“We’ve ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here’s a bunch of pinterest and quora spam.”
“hey, is that a brand name? Here’s 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them”
I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches… it’s great.
Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google “Best vacuum cleaner”
Top 6 hits: “We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can’t really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money.”
What’s worse is most of what comes up isn’t even a hands on review, it’s literally someone doing what I just did, which is type “vacuum cleaner” into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He’s the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it’s no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there’s a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don’t try to game the algorithm so they’re pretty deep in there.
And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com
Nah.
What the average user is looking for is almost certainly gonna be near the top of a Google search.
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
What’s been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
For certain questions/information, ChatGPT provides better summary information than standard search engines like Google/Bing
A slightly dangerous part is that ChatGPT makes up convincing texts that may be wrong due to misunderstanding and or biased.
Yeah I had a coworker say she likes to use ChatGPT to find answers and explanations to questions she has that you would normally Google.
This is a terrible idea. While it may contain legitimate info, ChatGPT was not designed to give factual answers. It comes up with convincing answers based on text it has read. You’re going to end up with some bad information and it’s a bit dangerous to hear that people are starting to use it that way.
I used to work for Google. Now I pay for Kagi.
How do we find information these days? I still default to my search engine, which is often google. I moonlight over to DDG often, but usually an operating system upgrade gets me back on Google for a while.
I use DDG and think it does a great job, at least as good as google these days. There are certainly times that it falls short when compared with other search engines, but at that point I just use bangs and that effectively solves any problems I have had with it.
Duckduckgo is basically just bing results. But, I still use it for the bangs and lessened tracking. Being able to search any engine from the same search bar is remarkably convenient.
my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
you can use Google or Bing from duckduckgo using !bangs. g! (for google) or b! (for bing) then whatever you are searching for. I use g! all the time for non privacy related things. and since duckduckgo doesn’t use trackers and all that the results can be terrible so sometimes I just resort to using g!
Using DuckDuckGo to search through Google seems pretty damn pointless if you ask me. If the search engine is shit and I am just roundabout using Google then why even bother?
I know you said the thing about trackers, but a lot of us don’t really care about that. If the end result is just using Google anyway then I’d rather just start with Google and not use another site to use Google.
oh yeah. if you don’t care, there really is not a point to use duckduckgo. I should say IMO because I’m sure a much more technically minded person will have a better answer.
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo? People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
Yeah ddg is as bad as google imo. This works like the net used to be.
Damn, I’ve gotten so many good alternatives lately. Thanks for posting that.
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you should shoplift them from the book store instead
Why would you shoplift from a library? That seems immoral
What are “SEO spam tactics”? I would google, but am afraid of that now.
I think I just figured it out, Search Engine Optimization?
Yes. Google popularized it and now it has ruined Google search.
Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats
idk - you can’t really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it’s google’s fault for using such a game-able system IMO
I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don’t think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.
The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn’t try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.
Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.
It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.
What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.
But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.
Try duck duck go, brief subject, possibly include the word “forum” or “howto” or “Reddit” (I know I know) and then try to narrow down your search terms from there. Use quotation marks for keywords, and site: to denote specific websites that you want to limit your search to.
And that’s basically the magic right there. Another key term to use is if you get too many results of a certain type, like if you search the word constitution and keep getting the ship, include the term -ship and that should remove those results.
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Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Apologies, I used the overly vague term “AI”. Any company creating an LLM that has web search + scraping capabilities will be at the mercy of the search results.
That said, LLMs are actually quite skilled at ignoring noise (repetitive data), so gaming SEO may lose popularity. Hell, the practice will DEFINITELY lose appeal once LLMs are just browsing for relevant content and summarizing without any citations (links to the sites). And even of they do cite, no one will click them.
Convenience > Fact
tldr; This additional layer of obfuscation between search and result will reshape the fabric of the internet with time
Injecting stuff into the data consumed by LLMs is the new type of SEO.
