Compared to 10 years ago, in terms of being able to find useful content, do Google search results feel better or worse to you?

@danluu Alta vista was better than current Google

@danluu bring back Alta Vista!

@jmorris @danluu Alta Vista was useful though.

@danluu I miss 'Ask Jeeves' so much.

@danluu tbf to them, moderately worse

@danluu
I quit using Google long ago because the search results were always the same (and I hate my data being harvested and sold).

@danluu Google is basically the same and there's less good stuff to find.

@danluu once the needed modifiers are inserted in the prompt, then useful results can be found.

Also, god bless any one who still has a webpage with text and pictures. I REALLLLLLLY don't want a 10.1 minute youtube video to get a single CLI command for an unusual task.

@kajer @danluu In my experience modifiers can only make it omit some junk content that's crowding out results, but don't expose any text search access to pages that contain tje exact text you're looking for but that don't already get categorized by the ML shit as associated with the semantic-munged query.

@danluu
Goodle search is worse to the point of being disgusting.

@danluu Luckily all the new AI generated content will make it, uh... worse. 😩

@danluu The combination of Google incorrectly being helpful and just extracting the wrong answers and snippets combined with most of the sites that it does return being LLM generated SEO traps - I think "feel" is an understatement.

On the plus side, I read more papers via scholar again.

@danluu "I" "shouldn't" "have" "to" "put" "every" "word" "in" "quotations"

@danluu significantly worse, as I can track by the tricks and workarounds I’ve had to come up with for an increasingly useless platform. Not just useless but actively working against its users like with image search in recent years.

@danluu Seems worse, but that may be because I use other search tools more.

@danluu I wonder how much of that is Google shooting themselves in the foot and how much is the rest of the internet being a late-stage-capitalism hellscape of ad revenue and subscription models.

@danluu Loss of power search really degraded Google search.

@danluu
I'm in Australia and unless I add the word Australia to the end of a search, I get pretty much all US content.

@danluu the first page of Google's SERP have two things: Ads, and ads pretending to be blogs.

@danluu It’s useless. I can’t believe I’m paying for Kagi now.

@danluu #DuckDuckGo for the win

@danluu I don't do Google search.

@danluu I'm surprised at this result so far!

https://hachyderm.io/@heathborders/111506900843499091

@heathborders There's enough indirection in interacting with another instance that I didn't vote, but my primary answer to your poll is "good at googling".

Something that I think is expected is that, over time, as this poll has spread and more "normal" folks have voted, more people have voted "no change" and on sites with more normal folks, more people voted no change. In terms of perceived search quality change, the results are mastodon < twitter < threads.

@heathborders For typical users, my guess is the main reason is that they're bad at judging result quality.

Recently, I've watched some normal users interact with computers, including watching how they look at search results. They generally get terrible search results and have no idea that this is happening.

I ran some test queries to make sure that I'm not imaging this and I'll probably write a blog post about this at some point.

I ran a few test queries drawn from queries I saw a non-technical user use to setup a new computer. Which do you think had the best results?

For the small search engine entry (Kagi / Marginalia / Mwmbl), selecting that answer should mean that any individual one was best, not that the ensemble was best.

For the above test queries, which small search engine do you think has the best results?

@danluu
I prefer Mozilla/Firefox/duckduckgo

@danluu I don't use Google search. There are so much better search services available, in the sense of not making the user the product. In fact, I don/t use any Google service, at all.