searching a specific problem, on what search engine it is…
no satisfactory answer. what else is there? other than just asking questions on lemmy?
my favorite searches are for a problem and you get plenty of forums and such with people who saw the problem but no solution.
It’s gotten terrible over the last 5 years. AI slop is infecting everything and causing so much noise, it’s impossible to find real info anymore.
Best I can suggest is searches across Starpage, DDG, Qwant and Brave. When one fails, try the next one.
I often times use the time filters to filter out content after 2020. (Of course only for timeless topics)
I also use uBlacklist to filter out obvious AI Slop especially those just reposting human stuff, like grokipedia. (there are also ready made lists for that) as well as highlighting great sources like wikipedia, mdn and what not.Still not the best, but it searches the web in the old school way, so it’s more reliable.
I stubbornly clung to Google despite years of increasing problems out of habit and convenience. I just switched to DuckDuckGo a few weeks ago because I was finally fed up.
The turning point was trying to remember a song with only a few words in my head. I searched multiple variations of it, with and without quotes. The AI response (because I hadn’t turned it off) basically said, “nah mate, there aren’t any songs that say anything like that,” and search contained less than 10 total results, none of which were helpful.
Finally I remembered a few more words and searched again, and found the exact song. And it included, verbatim, a line I’d previously searched in quotes.
I also searched it on Kagi and didn’t get any results, sadly (I really love the concept of Kagi).
Since switching to DDG has been like going back 8 years in search quality—way better.
Search is not an easy service. The non-AI search relied on server farms, indexing what is on the internet, and pointing you at what just likely is the answer. There was a sweet spot somewhere between maybe 2005 and 2015 when Google search was fantastic. With the data it knows about you it got you there maybe 19 out 20 searches.
And then things started happening. Google realised that they could sell more ads if their results were a little more shit and they required you to do more searches or click thru more results pages. At the same time, the content of stuff on the internet may have also reached a point where the idea of indexing everything started reaching its practical limits. And the longer time has elapsed since the graphical internet came about, the more deadwood has accumulated. Websites built in ancient days, now unmaintained, services that ended, expired licenses and certificates, etc. The answer you’re looking for may have been out there but for one reason or another can no longer be retrieved.
That’s all before the slop tsunami hit. And this food of content makes it harder still.
So-called AI is technology that’s being beta tested on everybody. I’m sure it’s getting better. At the same time there are plenty of valid reasons to look at it with suspicion. The bullshit it has made up, the additional environmental impact, the stealing of training data, etc. There is every chance that sAIrch will be better in the future than the sweet spot search of the recent past. But we’re not there yet in my opinion. We’re in the in-between time and we just have to muddle thru.
Google is betting big on this prospect. It’s self serving for them because they can downgrade their massive indexing operation and/or free up computing resources for other tasks. So I’m not sure if they’re more driven by financial motivations or conviction in the idea. Too early to tell. Nobody in the late 90s saw Google coming and eating everybody’s lunch in the search market. There is also a chance that a new company we haven’t heard from yet is waiting in the wings.
Ya I agree. It def went to shit even before AI. Sponsored results pushed more and more, and SEO slop abusing googles mechanics took over. Adding forum to the search became the only way to get anything because websites were trying to maximize time on page without even offering an answer. Eventually as the internet shrank and forums started dying out ‘Reddit’ was a good addition to a search, but that has since gone to shit too. It’s like a library of Alexandria has become a library of babel. Information is being gated and incredibly difficult to search for. I downloaded Wikipedia the other day because it’s starting to feel more inportant to have local access to information, but it only goes so far.
This isn’t helpful but might make you feel better. Funny song about Google. “Current state of search engines - music video” https://youtu.be/jrFv1O4dbqY?is=2IskI2DQZ4h_oPmm
well just make a post with the wrong answer and somebody will come to correct you
That used to be the case. Now, LLMs slurp up the wrong answer and regurgitate it until it’s just what everyone believes.
Tonyn’s Conjecture
Search has grown worse IMO to push you to use ai more. Ai reviews, ai sites, they need to give the appearance of it working better so you’ll use it. To do this they dumbed it way down.
Use something other than Google or Bing, like Ecosia, Qwant, or Mojeek.
SEO slop was a problem 10 years ago. Now it’s AI generated SEO slop which is indistinguishable from the SEO slop because AI trained on reams of the crap.
I think that forums really dropped off in popularity; people move to Facebook, discord, or Reddit closed communities so it’s not indexed or it’s hard to access. That, and the value of a blog approaches zero with the volume of slop out there, makes it hard to find stuff online. It’s not being posted in the first place.
Google has gotten tremendously awful at the basic fundamentals of searching.
So you’ve got this stupid AI thing of theirs that thinks it’s helpful by giving you its thoughts about what it thinks about what you’ve searched for. It also brings up relatively irrelevant things.
Then you’ve got another block of some of the dumbest things that get asked. You know the “People also asked about…” section which is just an annoying rabbit hole that degrades your intelligence just by reading what’s there.
Then you’ve got about the first page plastered with ads and suggestions that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for. Forcing you to go through pages until maybe something is there.
Ain’t it wonderful? /s
Or my recent experience: the search returns fewer than 10 results total. But change my search a tiny bit and suddenly I get the normal endless results, which literally contain the search terms I previously included in quotes.
I use Kagi for search. Between it and my self-hosted copy of Wikipedia, I’m pretty happy.
I think what your seeing is search engines don’t work like they used to. They give you what they think you want not what you asked for. Google might have been the first to make there search worse. They want you to use AI instead now. It also sucks. I usually try other search engines other than the main ones. Also indexing the entire web is not easy and would take a large amount of resources to do so some of the smaller ones seem incomplete.
Well, IMHO it depends on what kind of answer you expect and what question do you ask.
Maybe you’re not good in asking. Maybe the question is to open ended. Maybe you’re the first person asking.
Yesterday I searched “open source CRM” and the top result was “Definition of Open” Miriam Webster’s Dictionary.
Google and ai slop have made search engines shit
Maybe search engines have turned to shit for a combination of reasons, most of which are malicious.
You must search within…
I’m confused by some people saying “Google wants you to use AI now”. I think what they mean is they think Google wants you to just use the shitty AI answer at the top of its results. This is because people don’t know how AI works and confuse the technology with specific products. A result summarized by AI has to come up as fast as possible in search results and doesn’t have time to find good or verified info.
Search has been broken for years before AI was a twinkle, because people and companies don’t care if you find what you’re looking for, they only care if they make money off you. Want to know when shoes were invented? How about 92 links to Amazon to buy shoes instead? I just stopped using search for years.
To answer your question, I use Claude, usually Opus. I ask it to find the information I want, where to look or not to look in some cases, and if its something technical or troubleshooting related , I tell it to do research and only rely on training data as a last resort.
Since I started doing this I’ve learned so much more than I could have with search engines, and had conversations about the information to really make sure I understood. Its also great for getting info on laws and specific scenarios and has gotten me, and friends out of several predatory situations that would have required an expensive and unrealistically motivated lawyer. Like another commenter said, use your common sense, ask for direct links to its sources if you want to verify, and never use Google, Brave, or other shitty search engines again.
Message me if you have a specific issue. I’m pretty good at finding where a request went wrong if unhelpful info comes back.
