Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they're trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.

[–] lntl@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i test all web search engines the same way:

punch in "Python itertools"
see if the official Python.org documentation for itertools is the top result.

if it's not, then the search engine is contaminated with advertised or SEO optimized results and it's wasting my time

[–] spader312@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The first result from Google was the official Python.org docs for me

[–] devfuuu@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

The true test is searching anything related to android and not get flooded by hundreds of links to auto generates blog content and useless bot created pages.