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?

It's called enshitification, basically web services get worse so that you spend more time on them and see more adds. Switching from Google to Duck Duck Go has made things a little bit better for me.

Sometimes I want a technically savvy person to explain the inner workings and how it's changed, but lately I'm just so fed up with it I want to figuratively dump it all in the trash, cancel my data plan, and just live without any Internet at all.

It feels like we lived through a golden age and it'll never be that good ever again.

Check out SearxNG.

I read an article about it somewhere, but, can't find it. Basically the guy in charge of search realized they were at the highest level of users they can get so the only way to increase search traffic is to make it just bad enough you have to search different phrasing a couple of times to get the result therefore increasing search traffic.

Diabolical

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.

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

I've read that, too. Probably that same article. I've read a few other explanations, about how SEO "ruined" the Internet. How they've deliberately handicapped search so you'd use AI, etc.

I feel like all of this is true but there is also more to all these stories than meets the eye.

To me it feels like back in the the day everyone just collectively allowed the tech giants to be lifeguards. But then we find out that they've been taking money on the side to let people shit in the pool.

Now the pool is completely filled with the commercial sectors turds and the "lifeguards" want to sell us a scooper to get our carefully curated results out, sans logs.

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.

I use kagi and metager. They've solved it for the most part for me.

Google in particular getting worse to get you to click through more results pages or to run more queries so they can sell more ads on each of those is well attested. I used Bing for a while and didn't think it was better or worse than newly bad Google. So now I use an equally shitty non-US search engine (start page) and just give up sooner.

In their defence, I think the exponentially increasing content of the internet, and the not insignificant portion that just sits there dead or unmaintained, plus the bits and bytes that just disappear as subscriptions or support run out are difficult problems. It's getting ever harder to write an algorithm to sort through that as well. That plus greed equals shit.

Pre-Google we had very shitty search results. Than Google became the Kleenex, the word everybody used. Then Google got worse. While my faith in "American Intelligence" is somewhat limited, I think we will get back to better results soon. What Google had to do (build big server farms to look at all of the internet to index it) may become trivially easy for a sufficiently good LLM eventually. Although we're not there yet. Given that it's not just Microsoft or Google fighting in that market for dominance, I live in hope that competition from OpenAI etc. lights a fire under their arses.

The goal of a search engine is to make the company money, not to aid you in finding what you are looking for.

Good points.

Legacy stuff is definitely getting buried under the new wave. Exacerbated by the fact that "new" sells while old "costs somebody to maintain".

Speaking of costs, I guess the free lunch is about over. Besides the cost to access, most of the web was essentially free. A little bit of banner advertising paid for a simple website. But between then and now it's becoming clear that the continued expansion of increasingly invasive marketing and data collection to pay for larger and large sites, and their complexity, is not sustainable.

This one maybe ? https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

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 read an article about it somewhere, but, can't find it.

Is this intentional ironic?

The thing that is eternally forgotten when people ask these sorts of questions, or perhaps it is just deliberately pushed to the back of their minds is that the corporations providing these services are not in the business of providing services, they are in the business of making profit, primarily by finding ways to push as much advertising as is possible. Remembering that is really the only true answer to these sorts of questions.

Yep

SearxNG is just a meta search engine that uses other search engines, so it'll have the same issues as the upstream search engines.

If I remember correctly, around 5 or 6 years ago, Google Search leadership changed such that the ads org started running it. The focus since then has been on advertisers rather than regular users.

This is literally the definition of enshittification: the company first focuses on gaining users, then switches the focus to business customers, then squeezes both of them.

non-US search engine (start page)

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company.

Try Qwant or Ecosia. They're working together to develop an independent search index (Staan) and it's already in use in France and Germany.

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

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 know it's not the thing you likely want to hear, but... At this point, I'm glad I switched to a paid search engine (Kagi).

Theoretically, there's nothing stopping them from enshittifying down the road. But at least for now (and hopefully the future) they are a great search engine.

They have their own index (so no relying on google/bing), and it actually works as I remember Google working 7+ years ago. Minus the ads, and plus a ton of flexibility permanently boosting/removing sites from your searches, auto-grouping/ignoring listicle-type articles in results, flagging sites as AI slop and punishing them for it,...

They even have a fediverse search "lense" that actually works really well to search Lemmy/mastodon/...

I just realized I sound like a paid shill. Sorry about that. I'm not.

If you're not paying for it, then you're not the user, you're the product.

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company.

Eff me, really? Can you back this up? I only see a company in The Netherlands.

My understanding is that they use Google's index. It's just that unlike Google, they aren't motivated to give you shit results to keep you on their page longer.

...oh. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

Looks like only their "small web" initiative is 100% self-indexed, and everything else is indeed a mixture of sources.

Oof.

I guess tue point still stands: the results are a lot better than plain Google, all the bullshit is stripped out and you get to customize your results in actually useful ways.

Still sad though.

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...

If you're paying for it you're probably still the product.

These points are valid in their own right but I don't think they explain how Google has become much worse at finding things that really are in plain text on a website somewhere. Things that could be found, that is now buried.

SEO got really big around 2016 and Google has done nothing to help users get around their algorithms being gamed. Instead, it appears they've leaned in to the fact that companies were ready to pay for better treatment by the Search.

If you're paying for it you're definitely either already the product, or will be eventually when the company sells out.

The only enshittification-resistant choice is copyleft Free Software.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/

It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money.

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.

Kagi is definitely worth every penny. It feels like keyword searching in the 2010s, and that's a huge compliment. Their small web tool has led me to some fun blogs for my rss feed, but there are a lot of ai bro blogs on there too which is incredibly ironic.

A search service is different from the Linux kernel or a web server though. You can release the perfect open source search engine, but running it will be expensive. If we, as users, aren't paying for it, then someone is going to have to extract value from us to pay for it.

Greed

Lol no

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...

Or it might tell you to put glue in your pizza

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.

SEO and decent search results were having a fist fight for years, then AI showed up and shot it in the face.

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.

"AI" is why you now get thirty different pages talking around the topic you've searched for but not actually answering the question, reaffirming that they're talking about what you're searching for by repeating a useless bit of information about it, patting you on the back for thinking up such a nuanced topic and how only the smartest people think to ask this question, then three paragraphs of tangentially related information with an ad inbetween each one, before you find out that the page doesn't actually have the information you're after because the page was written by clankers.

Which is probably the intent of these cogsucking companies pushing this slop; flood the zone with useless trash, convince everyone that this sudden increase in quantity of websites necessitates another 900GW of data centre capacity right up in the ass of the nearest low income area.

How come you use both? Do they have different use cases or specialities?

Thanks! This is what I was thinking of, but ironically I couldn't find the links/articles lol

It's simple. Cause Search engines transformed to ad engines.

the reason why google search results went to shit is because google did some basic maths.

99% of search queries actually ask for information that you can find on one of the top websites. only about 1% actually care about anything besides that.

so if you deliver results only due to a rather superficial algorithm, you will still retain about 99% of your userbase, but the computation cost for finding these results would go down dramatically. so you save a lot of money on electricity, while serving almost as many ads. it pays off for google.