Asklemmy

As others have mentioned, it was engineered to be worse for the capitalists to make profits from ads and the statistics to look better to shareholders. This in turn has made people to create a shit ton of garbage articles and blogs that say a ton while saying nothing, so even if you used a new search engine with the funding of Google but the algorithm of back then it would still be shit probably, because the volume of shit on the internet has now reached a level where finding anything in it is impossible.

The explosion of AI has come right at this moment where search engines have been lobotomized and gives people an option to be able to find things again, which is also another factor contributing to the profits of the AI companies, but even that is limited to what an LLM can average out from the totality of information that it has been fed and has the obvious danger of making stuff up and treating its biased training data as truth.

Generally, I think we're fucked. I really don't know if we're ever going to get back the internet experience that once existed and what it's going to take to get there, but it would probably involve a massive societal change to come before it.

I have a bunch of Search engines where they say different things about your search (I combine it with noscript because fuck JS)

Startpage: you need JS to verification, basicaly is an API from google.

Mojeek: also JS verification, their results are focus in local websites (.es .nl .de).

Searx.be: you need write a code before start use it, index all the fediverse, opensource frontends and scientific works in an anti-massmedia site, also can fail in specific searchs.

I trying different ones, because as you say is not realiable anymore so I have to act as if I asking help to a bunch of greddy friends with their own interests

I have not had good luck with any search engine I've used lately, even Kagi. I pretty much have to go directly on the website I expect to find what I'm looking for and search there now. Also I suspect that with AI people might be posting in forums less now.

SEO. Everybody is blaming corporations but nobody today can develop a search engine that can't be spammed. If they could, they would.

People with bad info put more effort into SEO than people with good info. Google changing focus from getting people good results to getting people to stay on their site. Powers that be filling the web with misinformation. There's always been conspiracies and misinformation on the internet, but now there's major money in pushing it.

There are leaked emails from Google (from many years ago) where it was proposed to purposely degrade search quality to increase ad clicks. While some at Google responded with dismay as this, it is not a great leap to assume that this faction eventually won and they did in fact deliberately do that. Advertising is Google's main revenue source, they are clearly motivated to do so.

SEO.

I think they intentionally made search engines worse to push people into using LLM's

Ever since the deployment of machine generated results for search engines, there has always been a competition between the search engines and various others using search engine optimization to get to the top of the results. It isn't worth it for Alphabet or Microsoft to fix their search engines if they can push you to AI, so their non-AI results naturally degrade.

Episode of the Better Offline podcast: The Man That Destroyed Google Search

Because data is never free. Google, duckduckgo, kagi, they all cost money one way or another whether that be a subscription service or by forcing websites to be shit so your only option is using their LLMs. Yes the reason why the internet has gone to shit is because of LLMs

I've went through hundreds of search results on duckduckgo, even when I make it intentionally broad and genetic that wikipedia would cover it, it still doesn't come as the first search result. Search engines have gone to shit because LLMs make the most money in terms of data surveillance. Meaning (take for example google) they have a profile of you, they have queries to train, they have data that can be sold to advertisers. The only reason LLMs are being pushed so much isn't because its intelligent, it's because it makes the most money.

There is a "search engine" that hasn't gone to shit, and that's called marginalia search, It's not exactly a search engine where you can type a url and it will bring you to a page, Instead it compliments your general search engine as a research aid and you can find some golden sites.

I've personally used it for data sheets on IC electronics and their implementations. Unfortunately I've found it insufferably difficult on duckduckgo (like multiple pages deep for a datasheet, something that should pop up on the first page), and I don't trust the output of LLMs (large lying models).

So yea, hopefully this helps.

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...

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.

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.

Money.

Anytime you think it's not about the money, it's about the money.

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

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.

Because "Fuck you, pay me"

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...

I've been using metasearch engines (engines that pass your query to multiple search engines so you can aggregate them easily) and the two I've been using were pretty good in my experience. 4get.ca and degoog.org.

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.