- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.
I love a good, informative troll.
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In my recent experience, it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.
What are better alternatives to fandom? I see the incumbents name get repeated more often than the alternative unfortunately.
The problem is that fandom tends to vacuum up and supersede the smaller wikis, and the SEO bullshit just makes it happen even faster. The answer to your question unfortunately is “it depends on the game/show/fandom”.
wiki.gg is where most of the wikis have transferred to, terraria for example
Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.
It has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone. I have been using DDG for a decade. I noticed a distinct drop in search quality after the bing partnership.
Oh my god the Fandom wiki for minecraft uses the same little tab icon as the actual minecraft wiki but it has a fucking “are you an adult or child” popup EVERY SINGLE TIME a page loads
I hate it so much
If you have any tips or tricks for DDG please do share! I’m definitely getting better overall results there, but the local ones can still be a bit rough.
I’m no expert but this should be useful: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/duckduckgo-search-tricks-student/
What do you mean by “local”? If you mean finding somewhere to go for lunch or the opening hours of a store, I recommend using the maps app on your phone (I prefer Apple Maps over Google, because it uses Yelp and TripAdvisor for reviews which are accurate than Google reviews… if I had an Android phone I’d probably install Yelp/TripAdvisor).
DDG tries very hard to push Amazon and Ebay to me. They’re not even available in my country 😅
That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I’d report it to DDG.
I don’t know why they would need my location/region. They’re already trying too hard to advertise stuff to me. Isn’t the internet like, international? Other search engines I never get that Ebay/Amazon stuff, it’s a DDG feature for whatever IP I get.
Unfortunately DDG has been dogshit in my native language. Shame
My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google’s quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don’t get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.
Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It’s almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.
Isn’t DDG owned by Google?
No it has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone.
What? Why do you think that?
The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”
And super specific queries?
For me it’s programming issues. I guess devs know that doing SEO would shoot themselves in the foot.
Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?
Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.
So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.
At least that’s my guess anyway.
Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.
It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
If I’m looking up something general, like some actor or tv show, then DDG is perfect. If im troubleshooting some weird software issue then i find it doesnt always list as many results, as if it hasnt indexed as many sites.
DDG at least now means I can search random shit without it suddenly being inserted into my social media algorithms like some kind of psychological torture.
Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites.
use Indie Wiki Buddy extension to get rid of fandom.
This extension stopped working correctly for me some time ago. It just stopped redirecting to breezewiki correctly.
Hmm. Has it updated, and have you allowed it the correct site permissions? Every once in a while it’ll ask you to update the site modification permissions.
I’ve had zero issues with it on Firefox and DDG. May vary on other browsers and search engines though.
Or ublacklist to block any site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
That works too, but indie buddy works better because it gives you a direct link to the proper indie wiki page in search results rather than just blocking Fandom and leaving you with nothing.
My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.
It’s bad enough that I’m about to switch back to Google.
That’s not been my experience. I’ve been using DDG for years, and when I first switched I would occasionally have to go find something on Google instead. That slowly fell off as the years went by because going to Google and getting better search results became rarer and rarer. It’s to the point now where I don’t even do it, unless I need to look at something on street view.
I second this, this has been my experience exactly. It’s gotten so bad that not only do I not need the Google fallback, but I’m starting to feel like the DDG results are better than the Google ones in the first place.
Better than Google now, but still not better than Google back then. It my experience at least.
Unfortunately, this has also been my DuckDuckGo experience for several months. I wish it wasn’t
Try Startpage. I have just started using it so I can’t tell you how it compares. I also need to look up who owns it. But I have been told it has the same privacy qualities of DDG.
I used to like it, but there was one incident where it fed me links to phishing sites. Like all the results were malicious. I suspect they had an internal breach or the session was somehow hijacked. That was years ago, but it made me wary. It’s usually okay.
Good to know I haven’t fully switched yet. I am definitely going to look more closely at its parents company and where it has servers.
It depends on what your searching. For me programming questions are way better on google.
Also searching obvious questions like a country’s population, google still does its job there too.
I deleted their app and moved search engines, they got shit quick. So bad at their main usp. I was constantly fed hyper local results, local even with location off. And dont get me started on how bad it was for porn.
I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.
Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.
There was article about that recently. Apparently Marketing won the battle for control over Google Search. So it’s no longer focused on quality of product.
Google has also gotten lazy. Their first dozen or so searches are either YouTube or Reddit results. (And that’s only when they want to pretend they’re a search engine).
I think you’ll enjoy watching the movie called Idiocracy. It is your AltaVista search result extrapolated to full life.
Is that the one where the guy is frozen for 500 years? I watched that today.
Encino man?
Can confirm, it’s still the top result under the sponsors. And it’s an amusing read.
Omg I can’t believe they used AI to write this article 😡
my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
Y’all mfs didn’t read the article lmao
People downvoting you without having read the article 😭
With the prevalence of reddit google was of the most useful tools I’ve seen in my 40 years on earth. Only to go to absolute shit in the last 2-3 years.
Do any of us still use Google in this way though?
Sure maybe nanna still talks to google like an Oracle… “oh Google what is the best printer of 2024”
Yeah…have you ever had to buy new appliances? I just got a house, half my searches were for appliances, fittings and reviews and the results all sucked.
Well yeah I do have appliances, but I don’t think I’ve ever searched for product reviews for household appliances.
I just don’t find reviews for this stuff very helpful I guess.
Then what do you do?
I just evaluate the available products based on price and features.
But how do you know what matters in some appliance you didn’t even know existed nevermind how it works?
I don’t really follow you sorry.
I can’t think of a time I’ve needed to buy an appliance I didn’t know existed nor how it works ?
Even if I didn’t really know anything that doesn’t really matter. Usually purchases are heavily influenced by my budget. It’s not a question of what features I need, it’s a question of which product is the most reliable given the amount I want to pay.
Well I’m not a homeowner so I’ve never purchased a household appliance really, but I also grew up in a time (Gen-Z) where most everything is one type of scam or another, everyone wants to sell you a course or some other crap, and everything in an ad is nothing you want to ever have, so I feel the need to research everything thoroughly even if ultimately my budget is the deciding factor.
If I wanted to buy a new washing machine, I have no idea what goes into that, like what makes a good washing machine and fundamentally I don’t really know how it works, I know there’s water and spinning, but beyond that it might as well be magic, so how would I choose what to buy if say there were three options at the same price point?
Case in point last time I bought a microwave I just got one that seemed to have as few electronics as possible, staying well away from anything advertised and staying well away from microwaves that could auto-connect to car hifi Bluetooth bullshit.
Somehow I got lucky with a really reliable old one with a fun actual real analog bell you can ding by turning the knob on and off, but at least with that I knew more watts equals more betterer, but with a washing machine I have simply no clue, more water? More spin? Sucks in the pods better? I’ve no idea. So how do you decide? What about a boiler? A dryer? A kettle? An oven? A stove?
Give SearxNG a try. There are browser plugins available for it. I was using Librey but I’m finding SearxNG to be better.
Why?
Because google is a turd sandwich? When alternatives are out there, people need to use them. Everybody was using yahoo or infoseek, or in case of somewhat intelligent people, altavista back in 1999. Every now and then you’d hear someone say something about google, and lo and behold, it was way better than those search engines. Now google sucks. A replacement will eventually arise.
google controls the portals through which many people search. Defaults will always be google when people are using android and or chrome. Yahoo, infoseek or altavista never had anywhere near a grip on people like google does today. It takes effort to change now, while in the olden days you just had to change your 1 start page on the browser, things are a lot more embedded and thus customers locked in. Thinking it will switch over to a better alternative like it did back then, purely because it is a lot better, is a bit naive I think, unfortunately.
You’re giving no information other than “switch”, I’m trying to prompt you to give an actual critique, and what you like about it that would get people to switch.
Aha. Well, so far I’m finding that it gives better results than I’ve been getting from google in years. I mostly search programming or linux related questions. It’s another metasearch engine which goes through multiple search engines and presents you with the results it thinks are relevant. It will show you which search engine(s) it pulled each result from as well. Seems to almost completely get rid of blogspam and advertisements and just return real information.
Edit: Also, it brings back the cached feature
and Google is a turd sandwich.
SearxNG, much like original SearX, pulls data from a variety of search engines, reducing their bias, and also has great filtering options, including filters for academic/IT/social/etc.
Aside from that, it is decentralized and private. Everyone can kickstart their own SearX server, though it might need some minimal juice to work quickly.
And yes, it can be integrated to search from URL bar much like any other search engine. Some instances offer addons that set their one to default, tho you don’t have to install anything, just add your preferred instance to the list of search engines, Firefox will prompt you on that, for example.
Kagi
Paying for search aligns incentives better than free search.
It’s also the best results from a search engine I’ve had in a decade.
Theoretically, sure, but I’m not paying what they’re asking. $10/month for unlimited searches is ridiculous, and $5 is still unpalatable even if it was unlimited (which it’s not).
I’d pay if it was something like $1-2/month for 500+ searches.
Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.
Somehow, they’ve reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some “domain ranking”. Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.
reddit is a very good search resource though because it has 15 years of real people giving real information. I imagine reddit from here on out will be going hard on the enshitification train so it’s value as a search resource will rapidly decline.
Anything post-2022, and probably post-2020, is suspect on Reddit because it became abundantly clear how steerable it was and how easy to generate sales as long as you didn’t do anything too “suspicious”. Current ‘ad guides’ tell advertisers not to link things because just saying the name reads as more authentic.
Before that it was legitimately people discussing, e.g., the best flashlight for x-y-z purposes. But a decent amount of old stuff has been gutted by people deleting their posts/accounts.
You weren’t around for the 2016 presidential elections.
Politics on Reddit has always been shit. Product reviews and recommendations were good. How-to’s and troubleshootings that don’t fit on stackoverflow are still good.
After January 2015 it was a downhill slalom.
Missing the days of Consumer Reports. I think the velocity of new products is too high for them to be relevant for more than a few months once they release a report anymore.
I still sign up with them when I’m researching bigger, or long-lasting, purchases. Cars, washing machine, and that sort of thing. I’m always a little annoyed at the price, but the content is SO MUCH better than any other online review source that I’m always happy with my decision in the end. Reddit comments are probably second, but I’ve found those to be littered with what seem to me to be suspiciously positive reviews for items that are not significantly better than their competition. I feel like I need to dial up my critical nature to 10 to fight against the echo chamber and/or the covert advertising.
I saw a website that was selling Reddit bot services to companies that want to review their products. They would just send a swarm of bad accounts in there and make nice comments. Even replying to their own comments.
After that I stopped trusting almost every Reddit review (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
*Edit: meant to say bot accounts but leaving it
I was shopping printers earlier, and reddit-based results had clear paid comments.
Reddit posts could always be company astroturfing as well.
I get Consumer Reports free through my library. You may too!
And Wirecutter used to be good but they will occasionally point out how highly rated something is, and cross checking against falespot et al indicates a lot of fake reviews.
you are a printer we are all printers
Technically we are highly complex, self replicating 3D printers.
I’m not, but my wife is
oh man, you made me think so many bad jokes about this… 😅
Its printers all the way down…
Yeah, well PC LOAD LETTER
The next good search engine will unironically be a Microsoft chatbot of some kind
You mean current Bing co-pilot?
Bing has gotten so much worse in the last 5 years, it’s not even better than google anymore
Search results aside, why can I no longer copy the result from Bing’s calculator anymore
Lol, Copilot is easily the dumbest AI assistant. It’s completely useless, it just spews bullshit.
I only ever knew Bing as being good for porn. Maybe a porn aficionado can confirm if it still is
Yeah Bing used to be lagging behind Google on censorship so you could find shit that Google wanted to hide once. Now, it all sucks.
Takes all of the AI processing power in the world to make Bing a good search engine
It worked, SEO really sucks.
Heck, I didn’t even need “2024”, just “best printer” worked.
Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.
Yup, and that’s why we shouldn’t have one dominant search engine, but a few that all do things differently. That way gaming the system is a lot more difficult. But I guess that’s not the world we live in, because everyone wants to use “the best,” which means “the best” will eventually degrade due to everyone gaming it.
The demise of google search is by design. https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-accused-killing-google-search.html TL;DR. Management noted that search revenue was not growing, so the head of google search Prabhakar Raghavan made it worse so you have to click more to get what you want. More clicks = more money = growth = happy investors = enshitification. Fuck you Prabhakar Raghavan.
And by making the search engine worse and worse, they open the opportunity to bring AI chat as a “savior”, and people will think it revolutionized internet search.
Zitron, though, describes him as “a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect.”
Based
