Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

  • Tenthrow@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.

    • drphungky@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on “the best impact hammer” or “how to buy solar panels” without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

      The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.

      • livus@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah this, it’s demented.

        I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and “no further results.”

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.

      • Eidolon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

        Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.

          • csm10495@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I’m sure it’s a people circle thing.

            It’s way too easy to use Twitter and complain… it’s way to easy to use reddit … (if you use their app) and complain.

            I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.

            Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I’ve gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse… so would I get that experience here ever? Idk… but it’s a minus for me.

            Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don’t see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.

            • 🦥󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’d prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it’s currently in.

        • Hopps@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.

          Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it’s an okay vid.

          • SSTF@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My understanding is plugin is alright (I have it too), but it’s increasingly inaccurate, especially for videos uploaded after it was created. I believe it took data from YouTube before the dislikes were removed and uses that as a snapshot, then adds the thumbs up/down of users of the plugin and uses that to extrapolate trends from the very limited data it has coming in.

            The real solution would be YouTube showing the scores again, but I guess their stupid corporate videos getting BTFO was too much for them.

            • Hopps@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The plugin you are mentioning is based on dislikes and yes it is very inaccurate. The one I mentioned works off of the ratio between the likes vs the view count so the accuracy is always there, it’s a different way of going about it.

              I agree that YouTube just needs to bring the dislike count back, it’s a pain trying to find these alternative ways to know if a video is good when the data is there. It’s so greedy of them, outright harming user experience for profit.

          • Eidolon@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

            • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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              1 year ago

              Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

              You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.

              I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.

              • goetzit@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?

                • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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                  1 year ago

                  You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.

      • sacredbirdman@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Well, what caused the chase for ad-money and affiliate link clicks? Google, Amazon & other mega corps. It’s just indirect enshittification :-|

      • Hopps@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it’s been working out fairly well.

    • Captain Jimmy T Kirk@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.

      The last couple of times I’ve had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.

      If it keeps up this way, we’re going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.

  • sacredbirdman@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there’s so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that’s why they don’t see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on… So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far… and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they’ve been worse than competitors for years.

    • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I’m willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit’s only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that’s how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It’s going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.

    Google’s got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now…can’t find shit. And it’s about half its own fault.

    I’ll put right around half of the blame on “platformization.” Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn’t get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what’s there. Twitter is slightly more open…but not really.

    The other half of the problem is Google’s own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.

    That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they’ve gotten in the habit of appending “reddit” to google search strings because a. that’s where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit’s own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn’t work so well.

    So what are we keeping them around for?

    • mioko@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.

      • refugeered@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.

        https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.

        https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.

        But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.

      • httpjames@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Kagi is a premium search engine that aims to have the highest quality search results. They use algorithms to surface up more indie content, like blogs, and downrank tracker-heavy pages and blog/SEO spam. The difference between Kagi and Google is night and day.

        • SMT42@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.

          But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach

          • alejandro@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I use Kagi and never pay more than $10/mo even though I use it a lot. I think most people don’t know how much they search in a month, so the pricing can be confusing.

            I have the early adopter pro plan, which gives me extra searches (1500 instead of 1000), but for reference, I averaged 1044 searches/mo over the past 6 months (not counting this month). So if I had the standard pro plan, I’d have paid $10.66 per month on average.

            The unlimited plan seems excessive to me, unless you’re playing with the API or something like that.

      • itsJoelleScott@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.

  • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I’ll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.

  • cpt_kierk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

    In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we’ve built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn’t, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add “site:reddit.com” to the query. But if the niche communities die, that’s a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.

      So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit’s own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won’t realise this.

      • impulse@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.

        My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.

        Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.

        • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Keep checking, see what happens

          Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.

          Certainly, I’ve had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.

          But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It’s only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I’m getting info the recent ones they’ve been lingering on.

          I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they’re all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I’ll have logs to show their violation.

    • Ziro@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I’m new) smacks of the “old Internet.” I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.

  • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I didn’t realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It’s just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.

    • achensherd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.

      • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What’s even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don’t even work half the time these days.

    • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.

        • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Fuuuuuuck… Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with… “EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt… tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR”

          That’d be so damn annoying haha

  • ???@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google’s retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn’t satisfy it’s ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.

      • ???@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.

        Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match… They don’t fucking work anymore.

    • Sterben@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)

      • ???@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).

        Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn’t significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.

        • Ɀeus@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling “how to x site:reddit.com”, we’ll just fedisearch “how to x”

          in fact, i’m pretty sure i already found one but it wasn’t very good, and i’ve forgotten it’s name

  • ward2k@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error

    It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google

    • SSTF@lemmy.world
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      I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.

    • Aetina@lemmy.world
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      I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.

    • ahbi_santini@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.

      It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers

      • ward2k@lemmy.world
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        An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)

        Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause

    • JoMiran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m a beta tester for Google’s Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it’s easy to see that Google’s focus on its AI seems to be search results.

      PS: It’s also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.

      • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.

  • W6KME@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.

    • _finger_@lemmy.world
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      The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.

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      I haven’t been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it’s just stupid crap that isn’t helpful. ‘Here’s 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.’

      • Arekusenpai@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google’s attempt to be useful was to to search for “baluster” instead of “banister”. It’s a complete fucking joke.

        And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you’ve ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I’m located in the US.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          Also is it just me, or did search engines (not just Google) suddenly start disregarding quotation marks a year or so ago? I’ve been adding quotes to tell the stupid thing “no, I really did mean that weird word you think is a typo” and lately it just fucking auto-incorrects it anyway!

          • c2h6@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yea I have this problem as well. Brackets, quotes, nothing forces the search engine to ONLY return that specific term.

        • klyde@lemmy.world
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          It’s awful and it’s sad. I remember when I could find everything on there and now it’s just all garbage. I’d be pretty annoyed getting links outside the US when that’s where you live. Sure wish it was like it used to be.

      • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How to fix your tech problem:

        1. restart
        2. the same generic fix you already saw on the last 10 websites that didn’t work
        3. download our totally legit software that’s specially designed to fix this exact issue
  • amonkeyfullofbarrels@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.

    • figaro@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world’s most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn’t know I needed regarding how they all work.

      To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.

      • Risk@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not a vacuum salesman but repair man. Still active on reddit, but that’s the last AMA he did.

        I doubt vacuums have changed that much in 4 years.

      • itsnotlupus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        in the same way that infinite monkeys will replace Shakespeare, maybe.

        (this is not meant to imply that reddit posts/comments are praiseworthy works of literature. although obviously, they are.)

      • You are irrelavent@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not gonna happen at it’s current state. I really can’t wait for the “AI” trend to die. People think it’s some magical resolution when it’s really “As an AI language model 2+2=5”.

        • Nioxic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You have to have some idea as to what the answer might already be

          it doesnt provide sources etc. which is a bit annoying.

          the chatgpt “bot” in the edge browser is actually decent at providing sources, but its terrible at finding specific info. i tried finding information about what TIME a certain game would be available to play, and it just kept giving me its release date. (which i also gave it, in my query)

          but they’re still very new.

          google, and such, have had over 2 decades to refine their search etc

          i use chatgpt quite often to explain a large blob of text, in a simple manner, or give me code snippets for generic stuff im too lazy to write. test-data as well.

          • figaro@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            For simple coding it is a dream. Or like, shitty DNS errors that need to be sorted out because apparently you can’t have 2 SPF records lol. I copy and pasted all of the records over and said WHAT IS WRONG lol, and it figured it out for me.

            I get that some people don’t like it, but… its not going anywhere.

            • Hopps@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I second that, it’s been very useful for coding/debugging for me too. And the cool part is that it’s only going to get better.

        • hardypart@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          I really can’t wait for the “AI” trend to die.

          I think you vastly underestimate the impact machine learning and large language models are going to have on our society. It’s like saying “I really can’t wait for the Smartphone trend to die” in 2007. Or “I really can’t wait for the Google trend to die” in 2000.

          All aspects of our lives are going to be infiltrated by machine learning and large language models. Personal organization, work, grocery shopping, entertainment… Everything!

          • Kept7963@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The hype around it is pretty insufferable though, in a way neither of the other examples you gave had.

            The closest example I can think of is NFTs.

            I don’t think it’ll go the way of NFTs, but it’s also going to disappoint people because it’s promising to be everything for everyone.

            As far as I’m concern it’s a very powerful search assistant and especially for bridging the gap between regular and power users - being able to use natural language is a game changer.

            I also found it great when getting set up with a new piece of SW, and rephrasing or summarising text on general topics. It’s not so good for parsing specialist information even when asked for specific items.

            I’m looking forward to seeing what other tools people build with it but thus far I’ve been thoroughly… whelmed.

            • Saganastic@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Speaking from personal experience, it was obvious NFTs would go nowhere and large language models would succeed. They’ve both been hyped by the public, but one of them has the utility to back up the hype and the other doesn’t.

              I use chat gpt all the time. I use it at work, i use it for looking up recipes, I use it to help with DIY projects around the house, and I use it to just get more information about a niche topic. The results are catered specifically to me and my question, and they’re better than a search engine. This tech is only going to get more common from here.

        • Saganastic@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Machine learning is here to stay. This is really just the beginning of mass market adoption for it, there’s still a lot of room for the tech to grow.

          I really don’t think your representation is fair. For Chat gpt at least, it will sometimes be wrong, it will sometimes make things up, but is an extremely useful tool for getting quick answers and meaningful insight into questions.

          • LunarLoony@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            But if we know that it makes things up and gets things wrong, how can we trust any information it gives us? Fact-checking is one thing, but at that point, you might as well skip the LLM and just look the information up yourself.

            • Saganastic@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              At the end of the day you can’t 100% trust anything you see on the internet. You have to think critically about the answers it gives you and cross reference it against other sources. No different than when evaluating search results, which can also be wrong. But it’s a great starting point.

              It’s a lot easier to get a thorough and concise answer from chat gpt and double check it than it is to wade through a search engine.

  • shiftenter@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you’d eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I’m grateful.

    • MrGG@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’ve noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.

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        1 year ago

        Agree. Something definitely changed in the last two years. It’s unbelievably bad now, to the point where I give up if the answer isn’t among the first 3 results. It’s insane.

        • sazey@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          As others mentioned, Google just straight up ignores most of my quotes and excludes and just shows me what it wants to. Shockingly bad, I remember a time when if I couldn’t find something, it was my own failing.

          edit: this is with ad-blockers etc btw. Imagine using Google raw, must give you e-AIDS

      • notfromhere@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        I’ve noticed the degradation of google search since they introduced search suggestion completions. That is forever the timemark (landmark for time?) in my mind of the enshittification of google search.

  • Gentoo1337@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Of course they are. Adding “Reddit” at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).

    • meiti@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.

      • Trevader24135@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers

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      1 year ago

      DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it’s not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn’t going to cut it.

      Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.

      Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.

      • Restaldt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ive started going to chatgpt to help me out with errors i dont understand and google hasnt helped with

        • yokonzo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Same, it helps with a lot of issues and even skips the part where people are questioning why you even want to know that and how you’re doing it the wrong way and should do their way

        • nucleative@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yesssss, me too. And often it gets to the right response on the first try which is the ultimate timesaver. This is why Google may be toast unless they can figure out how to integrate this.

          The only caveat is that sometimes Chatgpt just hallucinates an answer or it’s incomplete, so you need a bit more dead reckoning to make sure you’re going the right way.

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I find DDG has the same garbage AI generated content as Google. Also, search operators have been broken on DDG for years

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    1 year ago

    I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.

    If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…

    • kat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.