A few years ago anything you wanted to search for would generate hundreds of pages of results. From sources all over. If you structured your query well you could dramatically cut down the irrelevant results and then spend a bit of time skimming through the offerings until you found your target.
Searching felt like a hunt, it could take you to far flung corners of the web, and hitting the jackpot on some obscure forum was part of the fun.
Now searching anything feels incredibly frustrating. You know what you are looking for is out there somewhere but it feels impossible getting to it. Basically we have only two main routes now, Google and Bing (and I swear Bing is just copying Google’s homework). I’ve tried a handful of others and they all fall very short.
Something has changed dramatically under the hood.
It seems like the results are very shallow and no amount of prodding will get either search engine to produce anything besides the laziest output. Any subject has a limited pool of sites they lean on and then pretend that that’s all of the Internet.
It generalizes very quickly and if you try to counter by putting things in quotations it gives up.
Even in the rare moments I’ve buckled and used their stupid AI, it takes even more time browbeating the program to just deliver the damned specifics.
What is going on??
How do we get our old search back?
I swear every day of trying to navigate the web feels worse than the day before.
How did we get here?
There’s got to be something better, right? Or something we can do to pave a new structure that benefits the denizens of the web better than the lazy slop our tech overlords scrape off the table for us. What can we do?
Because “Fuck you, pay me”
You might try to give one of the alternative search providers a try. There’s duck duck go for the USA, and Qwant for the EU.
It’s simple. Cause Search engines transformed to ad engines.
SEO did this. It started before LLM and chatGPT. Blogger make money be generating trafic. So they wrote shits in a format that please search engine.
That’s why if you search “search into file Linux”, instead of just a grep command line, you end up on 2000 lines article with introduction, paragraph, explanation, blablabla. Because search engine boost this kind of content. Title, introduction paragraph that repeat the title, subsections, etc…
Because the AI hallucinations are pushed ahead of traditional search engine results?
This evening I was repairing something. My google search gave an AI summary that gave two important dimensions of a part I needed. I was like “OK let’s go eat”
Two hours later, because I didn’t write anything down, I entered the same search verbatim and got a different AI summary missing one of the dimensions.
We have made computing non-deterministic. We’re busy giving sentience to refrigerators that can’t keep ice cream frozen.
I’ve never seen any search engine officially confirm this, but search across all search engines became terrible just a few months after the release of ChatGPT.
Which is why my assumption is that LLMs are being used to generate heaps of credible-looking, but ultimately worthless webpages. And search engines have to try to filter those out or their results would be even worse.But then there’s no obvious distinction between a human-crafted blog and some spam webpage, which means the human-crafted blog is likely to be caught in the crossfire and get filtered as well.
Well, and on top of that, search engines presumably got hit by AI scrapers looking for training data, so that’s why I would assume, they now limit the search results to one page…
Yeah. Noticed this too. Pages that look legit but are filled with useless word salad that doesn’t go anywhere.
Gives you an impression that those pages didn’t exist before your search. How it got to top results is beyond me.
If you’re not paying for it, then you’re not the user, you’re the product.
There was more money in showing you things than there was in helping you find things.
If you ever watched any of the saturday morning, over the air, wrestling “news” shows in the 80s and 90s, then that’s all everything is now. There used to be a pretty good article about it.
I use kagi and metager. They’ve solved it for the most part for me.
Because it makes AI much more appealing.
No more reading about the recipe author’s grandma and how the food reminds them of home. AI will extract the useful info and ignore the SEO bullshit.
Or it might tell you to put glue in your pizza
As others have said in the posts, you can no longer find information that was found many years ago. From my point of view, I think there are many causes. Some of them to copy from a movie would be “information is worth money”. Another cause would be that the information you are looking for is no longer wanted to be searched. Because of this, I noticed that on the dark web sites there is still some information. In short, the information will be limited.
Copy - pass in your pc
The goal of a search engine is to make the company money, not to aid you in finding what you are looking for.
We’re in between a rock and a hard place. The only way to shake the grip of enshitified companies is to either turn to government/tax backed public utility type incentives, which opens up a whole other can of worms, or lean on crowdsourcing, which is very hit or miss.
I do think that part of the problem is that so much up-to-date information is now trapped in discord, also that people are generally using forums and the like less to solve their technical problems because they’re privately querying robots. This on top of enshittification… We did not know how good we had it 20 years ago
That and everything is a YouTube video now. Or at least that’s what the search company that makes money off their video service wants you to think.
Check out SearxNG.
I tried using an instance on a public page and after about a month I gave up. Maybe it was configured poorly but it was real hit or miss. Sometimes it’d deliver but just as often the results were nonsensical.
There’s probably some instance that’s really dialed in but I quit looking after the first go around.
