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Google originally made a name for itself as a great search engine - but has it gotten markedly worse?
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All of my searches are now filled with ai generated articles which are useless for information...
Not to mention blatantly wrong and made up information. I often search programming info and half the time it just makes crap up.
@@BC-ji9xr I've encoutered that so many times now it really frustrating
The advantage of GAI is that you can make some basic images of your weird DnD character for free. The disadvantage is that it is permanently destroying humanity's ability to perceive reality with any level of indirection.
@@BC-ji9xrJust chatgpt articles written by Indians for a few cents
@@GrigRP All we need is for google to be able to detect (maybe via user flagging) and ban such websites from the search engine. If such website will be moved permanently to the end of search results it will solve the problem. Without users sooner or later they will run out of money.
"why haven't they fixed the problem? We'll tell you after this message from our sponsor" I think you already answered it unintentionally. If it ain't sponsored, we ain't telling you /giving you what you searched for! There you have it
Sad but true. Money talks, the rest will never be heard by anybody.
Yeah, that's why free search engine sucks ass, try Kagi instead. It's not free thankfully.
As soon as that happened, I remember this is the Linus Network, and what a bad name he has as far as greed. Until then I was thinking of this as his channel, which is how LInus wanted it
I’d still argue that the hyper competitive field of search engine optimization plays a bigger role currently. The goal of a cooperation is to be juuust bad enough that they can squeeze more money out of you without being so bad that you leave them for a competitor. Having genuinely unhelpful search results is a bad look but they are essentially the retail workers getting trampled by customers on black Friday. There is no way they can control the chaos cause everyone is fighting to get their garbage article to the top of the page and everyone is figuring out how to game the system as quickly as Google can make changes. I agree the problem is people trying to make money, but google is only a small piece of that problem.
The problem isn't search engines, or AI. It's business and f_r33 m@rk3t ideology. This is just the "natural" course of things.
Can we talk about KZhead and its HORRENDOUS search quality. That can't always be SPAM when it literally says "videos you might like" after barely showing 4 videos I wanted to search for. Why is that thing even there when I am trying to search for something very specific!
I hate that with a violent passion
I just saw a useful hack from a comment I saw on another video! It's still not perfect with showing only the most relevant videos, but if you put "before:2025" before your search (without the quotes and add a space of course) it will cut out the "videos you might like" and "for you" search results. The 2025 is just to show all videos from all years, but you can put in a different year to cut down the results
And the rolling recommendations you basically end up infinity scrolling a loop of videos you're not interested in. Surely there are more than 15 random videos you can recommend😂😂😂😂
@@littlekirby6 YOU ARE A HERO
prodz I think it was, did a video about this.
The loss of pretty much all Forum data, in search results, killed the search engine
Just use the forums lens
@@damnkris It just use to be there by default, and was the best info... Then it became the "discussions" tab and now it's just garbage.
@@damnkrisThey also seem to be killing off the "lenses". It used to be that you had "shopping" and "maps" there to easily switch to where you wanted to go, now it's almost as random and pointless as the "similar questions" field.
I mean, I still get a ton of stackoverflow data
I'm talking lenses in Kagi ofc. Google sucks, why would you use that?
not just search engines, youtube search itself has become unusable
yes I can't find anything related to what I type in the search bar
On youtube I think search is still working fine-ish, but related videos section is total garbage. I remember in 2010 I was able to get a song I like and find 20 new songs just by clicking first 3 similar videos. Today I am lucky to get one within first 30 similar videos.
@@hubertnnnsometimes youtube search breaks and when you look something up, it doesn’t bring back any results, it brings up videos you’ve recently watched or videos in your playlists.
@@hubertnnnnah you do a search and you get 5 results or so then the rest of it is just suggested videos for you. Like if I search for MOSFET gate drive resistor I'll get a few of those but then it's all rockets and of road recovery videos that I watch for fun.
I don't even have anything on the homepage anymore. Apparently opting out of watch history to avoid feeding their ad machine == no suggestions at all.
Query: "What's 2+2?" Number 1 search result: *click* "The number 2 has been discovered..." *skip to next paragraph* "Before math was invented..." *skip to next paragraph* "There are many programs to help you solve the equation, such as (sponsored content)..." *skip to the last paragraph* "... we don't really know what 2+2 is."
%100 facts
2 + 2 = 5
Yep. They put a large article to answer a simple question.
Yep rewarding the SEO hustler spammer on some beach with his laptop with 50 sites to maximize profits with "content" with the most word salad and "ranking".
The worst problem is that google no longer uses the search modifiers (like "" and - ) as strict requirements, they're merely suggestions.
I also noticed this. I do a lot of research and rely heavily on technical documentation in PDF format. Using "filetype:pdf" was the best thing ever but recently they stopped supporting it, and, like you said, interprets it as just a suggestion. The first few results may be actual PDF files but the rest are usually just auto-generated HTML pages or those websites that pretend they're a PDF viewer but are torturous to navigate around just to make money from other people''s PDF files.
I thought I noticed this! Definitely less effective nowadays.
Some of it is because the amount of stuff being indexed is so large, and some of it is that they've decided they can make more money by pushing people towards stuff that they think you want, rather than what you're asking for and then using that for targeted advertising.
There's also the obnoxious situation where a strict search term appears in the HTML but not in the actual displayed text. It's a few years old now so things might have changed, but I remember a google engineer *swearing* that the strict search does work... it just might not look like it does because sites will stuff things into the cataloged text that will never be shown to a browser.
Boolean search engine i believe its called.
having to exclude 40 to 50 sites via advanced searches is a pain in the butt
Less obscure a topic is the worse it is like average job sallaries has like 40+ bad actors to the extent that I hit the advanced site exclude limit and still couldnt find a good reputable result
Don’t use search engines. Use LLMs
I wish it was easier to just straight up blacklist entire domain in google from results. Similar how KZhead allows to "Do not recommend this channel" in a single click.
@@jagdkrabbe7478Pinterest would be on the top of the list
Searching anything related to Python is atrocious. All I want is either the official docs or a stackoverflow page, not CodingBootcampTutorialsForDataMLAIDummies expanding 5 sentences into a novel.
Pre-2010, you used to be able to find almost anything online! It was literally amazing the answers and data at your fingertips. Every year since, it’s gotten more and more restrictive and less accurate returns for searches.
Search engine optimization is probably part of the issue. I got seriously tired of quora and expert sexchange showing up on the first page of every search without there being anything relevant and there wasn't any way of just saying that I don't consider those suggestions to be useful the way that I can on KZhead. Also, not enforcing the rules that the bit being indexed has to be actually accessible to people that click the link without logging in is another serious issue.
Yandex does that. Google has meddled with the natural human-input search formula with political bias, cutting off what THEY think is not right, and now even worse... AI cancer, which does NOT add intelligence.
big tech wants to turn us all into idiot consumers that don't question or criticize anything as they put price tags on everything. They are manipulative and evil and need to be seriously regulated if we do not want them destroying any remaining vestige of community or humanity.
Google nerfed their search 15 years ago, when they silently disabled most advanced search operators. You used to be able to do "GPU +review -buy" and you'd get GPU reviews but no random GPU stuff and no crap from stores, online sellers, resellers, etc. Not anymore!
I still throw in plusses and minuses sometimes, cargo cult-style. If the operator gods brought good search results to my ancestors then surely one day they shall do so for my descendants. I just need to perform the rituals and be patient. Any day now...
"tools" -> "all results" dropdown -> "verbatim" helps but it still isn't what it used to be.
Did they remove that stuff? I recall recently searching for something along the lines of "game name -subtitle-" and couldn't hit any results because the - in the subtitle was causing google to filter out the game page.
Quotes now do what + did and - still seems to work?
Ironically struggling to find an article I read a few years ago with (EFF? Mozilla?) quoted discussing this. Whoever wrote the article spoke with others who found it's not that Google disabled +/- options, it's that there's an unremovable by the user '+SPONSOR +BRAND +CURRENT HOT SELLING CATEGORY' (obviously with specifics) added to every search. If I remember right, they said the added terms are somewhat randomized so a search for "best phone case" might actually get searched as "best phone case +Amazon +Samsung +kids gloves" and so on.
I hate when I search something on YT and theres 20 seconds of scrolling past recommended videos to get to my search results. Thats infuriating!
Damn, it happend to me too, honestly youtube serach engine is way worse than google cuz the reason you mentioned, i notice this when listening music, it is irritating they mix the search result with videos with completely different title that not related to what i am looking for
if you you get ublock , not only does it block youtube ads, but you can also add a custom filter that removes those recommendations etc coming up in the search results.
@@ratgreen good to know, mixing search result and recommendation it stupid as f**k, home page and recommendation page is there for a reason
Whenever I search for something I get 10 videos related to what I searched for and the rest is just KZhead’s FYP. Completely useless. I end up using Google to find the KZhead videos I’m looking for…
type 'Before:2025' at the beginning of whatever you're searching. should help filter out some of it
The biggest problem I have with search engines is how they automatically omit some of my words and even quotes and adding pluses don't include the word they omit.
I think google removed support for quotations last year.
Yeah that whole none of the words you searched for are in this page but here it is anyway probably made some people feel really smart like they had got that you were searching for general concepts and how cool is that. Terrible shame that it's really friggin useless when I'm looking for the actual thing I'm looking for not some touchy feely crap
I have no clue what you're talking about because quotes work fine for me. I use em all the time.
@@zyeborm Yes, this. I'm looking specifically for those 3 words. Thank you very much, I don't need 252 thousand websites that contain only one or none of them and something totally unrelated.
also what if you want an encyclopedia of holocaust debunk narratives? I have to use a paperback.. at least the indexing is good
It all began when Google began omitting forum posts from search results.
I don't think they really stopped forum results so much as the forums died Why does Google suck? Facebook mostly lol
@@zyeborm Care to explain? What does Facebook have to do with it?
@@mehowmeI think hes implying people no longer use forums and instead use facebook groups. Which is true. But its also because google prioritizes SEO results. Which a forum post wont be, so will come wayyyy behind all the spammy results. Its a double wammy, info posted behind specific groups in fb, and google SEO killing legitimate information coming up organically in the results has killed it.
@@ratgreenso how do you actually find the helpful forum results? Because I can't find them no matter how many of the initial search results I skip. And usually when I skip the 1st couple search results pages, it eventually tends to repeat the results from page 1 and onwards. This happens with many things, whether it's products, services, or information. Does it make a difference what device you use too? No longer have a computer and money issues, so I am forced to use android smartphone
@@zyeborm people stopped using forums often because they can't even find them or know they exist
It all went down hill in 2018. That's when I remember it starting to SUCK. All "top 10" type websites started to be the top search results.
I might agree. At least in 2015 I was searching for a lot of stuff and was getting relevant results, and as covid started (2020) most search results were propaganda, ads and garbage. So it went downhill somewhere between 2015 and 2020.
I would say 2016. The rise of mobile devices to the masses and 4G network transformed the Internet into a giant pile of ads and "trends".
@@ZorMon The reason it went downhill in 2016 was because that's when massive political censorship of search results started, because orange man bad.
@@256shadesofgreythat's exactly it.
@@-eternal Google dereferenced 90% of the internet for political censorship. We know that's called algorithmic fairness thanks to whistleblower Zach Vohries and god forbid you'd want to search anything related to this. I only use Yandex because they never did mass censorship, and it still feels like the internet.
the decline in wikipedia might also be due to the fact i just append "wiki" to my searches to do that now if wikipedia doesn't actually show up automatically.
yep
Late stage capitalism is shoving the little guys to the side. 2015 was a better year for technology in general, plus Wikipedia appeared at the top of most results.
Tried to find something on my phone: first 3 results all looked like the same website/information but reskinned, and when the cookie thing popped up it didn't even work. Finding stuff on phones especially is an absolute pain these days
Sometimes, when doing homework for a college course, I'll Google something that the book doesn't explain well. But then every result is a pay wall.
chatGPT replaced search for me.
Google has stopped asking "do you mean" and now just straight up gives you whatever it thinks you mean. The fact that I more and more have to use quotation searches to get where I need to go is a worrying trend. Unfortunately most other search engines suck ass so what are you gonna do 🤷♂️
KZhead to. If i search something it ignores half of what i type. Also when i search a subject that is controversial i only get news outlets if i put behind the search before:2025 and then on recent it shows legit the most recent stuff from random channels. But it also feels that starts to break.
That's the main reason why I stopped using Google. I was using Bing for a while and it was downright embarrassing how Bing was at least as good as Google was at that point.
Most interesting info I got from this video is that an adult site is above Amazon in web rankings. That's really something.
Duhhh.
cute cat
@@gus473 don't be cringe. You can easily go check for yourself.
Meow 😅 next time type pussycat instead.
@@gus473 3:23
I’ve consistently found that when searching for a specific model of some older product (which I’ve been doing a lot of lately for a personal 3D modeling project) and go to images, all I get is product listings, most of which is only loosely related to what I was searching for
Google search results is now filled with AI generated useless articles instead of user generated content, which is bad.
Yes Google needs AI to recognize AI spam. AI arms race has already begun, but Google hasn't entered that race yet.
@@QoraxAudiorecognise it? they have. they're one of the parties responsible for putting it there. like their "related questions" thing
EXACTLY!!
The searches would improve if we could (once again?) flag bad results. So many times I've ran a search, only to find half the first page are dead sites or someone that's barfed WAY too much into their keywords/search terms so they show up on any and every search but aren't remotely related.
I'd love to have the option to just list certain sites as not acceptable the way that I can list certain YT channels as not to be recommended. It would have the added benefit of using a lot fewer resources as ignoring an entire domain means that none of the stuff in it needs to be checked against and presumably, the indexing is being done on a site by site basis anyways.
what i currently hate the most is just googling a adress, a few months ago after typing in a adress you been able to click the map and look around,zoom in, etc... now it just shows almost a static jpg, even worse there is no map header button which would forward you to google maps with your searched adress or term... change for the sake of change, thanks google
hahaha what the hell man I hate this static Jpeg like wtf am I supposed to do with that shit
man, i thought this was only me, sometimes i get the button to get directions so i just use that now, very annoying though
yeah, google seems determined to kill all of the good stuff they once had. google maps is barely holding its place as the last good thing.
Hell yeah, annoying as f. Just make a link to maps... like it was...
@@DomanStuff2022 they said its for your own good tho
For sure, Google has been going down hill since 2016 or so.
But they/them are so inclusive and diverse, that's waaay more important
Not to bring politics into it, but politics played a HUGE role in it, and 2020 just made it a ton worse. Google realized they had the power to promote/suppress information as they pleased, and they (and various world governments) used that to their advantage. I mean, regardless of you opinion on the pandemic, but if you searched for something that wasn’t “establishment approved”, it would be buried beneath layers of the exact opposite information. And, if you think they limited it to just that specific category of information, you’re fooling yourself. It has slowly expanded into everything. Any search dealing with any social/political topic has thoroughly scrubbed results, and it has been proven by numerous studies.
@@nathan1sixteen yea its a mix of politics and greed
The Internet censorship since 2016 has been terrible. I noticed it everywhere and I'm not even in America lol. It's pretty much made the Internet a place for babies instead of nerds and gamers and I hate it now lol
Introduction of SEO has been the main issue AFAIK.
It's got pretty bad recently, I realised I've almost stopped looking things up online, it's like the pre internet days. I'll just assume I can't find the info and unless I care enough to find a reference book in the library then I don't bother. I feel kind of okay about it.
This. I grew up without the internet. It got popular when I was in highschool and it was amazing. I used to be excited about looking stuff up. I could spend hours reading on a subject. I loved it. Now, I dread every time I have to google anything. I hate how useless the internet has become.
@@mehowme similar yeah
With a lot of e-commerse in Indonesia like Tokopedia, Shopee, etc: Now if I want to search the drive update, firmware update, spec, etc of a product mostly google display the url from marketplace where many people sell the product.
because everything is getting worse
This. Honestly. What is getting better? Cars selling above MSRP and homes going for 2x what they we were 10 years ago is "better", apparently.
Not you. You are getting better.
"aNd WhY tHaTs A gOoD tHiNg"
The issue is that we are having more and more managers and less and less employees, especially experienced employees.
@@seeker_of_knowlage3568🗿
The worst thing recently has been googling the name of a city close to me or a place, having no maps tab show up and no way to get directions for it in a rapid way. Before I would just type the name of a place and click on the maps tab
sounds like you should plan your route before hand...
I noticed that too. The tabs are just completely nonsensical now.
Are you in the EU region? This could be because of the new DMA mandate.
@@imdnxtI'm not in the EU, I'm in Oceania, and I've experienced similar things regarding Maps not showing app.
Sounds like you're the kind of user google is catering too, with all of its widgets and dumbing things down. If you want directions, go to maps.google.com, open street maps, etc, not a search engine.
Semi related, I switched back to using physical cookbooks because online recipe sites are almost unusable. Not only is every one of them plastered with ads and pop-ups, you have to read a novella about the history of the recipe before reading an, often improperly formatted, set of ingredients and instructions.
It's the same with Google Assistant and Alexa too - you used to get a relevant answer from a decent source, but now 90% of the time I just get unreleated crap. So annoying.
I feel like that’s because those devices just scrape info from whatever the top search result is
honestly it feels like the entire internet is just like some sort of ghost like it doesent feel as alive as it once did
bring back Ask Jeeves
It has gotten that bad....where we asking for Jeeves.....
it was bad but still better than the current google
I remember when searching was reading articles and go from article to article and blogs that doesn't try to sell you anything and based of how much people read this article nowadays it's all punch of ads hiding in an article form trying to answer your question by just selling you the damn stuff or program that they sell
Looking for genuine reviews was easy in the past, especially CNET . Now they are all review aggregators from Amazon with monetized Links. Booooo 😡
Yeah, they are getting worse
No, it's getting better. Search hasn't been this good since the period between 2005-2011, Google was good then. Now Google is outdated, the ones in the know use paid search engines.
@@damnkris I am talking of course about Google, not paid SE
@@damnkrislike what ? With Google, Looking for genuine reviews was easy in the past, especially CNET . Now they are all review aggregators from Amazon with monetized Links. 😡
You know what's gotten worse? Google friggin Assistant. They're all over my house and they've gone from very handy to downright burdensome in the last few years. I want a deep dive video on THAT. Most of the time, they dont pick up our activation word anymore. They ocasionally forget our connected accounts, but will miraculously remember again the second or third time you ask the same question. My daughter's room light can only be turned on if you spell her name (I guess because we spell it Elinor instead of Eleanor?), but Google pronounces it fine. It randomly sets and then forgets alarms and timers. Just such hot garbage...
Contextual search was a big thing when Google launched " Google NOW" . THE HOT WORD used to be "okay Google now". With the launch of pixel after 2016 they tried to rebrand and bam - now it has to relearn those features ? ? I never understood why Google keeps relaunching these products that were at some point perfectly capable in the past.
Dude, have you REALLY installed that crap in your home, it's spying devices harvesting your data man, come on, I mean, are you not aware of that?
but we all can agree on that the youtube search function is absolute useless now
I worked in SEO for years. Google started heavily messing with their algorithm after 2016. Make of that what you will.
It’s no mystery. I mean, you literally heard political groups calling for social media companies and search engines to be “held accountable” for allowing “dangerous rhetoric” by the evil orange man to spread. They didn’t even try and hide it. They said Trump won because “Russian actors bought 100,000 Facebook ads” or some BS. Then there were the stories about Google execs being butthurt over the election results, and you end up when you are today, where they intentionally broke their product to protect their political interests. And, I don’t even care how you feel about Trump personally, but when you allow politics to start playing a role in how information is filtered before it gets to you, it will only ever end up with you getting no useful information, regardless of which side is doing it. Oh, and the whole “disinformation campaign” in 2020 in regards to the pandemic only made it worse, as then governments were SUPER involved with tech companies about cracking down on non-establishment opinions. That’s also when “fact checks” started popping up on everything remotely related to political/social topics, even on KZhead videos.
Imagine an option not to show eshops, when searching for technical question with an item.
Hmm, this reaction seems to produce a gas as byproduct that needs to be neutralized. Let's Google how that gas is usually dealt with in similar situations. * Googles using various different search terms * Online stores Ads Promoted content Totally unrelated results Hmm, strange, is Google becoming worse? "No you just suck at Googling stuff" Well, guess it wasn't my Google-fu that suddenly vanished. It's Google that slowly became worse. Although Google sucks compared to say... a decade ago or so, I haven't found a search engine that yields better results. Nowadays I just have to refine my search about a dozen times and, if that doesn't help, I can use AI to help me find answers. By now I'd honestly pay for the old Google, or even for use of an ad-free internet. Can we like separate the internet into a part that is corrupted by greed, and a part that is exclusively reserved for work? (so basically a STEM internet for productivity and a junk internet for leisure - although I would prefer above all that the internet wouldn't become junk but we're already past that I suppose...)
its like IKEA, they make you walk a maze of things you dont want or need untill you get to the section you are looking for.
Irs not just that the search results are worse, you used to be able to do advanced search options like putting a minus sign to remove searches that were not relevant or putting quotation markers so that you only got results with that exact wording. But if you do that now the results are all the same and the first 10 results are always ads
I rebuilt my computer last summer, and oh my god it really is impossible to search for any useful tech debugging/help anymore. I was about to make a new thread to ask for help on the LTT forums, but my anxiety of being a new user and immediately asking for help beat me.
always ask.
If affiliate link programs were outlawed, a huge amount of trash pages would vanish quickly.
I've been arguing that this has been an issue since 2021 for very niche topics, especially regarding old content from websites and blogs made in the 2000's and early 2010's. Before, looking up information and pictures on a specific Portuguese train was very straight forward. Nowadays it's painful or downright impossible, because: 1 - Search engines completely disregard old content. Any recent news or reuse of a word completely destroys old, but correct, search results; 2 - Many websites have opted-out of being combed by search engines, and a lot of newer content is behind gated services that force you to rely on their internal search engine, or are downright closed to non-registered users; 3 - Image hosting websites and forums have been dying left and right by successive waves of newer and more compelling social networks and chat rooms. All of that content is then lost to time.
you can filter results by dates on some search engines
Straight up searches suck. KZhead in particular has become horrible.
So to sum up, search engines nowadays have become places you type search topics in vain only to get advertised at.
Who's gonna tell them that Google hasn't had 'search pages' for a while now? It just keeps scrolling instead of hitting you with the 'next page?'
Use a Tamper Monkey script. It can give you the pagination numbers again. Not sure how to explain it here. I also have an add-on that gets rid of YT shorts.
I just want a good search engine for market research which aren't all paywalled or has actual good info
There's no competition in the search industry. Google is a virtual monopoly in search .
probably because all of the other search engines are just as bad or worse in most cases
Only in US and EU.
@sogerc1 nah.. I'm not in the EU or us but everyone uses google search, other alternatives is bad and a handful of them is straight up garbage
@@axld_eas Yeah, I probably left out several regions. For some reason I thought Indians used something else, you know, a big market, but looks like they also use google. I used duckduckgo for a while, as quality it seemed pretty on par, but it was slower especially if you put it as chromium homepage.
Yeah, because all of the other search engines suck even more than Google, lol.
I have been noticing this for a while, it has been getting increasing difficult to get good results from all of the search engines. The decline has been really bad in the last couple of years and seems to be accelerating as AI gets better. Now many of the top results for anything I search for are completely AI generated and frequently contain completely wrong or conflicting information. I have been trying to start a home garden and gardening info is extremely bad, basically anything that is not from a university or a personal blog is AI generated now with extremely wrong information.
Years ago, I noticed that streaming was becoming an even more expensive version of cable. People got upset paying $50 a month for 500 channels where most of them were never watched at all, and begged for an "a la carte" version. Well, that's what streaming is. Now, instead of paying $50/mo for 450 unwatched channels, people are paying $75-100/mo for the channels they do watch on occasion.
Not having ads is god tier
@@MrAw3sum I remember back in the days when cable was new - it didn't have ads either. Just wait. Give it maybe 5 years...ok, I'll make my prediction easy to remember: By 2030, streaming will have as many ads as cable does today.
They ARE getting worse, and are purposely designed to be worse, and don’t even get me started on how great Google Image Search used to be and how purposefully terrible it has become
Jeeves never let us down, what a legend he was
Such a gentleman.
my job is actually rating search engine results at google. And I have to admit, it feels like most raters just click anything by chance and don't actually look into anything
What, in your opinion is the best search engine?
More to the point - why can't Outlook and Sharepoint produce relevant results when even Bing can deliver somewhat relevant results?
google is useless now, we need a new search engine, like google was to yahoo we need a new youtube and facebook too.
No, Google just needs to get rid of the garbage filtering algorithm that they implemented like 5-7 years ago which has just gotten increasingly more and more garbage as time has passed, and simply give people the actual results they want. Honestly, the clearly labeled “sponsor” and “ad” pages don’t bother me, it’s the completely unrelated search results that I get. And, if you’re searching for something that Google finds remotely controversial, and you happen to be on the opposite of what Google wants you to think/believe, good luck. You have to basically nail article titles if you want any chance of finding what you’re looking for.
No, we don't need a new facebook. We don't need a facebook of any sort at all!
@@QoraxAudio true
I mostly just want a way to do a search but limit the results to only one result from a webpage. If I'm only going to have 400 results I want a wider range not 100 from the same site.
If Quora doesn't have what you wanted... maybe Quora can help (P.S. Google please limit these paywalled sites, it's better for your Adsense anyway)
Please also include possible things that we as users can do to improve your experience. Don't just state the Problem offer a "Solution". Maby using an alternative Search engine? I really struggle with this Problem and would love some advice. Thx for the Vid
Search engine? AD engine 🙂 It’s like the web back in the 90’s filled with ADs. Wait! Wasn’t that why we went to Google to begin with 🤔🤨
Half the time I have to bypass page 1 (and sometimes also 2!) of Google results to get to anything useful. Total bummer.
@@captante9889 Yeah. That’s very true 🤔 I just automatically scroll as soon as the search comes up because it’s all Ads upfront 🤷♂️
KZhead's search function has been doing stupid stuff for a while. 2 days ago out for a walk I searched "trapped under ice metallica" and the first video is an unofficial upload, with the official metallica channel's album version upload nowhere to be found until I filter for HD videos at which point it is surprisingly the first result. Everything else is either unofficial uploads, covers, playlists, and live plays. Though that's just one problem, because sometimes youtube likes to put irrelevant videos in the search results. Like world news from channels I have watched appearing in a search for something from a video game.
Great video James. Very informative. Keep up the great work everyone!
Not only are general search engines filled with generated nonsense, but Google Scholar also shows irrelevant papers since universities need to publish as many papers as they can.
It would help search quality already immensely, if Google et al would deliver search results based on what I actually entered! But nope, most of the time they show me something that sounds similar, ignores additional keywords that give context restrictions, or just plain show whatever they want!
I've found that clearing cookies/cache helps sometimes.
Google used to understand and provide articles that were relevant, but now it looks at a few words and everything else about the query/question is ignored.
That's true...if I search for something technical, I have to list through 3 pages of e-shops first and then maybe I get something useful...but sometimes it just ends with the e-shops...
Duckduckgo always finds the corn I want
Because DuckDuckGo simply gives you search results, they don’t filter it through a highly politically/socially/monetarily incentivized algorithm that gets rid of all the useful information you’re looking for and instead pushes whatever Google and its friends want you to see
Just know that it's not a privet search engine anymore and hasn't been for years.
I tried using ddg aswell, been using it for 4 months now, but it increasingly stopped working properly. The more I searched the more I noticed that after 3-5 results it just straight up does the same dumbfoolery as Google and just assume random shit from arbitrary words of my search.
The real issue with search engines and with big companies like Google or MS is that for the most part they will use their monopolistic position of power to basically - censor things they think are improper and remove them from search results (regardless of the things being improper or harmful or not). This is already happening and it is very hard to find certain stuff that was showing up on search results in the past not so long ago. What I am also worried about is the recent Google Gemini "historical photo" incident that clearly shows that big corporations do have some bias. And that bias will be present in the search results, filtering out what is not consistent with their ideology / doctrine.
The other day I was trying to find picture of the older version of one road sign. In particular green "right turn on red allowed" arrow before it stopped being painted on a metal plate and became a traffic light. According to google it never existed. All results were giving me answer to an unasked question if I have to stop car before turning right on red.
Try searching by date now, cant reverse search in a date range the operators are broken. Used to have a proper search between option where you would indeed only find stuff in that range.
google used to work great but these days bing is much better :( sucks but it is what it is
Google doesn’t want to fix seo spam because it will hurt their internal metrics. It won’t change
This is a subject that impacts everyone. But at the same time it is complex and has many roots. The fact that you guys managed to summarize it so clearly, with simplicity and many evidences is amazing!
the widgets themselves i actually like as i get information about topics i search for without having to find the "right" link. as for ads, i hate when they put the ads where i ought to be seeing search results
If you scroll far enough under this video, this video is being recommended by this video.
Well, it does actually. Fair enough
Tbh I kinda already got used to all these AI generated pages that shove as many target keywords into their content as possible. For some reason (I assume laziness) all these websites have similar UIs, so whenever I see them I just "nope, gtfo"
Google being "vertically integrated" and basically being all things to all people reminds me of Wal-Mart - if there's a real-life thing you need, you can probably get it at Wal-Mart, from furniture to groceries to medication... and I'll wager it won't be long until you can get medical treatment there too at this rate.(Thirty years? Who knows... it'll probably happen!)
Nowadays, I rarely use google search without adding search operators unless I'm converting a currency or a unit or searching by images The one I use the most is the quotation marks to look for a specific word or phrase
The Control of Human's via Search engines - do SUCK...
This, right here. Google realized like 5-7ish years ago that they could control public opinion by controlling what people found in search results. Everyone knows that if it’s not in the first page of Google, it doesn’t exist, so fill that first page with whatever narrative/information Google wants you to find and stick the rest of it on pages 2-1000. This became PAINFULLY obvious during the pandemic, but it was promoted as “combating disinformation” and “saving lives”.
It doesn't suck with Kagi. Kagi has a major pro over others, it's not free. That way they get more money the better search experience they deliver, not the more ads they show you.
Kagi is the exact same.
I agree - Kagi has pretty great search results, especially compared to the big ones like google and bing
Very informative - Well done, James 👌
I'm only three minutes in and I'm already learning so much. This video is superb, thank you!
Because they have all been made into the governments allowed editions
I think it's because Google and others engage in TOKENISM recently, when hiring personnel. also known as "affirmative action hiring".
I've noticed a lot of times if you put too much information into the search it locks on to like two of the words and that's all you get but those are the two words that were the least important I'm talking about like if you say what is the meaning of something it will lock on to what meaning and try to tell you the meaning of the word what completely ignore the rest of the search
Google is now more of a navigation tab i use to get to some websites I know and it has been mostly replaced by chat gpt when i try to get information about something (and thats dangerous because sometimes Chat GPT fumbles it but it is SO MUCH comfortable).
Simple solution - allow users to rate websites and articles. Google owns both a search engine and a web browser so it should be easy for them to integrate such system. Add 4 icons: useful, garbage, clickbait, report and keep track of how many times each website/article/product was marked as each. Good luck with bots gaming a few billion users rating every website they use, especially since mad people are more likely to thumbs down something.
don't underestimate the bots
I think Kagi does something like this. You can at least downrank sites in your own results, and see what most people are down/up ranking, but I’m not sure if they use that to train their system overall. Downside is it’s not free, but that also aligns their motivation with their users instead of advertisers so it’s an upside too.
Hey can I interest you in buying my ai driven site ranking tool? You can use it to give your site good ratings and trash your competitors. Only $50 a month per licence. I hear your competitor bought 2 licences perhaps you want 3?
@@pepinlebref7585 The only way for bots to circumvent this system would be by generating actually useful articles, and at that point I wouldn't even be mad.
Google have gotten worser. Bing have gotten better.
Bing is still a fucking joke
@@morenauer No it is not.
@@saulgoodman2018 Bing is 10000000% garbage. Google is horrible but at least I kind of get relevant results when making searches. Bing barely gives anything relevant back and the search page is constantly shoving the horrible AI into my face.
@@michaelsilver5862 Bing is not garbage.
It is genuinely baffling how bad it is now. The other day i googled "pain around waistline when coughing" and all of the results were along the lines of "how to deal with lower back pain when coughing" which was not what i asked at all
You didn't talk about how Google manipulates the results base on their political biases. And you didn't mention Perplexity AI, which is a new way of search that could be a good alternative to Google and is growing a lot.
ChatGPT does often a better job. I don’t like it. But here we are.
Yeah, I find myself using it instead of Google depressingly often these days. I even ask it to search for stuff for me now.
Ublock Origin for the win!
Ublock* learn to spell
It's ublock
@@CanadianBakin42O why tho?
@@CanadianBakin42Oconsider indica or stronger medication
@@CanadianBakin42O I believe the correct spelling is "Underoos Block"
I just wish they would stop randomly replacing or ignoring my search terms. For example, when looking up software with a name similar to a common word, I tell it to exclude the common word, but pages related to the common word still fucking show up in my results! There needs to be a checkbox for a feature called "Stop trying to fucking guess what I want and just index the god damned pages with the terms I gave you." You can leave the feature off by default, even!
Would be cool to have some sort of local search engine. I would imagine some sort of community driven github project that is essentially some 20 GB LLM where every bit of knowledge has link to original source and that would be updated by volunteers. So that you could google it in your own computer basically.
All that and Google tries to push its world view on you too.
Why does the KZhead algorithm suck so much now is the real question.
They're owned by Google
The algorithm is trained using unverified bot inputs. Garbage in, garbage out.
yeah nowadays its really really bad
What a shame those same search engines were modified to search retailer's webstores and finding stuff is often more difficult too. Amazon and Walmart's item search isn't great, and ebay's is failing too.
gotta use a combination of google product search, ebay and amazon or so
Search engines have definitely got worse since the last two years.
They've sucked since like 2017, ever since Google started censoring search results to go after cons in the States
People will argue with you but I remember in 2013 when I went to college, again in 2017 and again in 2023 (changing majors) and the differences between those time periods. I distinctly remember Google being amazing in 2013 and it was right during the 2016-2017 Election where the search engine was being extremely difficult to use to find stuff I knew was out there and I had seen before but for obvious reasons, I couldn't find it anymore. Stuff was harder to find on KZhead too if it was political to one side, like the Hiliary Clinton video of her passing out from heat stroke and being pushed into a van, or a video on the Swin Flu Vaccine in 1976 with Mike Wallace on 60 minutes where the government fucked up and told people it was safe but it wasn't and a shitload of people sued them for it..
@@TheTechnicalMiracle oh yeah I remember those 100%. But in trying to derank any search results that would be beneficial for cons during that cycle they broke the whole site and haven't fixed it since. There was a time I could search for something on Google by literally typing the letters next to the letters I meant and it would know what I searched for
This is also my point of view, it started to suck the day they were not neutral any more. Since then they became even more extreme. It is the same reason why chatGPT is mostly garbage too.
Reality has a well known left wing bias
@@zyeborm no, it doesn't. That Jon Stewart quote is both cringe and widely inaccurate
They have become politically biased trash bins.
I notice an old problem returning. Many pages that display an information on search results but an entirely different content once you open the link. Google is allowing clickbait, somehow. We'd assume they were able to scrape the information that actually shows up for normal users, but it's problematic when they scrape sites as a robot and not as a "fake" regular user. Any experienced web designer can have two different versions of the same page, one for bots and one for regular users. I also noticed that most of my incoming traffic was gone after I removed AdSense, so I might be forced to bring it back 😬
Nowadays it's getting more difficult to find answers for things. I used to be able to search for a specific problem and actually be able to find something. Now I ask a question and the best I'll get is something vaguely related. I go back and rephrase my search-which used to work, but now it just gives me the exact same results.