People who haven't gotten into habit of googling stuff in the last 20 years might not get into it at all anymore because of how search engines are gamed with SEO spam tactics nowadays

"We've ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here's a bunch of pinterest and quora spam."

Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.

Search engine protocol:

Ignore first few results (ads)

Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)

Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare

Ignore subsection of reddit links

Find 0-1 useful links on first page

Regret

Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of "search term"

This is especially frustrating when trying to find parts for vehicles or machinery. Used to, one could search for something like "1988 Suzuki Samurai Oil Filter" and get the answer for all the common filter brands. But now all you get is links to an auto parts website, where you have to use their shitty search function and hope they have what you need.

The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.

I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts

We need a Google successor.

Something non-profit.

I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.

I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it's a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where 'using the computer' is a minor task of one's workday.

wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.

Reject Search engines, return to shoplifting For Dummies books from the local library

Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.

Tfw you searched something and the top10 answer is mostly copied homework without much variation, and then the best one is from reddit.

my lil trick is I'd just add "Reddit" after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution

It really winds me up how results that match every search term aren't prioritised any more. I often search for very specific pieces of hardware, and it's been a nightmare since the late 2010s. You now have to pore over each result to check that it's 100% what you're are looking for.

SEO exacerbates the problem, but I'd say the root cause is the algorithm itself.

If you have avoided learing how to use the internet/search engines till now you probably couldn't learn if you tryed

How do we find information these days? I still default to my search engine, which is often google. I moonlight over to DDG often, but usually an operating system upgrade gets me back on Google for a while.

That's why I use Kagi. It's a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.

Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats

True, and it should be taught way better. There are so many nifty tricks when it comes to search engines that the average user don't know about.

Nah.

What the average user is looking for is almost certainly gonna be near the top of a Google search.

What are "SEO spam tactics"? I would google, but am afraid of that now.

Wasn't seo revamped like decades ago because it was prone to spam? And now is best bid get to be in the first pages/results?

There’s actually a lot of theory and early work out there on the topic of federated search. While existing search aggregators like Searx and YaCY certainly qualify as federated, search infrastructure built from the ground up with decentralization in mind would look very different. All that to say this isn't necessarily the end of the line.

If they haven't gotten into this habit in the last 20 years anyways, I don't think the SEO spam was that last straw. That ship has sailed.

I used to work for Google. Now I pay for Kagi.

Ignorance is bliss, give me some pls

For certain questions/information, ChatGPT provides better summary information than standard search engines like Google/Bing

Permanently Deleted