this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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[–] De_Narm@lemmy.world 152 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's not only a search engine problem in itself - websites also got worse in general to appeal to googles algorithm. Which means that other search engines would show similar crap, unfortunately.

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 79 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista's search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn't work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I've been using Duck Duck Go. But you're right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Profit motives are good at ruining social platforms; society.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

Profit motive does okay with goods you buy. But free stuff in a profit motive system is gonna be weird.

[–] greenskye@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago

Yep the whole Internet feels like a dying mall. There are still some places I go for specific needs, but I'd say my casual browsing of any kind just keeps getting smaller.

[–] bruhduh@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there's other alternatives and searx unified them all

[–] Gabu@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo is not good. It's only marginally less pathetic than Google, but that has to do for the time being.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Eh, DDG is mediocre, but I don't know of a better one ATM.

[–] seathru@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kagi is pretty good. But not free.

[–] Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Kagi is pretty good *because it's not free

I really hope it'll get better if more people use it

I also wonder how it will be abused by the sEo sPeCiAliSTs who spam my fucking business email ten times a week. Fuck off "Chris"

[–] snowe@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Kagi. Way better than Google and DDG.

[–] SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

SearX isn’t maintained anymore, SearXNG is the meta-search engine that is still maintained.

[–] baropithecus@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).