Even the basic - operator so rarely works as intended in any search bar anymore. I used to be able to ferret out anything from mountains of results that way. Now it just ignores the operator.
Quote marks to search for a specific phrase in order doesn’t work either. I remember in high school in the very early aughts being taught these operators. Fucking shameful.
Quotation marks work well for me, still, after all these years, as their 2022 blog post claims.
They’ll find “him. But” when you search “him but”.
They’ll find “is not” when you search “isn’t”.
Saw them work in a singular and unscientific test a week ago.
One search to try on your favorite engine:
“they had spent all day waiting outside the double doors”
Google, Yandex, and Bing all pull it off. DuckDuckGo fails.
Ah, maybe you’re referring to this: on mobile, you have to ignore Google results below the DMCA removal notice. On desktop - none of those spammy “tiles” with video content and the like. On mobile - yes, after the 100% exact results, you get their attempts at hooking you into staying on the site.
There was this sweet spot where you could both ask it a question in almost natural language, but also use very simple operators to fine tune your results massively.
Then SEO became an offshoot of marketing, and it started to get worse and worse, until 90% of it was sponsored content of some sort
Now, I have no idea what’s going on. It’s like search engines have collectively decided “hey, remember that thing when we helped people find information they were looking for? What if we just didn’t do that anymore?”
I just go to Wikipedia now, fuck them search engines.
Actually, their current events section is a great way to get the gist of things without giving clicks to corpo fearmongers.
I’ll check that out, my questions are mostly very specific technical ones unfortunately. But after I forbid myself from Reddit, I do feel like I could use some new info streams…I feel healthier using Lemmy, but there is a bias… a bias I tend to agree with, but you need multiple viewpoints to circle in on the actual truth
Personally, I’ve been using language models. Not good for current streams, but for general, or even specific knowledge? Hugging faces hosts a ton of AI, if you find one trained for a specific purpose you can get pretty decent results directly.
Your mileage may vary, obviously
My guess is that it’s trying to be helpful – that if you (for example) type in a search for lucy and wardrobe and cordial it doesn’t limit it to all of those things, but shows you everything.
Which is fine if you are new to the web, but if you do know what you want and are looking for the exact thing, then ten thousand results…
I can see what they were doing ignoring the operators, but yeah – it blows.
The top search results from Google always being reddit links is a fairly recent phenomenon(I would say in the last year or so?), in no small part due to Google’s targeted advertisements and SEO ruining the Internet, and LLMs has made blogspam much easier than ever before.
Despite its multiple flaws(the biggest one would have to be the inability to search for comments), reddit is one of the only places on the English speaking Internet where you can find genuine, relatively high quality dialogue between real people, good or bad, without any paywalls, which is also why I think reddit has always had an disproportionate influence on Internet discourse relative to its size.
I would say if reddit was competent, they would be trying to foster this aspect of its community that would take the function from Google and make it the best place to search for answer to everything, because in the end, all search on the Internet boils down to finding real people to willingly help other people in public, and there is no better marketing than genuine word-of-mouth. But, reddit seemed to be keen on rereading the steps to what ruined Google in the first place, the priority of targeted advertisment over people.
Can posts and comment here in Lemmy be found in Google (or generally any search engine)? That would be a massive downside.
Of course they can, as a public forum, Lemmy is search engine crawlable as any other webpage on the public Internet.
I’m not sure why that would be a downside though.
Yeah this is something that too few people get about the Fediverse. Because it’s decentralised and sends your data to many independent servers by default, it’s in fact even harder to scrub what you post off the internet than a centralised platform. Even if your current instance goes down, other federated instances will still have a lot of the original posts and comments. You can never be certain that all instances have deleted your post or comment because they can simply not comply with the signal from your home instance asking them to delete it, or have defederated between you making the post and you deleting it so it never gets the deletion signal. Plus, you have zero way of knowing if any instance still stores the original content on their servers or in backups even after you’ve both edited a post blank to remove the text and deleted it.
This is certainly a double edged sword. On one hand, it makes information that was intended to be public more accessible by the public. On the other hand, it does run up against the “right to be forgotten” doctrine, and does have very real privacy implications. Lemmy is better for privacy in terms of not tracking your browser and not having ads, but worse for privacy in that anything you post can’t really be deleted.
But more than anything, it’s a reason to think before you post because you likely won’t be able to take it back.
Google started doing the reddit thing because there google search is such shit that people started typing out in search “reddit what oil should I use for a 2009 Ford focus?” Because Google results give convoluted and shit results, but commentary in reddit already likely have a post about your exact question in their mechanicadvice sub that says you should use X oil in that vehicle.
God it is so annoying how bloated Google feels these days - it’s becoming more and more frequent for me just to use Bing because it actually gives me what I’m asking for rather than burying it in everything “similar” to it
Yeah. I use Bing now. And edge. Because when I setup my new PC I couldn’t be arsed to change it. Bing sucks, it’s just that Google now sucks just as much.
Why not Firefox? That plus uBlock Origin = pleasant browsing.
Search Engine wise - I use a mixture depending on what kind of thing I’m after. Need to try out SearxNG though.
SEO is what is killing Google. Companies designing shit websites designed to highjack search results is a huge issue.
It’s also because they search for something different than your query in order to combat seo in certain cases, and to help people who don’t know how to use Google: https://moz.com/blog/google-modifying-searches
But it seems like this behavior tends to break down when the user knows what they’re doing and Google does something different because it thinks it knows better search terms…
This article illustrates that google understands the intent of a search well enough to consistently show relevant results to the end user. For as long as I’ve used google, I think I’ve “fought” the engine to find a specific result like three times ever. Just today, I used it to figure out what I mistyped on my keyboard when taking notes by putting it into google and letting it autocorrect. This article does not demonstrate a problem with google that has degraded the quality of search results. It shows the opposite, actually.
Is putting “reddit” after everything using Google competently?
