Why Google Search is Falling Apart

I miss old mrwhosetheboss who was more technically knowledgeable. He was talking about android modifications like roms that he probably would never talk about today.

For the time being at least, there are options to still use the cleaner search results. For Firefox, this post walks through how to set it up: https://lemm.ee/post/42488635/14853159

I've been experiencing this, but only when I'm not logged in to my Google account. It seems that they're forcing people to log in so that the search results are less shitty.

Can anyone confirm this? Sounds like something exactly they would do for better data farming. All corps over last few years are offensive with browser tracking bullshit.

At this rate will demand a camera in your toilet to authenticate you every time you shit to ensure proper ad sense "fingerprint"
- who's to say the little black sensor on the public toilets aren't already doing that?

Because - and this is a real thing, despite how baffling and utterly, obviously insane it is - the guy who now heads the Google search team is the very same guy who drove Yahoo search into the ground.

This is insane. Idk what google is thinking.
- Google: "Well surely, he couldn't tank TWO massive social media engines in one lifetime!"
- Granted I’m jaded as fuck from only a decade and a half as a software engineer, but from where I’m standing, it’s pretty much all just c-suite circlejerking. Competent, incisive, effective, and ethical c-suite leadership that doesn’t focus primarily on finance matters is vanishingly rare these days.

For the same reason it became more popular than other search engines in 00s. Those would give honest search results, Google would have various kinds of complex foolery approaching ML to give people what they wanted quicker.

One can say their corporate culture shows signs of overfitting for that situation. And not just theirs. In general those attempts to make products more competitive with even more complex foolery outside of the main functionality - are that.

Except when products are simply less usable for said main functionality, people use them less even if they don't consciously realize that.

Also - what is Google in essence? It's saying that some computing thing is too smart for you to run it at home or self-host it. It can only be done by the very smart and important people in companies with trillions in capitalization. And because you can't, you are by some cultural taboo forbidden, to run it at home or self-host it, they get to manipulate results to make you give money to the people partnering with them.

We all know there's nothing fundamentally or practically impossible in making a search engine. If we don't have to cache pages, it's actually easy.

The issue is in the service requirements. What the Internet needs is a technically transparent p2p market of services. Where storage and computing power can be transparently donated (or sold) just like in some countries you can sell power to the electric grid.

OK, I've described the magic wand. That's the strategy. Tactics is for someone actually capable of conceiving the thing. LOL

When you go to search something and you literally have to type site:reddit.com at the end of it to get a human response it's no wonder it's falling apart
- And reddit is locking shit up as we speak. These corpos about stole 30 years of the internet from us. There is not much recourse either they control pretty much all of the IP and infrastructure. So their way or highway.
  
  Well there is fediverse for social media at least but it will long time to scale. Other sub sectors will probably need to explore similar models if people want to get away from being gang by 2-3 oligopolies in every market/service they need.
The search engine magic isn't just about caching pages. It's also extremely expensive / complex to:

maintain an index of all the websites in the world. This is an extremely high cost

refresh that index in almost real time. How long will your self hosted crawler take to find new content for every website in the world?

there's also the algorithm for weighing results. The order of results and their relevance is not easy at all. How many times a word appears on a page is a terrible metric.

A hosted search is also a lot more environmentally friendly - that gigantic search index and all the energy poured into the work is something that can be shared by everyone. If everyone did that themselves at home, you spend that same amount of energy for every single household.
- "Almost real time" is not what I'd call necessary.
  
  Weighting results - I'd expect user feedback (good result, bad result, combined with keywords from the request) would be good enough. Similar to ed2k for files' reputation.
  
  The index is going to be big, yes. But if we want a p2p system with split storage and computation, something between Freenet and Ceph, may be doable.
  
  A hosted search is also a lot more environmentally friendly - that gigantic search index and all the energy poured into the work is something that can be shared by everyone. If everyone did that themselves at home, you spend that same amount of energy for every single household.
  
  With some kind of such a p2p system I can imagine the overhead to be like 10 or maybe 100 times Google. But not what you said.

I’ve started getting those AI responses from Google now and I honestly skip right past them.

I fundamentally don’t trust the information so what’s the point of even reading it?

The AI responses are so incredibly bad.

I searched for a video game walkthrough that has a similar name to a movie, and it GAVE ME THE MOVIE PLOT.

What a shit show.
Have you considered not using Google?
- Yes, but in my experience other search engines still give slightly worse results.
  
  Kagi seemed good, but don’t wanna pay for it. Or at least not as much as they’re charging.
Most of this AI stuff is trash. I think Google AI has maybe once given me a useful answer. Amazon has this thing called Rufus that just slows down the process of searching customer reviews. Just like Google, it's maybe once or twice given me useful information and none of it worth the wait that it takes for the search results to come up.

But we are pouring billions into it and increasing our data center power usage by 10x because It's The Future ..
- The problem is AI will always confidently give you an answer like its word is fact. Obviously since you're the one searching, you're most likely unable to verify its accuracy so it's impossible to trust.
  
  I dont mind AI being wrong when i can immediately tell when its wrong but in searches I'll never trust it
Well ideally you provide Google the feed to train their llm

Maybe because the person that ran yahoo search into the ground is now responsible for Google search.

Yup that's the definitive answer
- So you posted a 17 minute video instead of a five-word sentence
  
  Link an article next time please!
You found the marble in the oatmeal!!
- Do I get to drink from the firehose?
Bingo. We have a winner

Sometimes I forget that google is a searching engine, I've been using DDG for years now! :)

I can't say I'm liking DDG. The first page gives me the same domain links. Like when I search for "eye washing gifs", the first three links is the same website. Where I'd expect it to give me three separate websites (and combine searches).

It does that for a few searches.

But then again, I'm not even liking Google.
- DDG does have its issues like giving me random news articles from my area if it cant find anything relevant...
- have you tried searchpage or searxng? i think they use google (while searxng also use other search engines) beyond the scenes.
The best thing about ddg is that I can click on any of the result links.

In google I have to skip like the first 3 rows because they are all tracking ads and my pihole blocks them 😁
Is Bing really that much better, though?
- You can use a bang, !g , to get google results on ddg
Thanks for the suggestion. I've gotten fed up with trying to work with Google now. I've given up

Because Enshittification

I just received a Kagi invite from a friend.

It's absolutely great

Let's hope they don't look too closely at how family plans are shared for now.
10€ + taxes a month is just too steep for me

That's the one thing keeping me from joining the Kagi train
- As an alternative, you could try self-hosting searxng if you're that way inclined.

Use Mojeek

What's mojeek?
- Mojeek is the only search engine that's truly and absolutely free from the clutches of Big Tech.
  
  The links are indexed from a crawler entirely built from the ground up, making it an alternative in the true sense.
  
  Results are ranked based on input keywords alone.
  
  No shady algorithmic manipulation.
  
  No advertisements.
  
  Also includes features like dark mode, location masking.
  
  I've been using it for months. It's an absolute delight!

Don't think there's any new info in the video.

Thats subjective though...

New to who?

Here's another discussion about this.