults
Well you’re missing out. Try reading:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-features
Especially Dynamic Filtering and Blocking Mode.
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.
You should look into getting an unlocked pixel with graphene on it
Saw that recently. Will check it out
it might be difficult here. I’m in Korea. ie the land of Samsung.
I stopped using it years ago because they were going downhill and still collecting your private information. I run my own SearXNG now. It proxies from multiple sources, no ads, no tracking. I really enjoy SearXNG as it’s mine.
Public instances
I’d say site blocking is SearXNG’s main selling point. (I switched when it got recommended to me on Lemmy :-).) Blocking just a few annoyances (Amazon, Pinterest, etc) make the search results so much better and relevant.
Also, Google is plagued by censorship.
Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.
I used searx a while ago but forgot if it has Bangs like ddg. Does it?
It does.
No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.
Don’t miss this article (Lemmy discussion) from an air purifier review site for an in-depth look at how trusted publishers have been downsizing, then outsourcing generation of affiliate listicles. Drowns out sites who actually buy & test products.
alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers “dotdash meredith”” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content
I only really use NYT Wirecutter for any kind of site that tests and reviews products.
They list their methodology regarding how they choose which ones to test, who is testing, how the test is being conducted, what the results are based on, etc etc
Is it the best one? No idea, give me your recs because I’d love to have multiple sites to go to. If I can’t find anything on Wirecutter, I’ll break down and see if Reddit has anything good.
Truly shameful how useless so many once great tools now are, and it’s all in the name of greed.
Edit: Just finished the article you linked - great read, thanks. Looks like Wirecutter is still good along with Tech Gear Lab and of course the site that wrote the article, HouseFresh.
I have 3 sites to try now! :)
General - Wirecutter
Tech - rtings
General incl. cars - Consumer Reports
Air purifiers apparently - House Fresh
Elsewhere there’s so much fraud I’ve been tempted towards crazy. Like, start a company where I personally meet people who want to review stuff and scan their IDs and take their SSNs before publishing any of their experiences/recommendations. Try to suss out if they have family connections to any products, any possible financial compensation…
For restaurants I’ve wanted to sit outside locations and ask diners who are leaving “ay this any good btw?”, given that’s hard to fake.
It blows my mind we haven’t solved review fraud!
alt-text: shoutout the local library for free Consumer Reports access; screenshot of their laptop comparison table with no ads, no SEO spam, no BS
Thanks for the recs!
For the UK, Which does similar things to ConsumerReports.
They’re not always experts, but they’re generally good reviews, and I honestly don’t have enough life to investigate every tumble drier myself. So having a summary of “in this price range, get this one” is very useful.
