Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
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The reddit thing was even described as a “hack” to google search iirc
The Internet has been slowly getting gutted since at least 2015.
It is to the point that a regular search engine is useless for actual research unless you are a power user and even then it is censored.
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Ducks fly together! Brave search is pretty decent too, if you haven’t tried it yet.
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I instinctively scroll down 1-2 screens now to get past all the ads and promoted pages. It’s like Amazon the few times I use that. Fully enshittified. I just use Bing most of the time which isn’t any better.
I started using Swisscows about a year ago and I’m never going back. Clean, simple, uncluttered. No trackers or “personalization”.
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Took a bit for me to even figure out what “moral values” was supposed to mean in this context.
Turns out they just think porn is evil and that children hate being exposed to it or something. https://swisscows.com/en/media-education
No true crime and no tiddies? Is there even anything on that search engine?
I can’t stand searching for a product on Amazon anymore. If I really want to use Amazon, it’s much more efficient to find the amazon link using duck duck go.
Ublock is your friend
It’s not all Google’s fault though. With the obliteration of online news and forums, there just isn’t much indexable content out there that isn’t trash. It’s only getting worse with AI spitting out garbage remixes of the same crap on pages that post more ads than content. Reddit was a bastion of real content written by real humans delivered in a mostly friendly way.
So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve? No one wants the trash content. The next “best” thing is Quora and that’s entirely hostile even if it manages to accidentally contain valid content.
Corporate has managed to destroy the Internet.
Google has the entire Deja News (Usenet) archive, more valuable than Reddit except for the older age. And they don’t let you access it anymore.
What are they doing with it?
Google is doing nothing with their Usenet archive. Hopefully they haven’t destroyed it.
Quora feels most of time is where humans try to write like an AI.
DuckDuckGo manages it mostly fine. At least, the results are more consistent, even if there’s the 1-in-50 chance it misses something Google would get.
The cynic in me suspects that Google makes their real results worse to increase ad results which are “close enough.”
Not even joking, I was trying to search for something just slightly niche the day before yesterday and I got so fed up with Google that I actually used Bing. And you know what? It was noticeably better. We truly went down the wrong pantleg into this universe.
So much this.