DavidGarcia ( @DavidGarcia@feddit.nl ) 37•23 days agothis is wrong, because today you won’t find the thing you’re looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.
Steve ( @Steve@startrek.website ) 30•23 days agoAnd then you notice that your search term was “corrected” to something completely different. Looking at you too, Amazon.
1ostA5tro6yne ( @chocosoldier@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 5•23 days agoi follow a channel on youtube called yitube that’s impossible to look up because it gets corrected to youtube. it’s maddening.
fogstormberry ( @fogstormberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 3•23 days agobut this doesn’t depict results you’re looking for in “now” unless you assume it is a product search.
edit: I see the yellow is supposed to be the same result. I am ashamed
the_doktor ( @the_doktor@lemmy.zip ) 30•23 days agoStop using Google.
And Microsoft. And Apple. And Amazon. And every single corporation that cares more about money and stealing people’s privacy than serving you.
Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English16•23 days ago…like AMD and Intel and nVidia and ARM and Apple and Qualcomm?
Oh wait.
the_doktor ( @the_doktor@lemmy.zip ) 8•23 days agoYep!
It’s all trash these days. We’re having to just avoid the worst of it while preparing for the rest of it to also suck so bad that we have to find even more alternatives, and then just throw our computers away at the end or at least go back to computing where it wasn’t all about stealing data, long, long ago.
noodlejetski ( @noodlejetski@lemm.ee ) 24•23 days agoby using uBlock Origin, uBlacklist, and then something other than Google.
Queen HawlSera ( @HawlSera@lemm.ee ) English23•23 days agoI’m honestly amazed no one’s sued google over the site telling them things like “Jump off a bridge if you’re depressed” or that products have been recalled that haven’t
lauha ( @lauha@lemmy.one ) 12•23 days agoLikely settled out of court silently with an NDA
Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English21•23 days ago&udm=14 is a temporary fix for those who still feel the need to use Google’s search.
Paid search isn’t the solution, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of the CEO of Kagi search.
What I would like to see is a non-profit search.
Google wanted to organize all the world’s information to make it useful. Sounds like a great idea destroyed by a profit motive getting in the middle. Try the same idea without the profit motive and you’ll probably end up creating something people will defend endlessly, like Wikipedia.
What if your search engine asked you for a five dollar donation, once a year, the way Wikipedia does?
Search engines should be non-profit, honestly, they should be an extension of Public Libraries.
GregorGizeh ( @GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip ) 9•23 days agoI haven’t kept up on this controversy, but is this really all there is to it? People think the service is untrustworthy because the CEO tried a bit too hard to convince a critical blogger, according to the comments possibly due to neurodivergence?
meowMix2525 ( @meowMix2525@lemm.ee ) 2•23 days agoRead the blog post. I can totally see where the writer is coming from. Vlad’s email responses are pretty laughable with that added context. Not only did they tell him they weren’t interested in engaging, but the responses he sent anyways thoroughly dodged the substance of their arguments. They did their research and came to pretty reasonable conclusions, and vlad totally talked around/failed to address the points that really matter. Kinda slimy ngl.
I can also see from the highlighted discord exchanges why they weren’t interested in engaging with him further. Sure he “responds” to everything, but he doesn’t really engage with constructive criticism. Whether or not the guy is autistic isn’t really relevant to whether he can run the business competently and make sure questions are answered in an honest and transparent manner.
salarua ( @salarua@sopuli.xyz ) English20•23 days agobutlerian jihad?
FiniteBanjo ( @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ) 7•23 days agoFor the unaware, this is a scifi term which describe humans overthrowing robot overlords.
Blackmist ( @Blackmist@feddit.uk ) English12•22 days agoThat’s the neat part, you don’t.
The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.
It’s a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we’ll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.
joeljuca ( @joeljuca@lemmy.eco.br ) 10•23 days agoI’m currently prioritizing DuckDuckGo over Google and others for a better quality of search results. There ain’t much ads to mess your attention, and the results are quite good most of the time.
growsomethinggood ( @growsomethinggood@reddthat.com ) 9•23 days agoIf you need to use Google, I’d recommend the &udm=14 trick, as demonstrated on the linked site. It goes straight to a “web only” filter for search results. There are some tricks and tips to set that to your default search option in settings, or you can get a browser extension.
Lad ( @AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com ) 8•22 days agoI was (trying to) use AI to help me with something on my PC a few nights ago. It was telling me to go menus and choose options that literally don’t exist.
Wtf is going on with AI right now? About a year ago, I found it useful for certain things. But it seems to have totally shit itself recently, and is pretty much useless now.
OpenStars ( @OpenStars@discuss.online ) English7•23 days agoIt’s an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.
I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the “Don’t be evil” slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore “we” cannot “fix” this. Only they could, and only if they want.
But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to “have things”, but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.
wanderingmagus ( @wanderingmagus@lemm.ee ) 3•22 days agoSearXNG does pretty well.
There’s also an ongoing project called Yacy which is trying to make a decentralized ever-growing index, but it’s small enough right now that the results are still quite poor even when federating with other users until you spend enough time fine-tuning it, which most people don’t want or have time to do.
OpenStars ( @OpenStars@discuss.online ) English2•22 days agoThat’s neat - though I would worry that it could get polluted easily, e.g. China, Russia, and/or fascists everywhere would very much like to control the conversation, so as it got a wider userbase that would be the time for it to cease functioning, whereas before that it could be allowed as something to occupy our time. So much of our daily lives are impacted by such geopolitics that we don’t even/often think of.
I hope that we (people writing FOSS) can explore the concept of voting more - e.g. how wikipedia does its edits with “trust actors”, similarly the Fediverse (& searching) could have a much wider pool of trusted community mods (or potentially a lesser category of that, lacking full post-removal capability as current ones do) where mods could vote and once something went below a certain threshold (e.g. 5x more down- than up-votes from such community curators), then a flag could go up like “this post has been marked as containing potential misinformation - are you sure that you would like to read it?” By distributing the load like that, it could help make this place MUCH more active, by lowering the barrier to moderation as it conjoins normal reading activities with a very simple button bush for most people. (and then a higher category of mods can double-check the curator mods, etc.)
On the other hand, authoritarian developers are unlikely to want to extend the Lemmy code along those lines, and rather go the opposite direction so that anytime someone says something even the slightest bit against their party line, boop the person becomes insta-banned in every single community that they have ever interacted in, even if never having commented but solely voted in them (I am not exaggerating this up - for one see the notes for the upcoming v0.19.4 release allowing this capability, and multiple recent threads discussing how this has already happened to numerous people - e.g. here is one excellent accounting of that process).
So anyway, if someone is willing to build a good system, then the people do seem willing to take it forward - e.g. see how many have already done so to Google Maps with all the reviews & pics including menus & such to share with everyone. But ofc there will be resistance to now doing that again for somewhere else, and perhaps still yet again if that one fails, and so on in perpetuity.:-(
wanderingmagus ( @wanderingmagus@lemm.ee ) 3•22 days agoSeems like you’re trying to address systemic problems of learned human nature at this point, which is something that can’t really be done through software alone. There needs to be a fundamental culture shift for that. Yacy is mostly good because it’s self-hosted with the option to federate to a decentralized index, and so is able to be tailored to your own needs without any external entity. However, the tailoring process means that the initial search results are absolutely atrocious compared even to Google at first, and then get much better over time. SearXNG, on the other hand, is a sort of self-hosted aggregator of search results from dozens of other search engines, rather than being a search engine in itself. It also serves as a proxy, since it is doing the searching and not you.
OpenStars ( @OpenStars@discuss.online ) English2•22 days agoComplex problems will not be solved overnight, it’s true, but we can get there one step at a time!:-)
phoenixz ( @phoenixz@lemmy.ca ) 6•22 days agoBeen like this for years now, I jumped ship 4 years ago to DuckDuckGo, might even jump that ship if it gets any worse, but alternatives…
Localhorst86 ( @Localhorst86@feddit.de ) Deutsch4•22 days agoI tried using DDG for about 3 months, until I had to ditch it. I want to use it, but its results are even worse than Googles.
While on Google I might have to scroll past the ads, sponsored links and obvious AI blog results, the first page will usually at least contain a relevant result somewhere, whereas DDG simply doesn’t bother to show any relevant results at all. Even on it’s first page, it will stray far from the actual search term.
Hossenfeffer ( @Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk ) English6•21 days agoSame with visiting almost any website.
Then
- Click on link to website.
- Read website.
Now
- Click on link to website.
- Click on Cookie options.
- Scroll down looking for ‘Reject All’.
- Discover there is no ‘Reject All’.
- Scroll back through list turning off all optional cookies.
- Scroll back to the bottom to click on ‘Confirm my choices’.
- Hunt for the close X on the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ pop-up.
- Click on the close X on the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ pop-up.
- Read the website.
- Discover the website is just more AI generated SEO garbage.
- Go outside, walk on the grass barefoot, weep for the future of humanity.
Gestrid ( @Gestrid@lemmy.ca ) English5•22 days agoI just subscribed to Kagi to try it out.
nameisnotimportant ( @nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml ) English3•21 days agoGreat! Everyone should try the free tier just to have a look at alternatives. To be honest after a few weeks and several specific searches I’m not ready to do the switch though.
thepaperpilot ( @thepaperpilot@incremental.social ) 5•23 days agoI’ve recently found out about https://search.marginalia.nu and want to start using it.