Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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I asked Google why search engines are so bad now and its AI summaries its own deficiencies quite well:
Some say search engines have declined in quality due to a number of factors, including:
Search engine optimization (SEO) spam A wave of SEO spam has contributed to the decline in search result quality.
Affiliate marketing Affiliate link sites contribute to the low-quality content that floods the internet.
AI-generated content New technology can quickly produce low-quality content.
Marketing Search results are filled with marketing and links that may not be relevant to the query.
Recommender algorithms Some say the algorithm that recommends content is a mess. For example, someone might be recommended alt-right content after watching a click-bait video.
Ads Google's biggest business is advertising, and it's inserting more ads into its products to make more money.
Some say it's harder to find specific information these days, and that search operators are often needed to filter search results.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.
And here I thought Startpage was acting up...
I wanted to make a joke about my first search engine, MetaCrawler, and then found out it's still around and still does search. Going down that rabbithole, it's changed hands a ton and was only relaunched kinda recently at some point. Is it any good? Nah, probably not.
I guess I'll just have to rely on my other aggregate search engine, SavvySearch (no, no the first search engine does not in fact still exist, much to my disappointment).