cross-posted from !google@lemdro.id
- Google may be altering billions of search queries daily to generate results that increase purchases.
- Testimony in an antitrust case revealed an internal Google slide about changes to its search algorithm, involving “semantic matching” to generate more commercial results.
- Google covertly changes user queries, substituting them with ones that generate more revenue for the company and display shopping-oriented results.
- This manipulation benefits Google’s profits but harms search quality and raises advertiser costs.
- Despite legal challenges, Google’s market dominance allows it to continue these practices, impacting users’ ability to access unbiased information.
This would explain why I feel like Google results have rarely been high quality unless I’m just trying to scratch at the surface of a topic or include “reddit” at the end of my search term.
Even though results have gotten worse, every time I’ve tried another search engine the results have been even worse than Google.
Have you tried Kagi? It’s a paid service (which is good for people that don’t like ads) and the results seem pretty good. They have a trial plan where you can do 100 searches. Where possible, it prioritises small sites that don’t always appear in Google results at all, and it has far less SEO spam than Google.
It feels like every other post on privacy and technology is someone pushing the (paid) search engine Kagi nowadays…
I really need to try them and see how many searches I actually use. Even their higher paid tiers seem like way too few searches to me. But I have no actual idea.
Yes, that’s unfortunately true, too. It probably comes with how sites will try to optimise as much as possible for search engines to find them, even if it means that it’s no longer useful (like those posts on social media that include every conceivable tag instead of the ones that actually fit thematically to the post)
There’s this project for a paid search engine, Kagi, that tries to make results more useful again by not needing to favour advertisements. I haven’t tested their trial offer too much because I keep forgetting it exists, so I cannot say how much better the results really are, yet.
Edit: Big lol, I just read the other replies in this comment chain and yeah I guess by now you are aware of this Kagi project hah.
Google is like a big hairy troll living under the bridge, the internet. Everyone thought the troll was kind of nice, even if it was a big hairy troll, because it usually let people cross the bridge for free. This court case is dragging out all the dead bodies and displaying them for the villagers to see.
I FINALLY understand why even putting quotation in my search queries still result in lots of irrelevant results!!!
Because Google isn’t even searching for the exact input!! They just changed the input!! Ridiculous!!!
Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.
I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.
Brave has proved time and again that they’re only trustworthy as long as whatever scheme they’re working on isn’t found out, and I can’t imagine that there is any chance their search engine is any better.
If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse.
