• GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I feel like complacency would be preferable to constantly changing things people like in ways that people hate

      Fuck google for forcing a change to my mobile browser tabs, i liked the stupid card thing :angery:

  • BabaIsPissed [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    love to search for something and see that the first 5 results are spam sites that scraped something vaguely related to my question from some forum or whatever.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      From some forum or whatever.

      Quora​!

      Sometimes Quora is actually good - if not great. But I'd always rather have a link to an actual publication or website like Scientific American or something. That's better for me than some rando. In the end Quora is a glorified form of Reddit.

        • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          Sometimes Quora members really know their stuff. If I google history of the les paul guitar and I get one (or more) Quora results - those results might be fantastic. A Quora member named My1959LesPaul might give a 600+ word answer that's enlightening, informative, amusing, accurate, and he even puts in ~5 photos. That's one of my "I love the internet" moments.

          But if I google history of covid - I don't want any Quora results or any Quora-like results at all. I'm not looking for a rando's take.

            • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
              hexagon
              ·
              2 years ago

              Ack. I can imagine. "Well, when it comes to this battle and many others - people forget to see things through the perspective of the Nazis..."

            • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Not always, in the past couple of years, there have been a lot of dedicated USSR nerds that continually post and debunk myths about the Soviet Union in WWII. But if their posting ever stops then it will immediately go back to unverified shit.

          • CTHlurker [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I googled "Did Stalin drink" and got served with a Quora result that cited directly from Montefiori and the Court of the Red Czar.

      • glimmer_twin [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Quora would be alright except it always wants me to log in to google or whatever the fuck to read it. Stfu I just wanna see what some rando has to say

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I deal with Google's bullshit for a job, and I'll tell you: if Google wasn't a monopoly, it would already be the computer from Star Trek. That wouldn't sell ads though.

    Google, what are the top grossing movies from 1980-1989? Where can I watch or buy those? Google, what is the closest Mexican restaurant open right now that has tres leches on the menu?

    They have all this information. They just want you to work for it because you'll see and click on ads, and the extra work on their part wouldn't really be profitable.

  • RION [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The only way to use Google to research for a purchase is by adding "Reddit" to the end. Amazing how such a substantial use case for a search engine has been almost completely broken by SEO sponsored trash

    • OgdenTO [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yes, I add Reddit, or 'forum' depending on what I'm searching for if I want an actually useful opinion on something

    • DrCox [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Careful! I & others have engaged in rigging Google search results for stuff when searching with reddit. Mostly niche stuff that doesn't have a lot of attention, but find the wrong thread on otherwise knowledgeable subforum there and you might buy some hot shit.

    • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      My boss was having me screenshot google results for "best (industry) reddit" so he could do some SEO tweaks yesterday...

      It's all gamed to hell

  • D3FNC [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's crazy when I search for something on Google and the website that formerly gave me a billion fucking results 20 years ago will now give me 3, at least two of which have jack shit to do with my search. Three results.

    Then I go to YouTube, which they own, repeat the search and it's the first result.

  • supafuzz [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Even the search in their other products is going to shit. Tried looking for something in your gmail lately? Decent odds it just straight up won't return things on searches that are absolutely in the email text.

    Google is a trash fire of a company, their whole advertising business model is built on lies (microtargeting is bullshit), and I'm glad more people are starting to notice that they suck.

    • Deadend [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Once the companies paying for auto targeting also figure it out, the internet will collapse fast.

      I was looking to buy a couch, I got a lot of ads for different places selling me couches.

      I bought a couch.

      The ads keep coming.

      I think Google and Facebook know I bought the couch, but they are basically fleecing the ad buyers because there probably isn’t a “if the person buys a big ticket item, stop trying to sell them one - setting “

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
        ·
        2 years ago

        "If we try hard enough, maybe they'll buy a second, non-matching couch! Or maybe they'll return the one they got and buy ours!"

        • Deadend [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Hell no. They would be Mad if they knew.

          It’s why they advertise to people who are looking for couches.

          They don’t want to waste money on people who aren’t actively looking. Otherwise they would just be ads and not premium targeted ads.

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Tried looking for something in your gmail lately?

      :pain: The other day I typed in my mom's name to try and find an email she sent a couple weeks ago, and it didn't turn up. I eventually found it by going to "all mail" and using Firefox's "find on page" function instead of Google's search mail function, but how the hell is that broken? It's just a simple string search in a database, I could program it myself in Godot!

      • supafuzz [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It's an old, established project and the corporate culture is that old projects are where your career goes to die. So only the dumbest employees are working on it. Plus it's free, and probably not very profitable because users push back against privacy invasions in their email more than other places.

        I wonder if the enterprise gmail is broken in the same way. They care a little bit about the customers who actually pay them.

  • The_Walkening [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Google constantly creating and then killing products with massive potential makes sense when you consider that ultimately developing patents for stuff that integrates with Google's ecosystem can effectively head off the same efforts from competitors.

  • UlyssesT
    ·
    edit-2
    26 days ago

    deleted by creator

    • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      God, I can't stand people like that

      "You're wasting my time"

      No bitch, YOU'RE wasting YOUR time by writing down comments on internet forums just to tell people "I'm not going to answer that"

      • UlyssesT
        ·
        edit-2
        26 days ago

        deleted by creator

      • booty [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It actually happens a lot, especially if the thing you're looking for help with is old / mostly irrelevant. The only results will be forum posts with replies like "why didnt you just google this first, here are like 10 different links fully explaining how to solve the problem" and all the links are dead because that forum post was 14 years old

  • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I've never understood this tbh, the biggest change I noticed is just that they got it to stop mixing porn in with the image results.

  • kissinger
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

    • fifthedition [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      https://teclis.com Teclis is a search engine for finding interesting, unique results on 'clean' websites. Teclis is an attempt to surface the less known web, the web of creativity and self expression, the more humane web.

      https://millionshort.com Remove Google's top sites from the result. Remove the top million, top 100,000, etc.

  • blobjim [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Not really Google's fault considering they're up against a gazillion people doing search engine "optimization" for a gazillion individual websites. It's basically an arms race. And of course if they change their search engine in some small way, it will literally put companies out of business that got traffic through Google search results. It does suck how much we now rely on this black box search engine database thingy to find things instead of coming up with other interesting ways of organizing information.

    People also might be expecting too much, for Google to find them obscure answers to whatever questions they type in, that have very few answers anywhere on the internet, which is probably not something a search engine is going to be able to do. The number of websites out there has also probably made it ever more expensive to do search indexing.

    • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      People also might be expecting too much, for Google to find them obscure answers to whatever questions they type in, that have very few answers anywhere on the internet, which is probably not something a search engine is going to be able to do.

      it used to do that just fine, shit used to read my mind and find stuff I'd seen months/years prior with very vague search terms

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      capitalism under silicon valley is an arms race to exploit the dumbest loopholes in the rules because most of what's valuable is still wrung from the bloodied hands of a Congolese Cobalt miner.

  • boog [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Unfortunately, I have to disagree. I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google but Google is still the best place to go to find something when DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it.

    • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I almost literally never find the information i am looking for unless I specifically google for Reddit threads where people are discussing that information

    • jizzong [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I have to agree. It's easier to find relevant threads for this very site on google than through it's own search function.

      • boog [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Actually, this is also true. Most of my googling to figure shit out anymore is "[topic] reddit" or "[topic] wiki"