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Comment by guerrilla

4 years ago

I stopped using Google entirely. I honestly feel violated every time it strips out words that I asked it to search for on the very first page. NO, I said search for this, do not do something ELSE you piece of shit.

I actually use DuckDuckGo exclusively now, not because it got better (it did a tiny bit), but because Google got so absolutely horrible that DDG is now actually better! I have the habit of trying Google if I can't find something with DuckDuckGo, but honestly I don't even know why I bother because not once has it helped since this degradation started.

I do wonder why though. I got the feeling that maybe they just gave up. Maybe they don't have to care anymore being a de facto monopoly and having so many other projects. It's hard not to think that spammers run the internet now... Ad networks run everything and then content is just generated shit spammed into results and feeds.

</rant>

8 comments

guerrilla

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moistly  4 years ago

So many bot-authored and SEO-tweaked garbage listicles and advertiser-funded “reviews” and poorly-written “TIL”/“learn from me” blogs bloated by advertising. In a few ways the web is better now than it was a few decades ago, and in very many ways it is much worse. Advertising has basically leeched almost all the value out of the web.

  • qualudeheart  4 years ago

    I’ve transitioned to a list of manually bookmarked sites.

    Search gets unreliable fast for rare topics. We live in an advertising based economy of poor incentives. If good paid search engines existed I would use them.

    • moistly  4 years ago

      The smart money saves the page, or its useful content, to a file. So much good information lost to link rot.

nyadesu  4 years ago

Only problem I had with DDG is search results not displaying a create/publish date, that info is so useful to me to filtering relevant things

  • privacyking  4 years ago

    That's true but I've found in recent years that the date given is wrong. e.g. you see something listed as 2021, but it's actually from 2016 and old.