Goog enough; why the usefulness of Google Search is declining

[Ace-Garageguy]

 

[bobss396]

I find it to be absurdly dumbed-down. Likely by design to turn us all into bumbling fools.

[MeatMan]

Lots of good info here! Thanks for posting.
My wife & I have been discussing the horrid results, not only from Google but any search engine. We used Duck Duck Go because we despise Google so much.
Another thing that isn't in the vid is the lack of good, older content. Its as if the servers have been culled of a lot of stuff we used to be able to get from the "old" Internet.
I remember when I used to surf the Web, but now I just go to where I need to go and get then get the hell out.

[Ace-Garageguy]

  On 10/19/2024 at 12:14 PM, MeatMan said:

...Another thing that isn't in the vid is the lack of good, older content. Its as if the servers have been culled of a lot of stuff we used to be able to get from the "old" Internet.

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There is another vid I started to post that visits that idea, but unfortunately, topics that would be deemed "political" here are mentioned, so I refrained.

One interesting thing that's happened very recently, however, was a major hacking attack on The Wayback Machine.

There are, apparently, some who would like to remove access to historical records.

[slusher]

My brother in law I a computer programmer and he told me the best thing about google is down loading musks, pictures and game industry..

[Russell C]

I'd say it's less about "Google being broken" and more about the public not being aware that the company isn't working on behalf of the public, but instead for itself. The one angle is classic "Madison Avenue," where they guess you are doing a search on something to buy which causes them to bend themselves into pretzel shapes to trick you into buying something. I learned years ago to scroll past any search result which looks like it's "sponsored" and I clear the cookies off my computer after every visit to Google (and pretty much to every other website) so that it can't get a good handle on what my purchasing interests might be. Also helps that I have a killer ad blocker. More than a decade back, before I did that kind of clearing, I was amazed that the Google side ads in Google searches were always for Chevy trucks and a particular GM car dealership only a few miles away which I could care less about.

The other angle is not on selling, but instead an outgrowth of the mindset of their top administrators and programmers. They may not realize they're doing it (some people suggest they do), but increasingly they are trying to steer you toward information rather than simply outright provide information. Case in point, a prominent famous person said something major and controversial several years back, I heard it clearly and so did many folks across the country, articles were written about it. But more recently when I wanted to repeat what the person said and couldn't remember the exact words, it took me probably 30 minutes+ to finally locate one article that included a video clip of the person speaking. Generic search words turned up the opposite of what I wanted, because … well … Google's top end people must have thought what the person said was damaging. So they buried it. The way I forced a result out of the system was to put particular words / phrases between quotation marks, which forces the search to only yield results of the specific items. For a non-controversial example of how that works -- if I asked the thing to show me results for Model Cars Mag, it comes up with results of models of all kinds (meaning model behavior, runway model women, model homes), cars (of every imaginable type), and …. you get the picture. If I type in "modelcarsmag" between quote marks, I get MCM right here. It's just one way of the larger method of boolean searches.

No offense to the other search engines, but my experience from doing intensive searches both for specific hobby pursuits and for items within a particularly politically divisive topic, I've see that Google is still head and shoulders above the others on coming up with the hard-to-find results I'm after. The other search engines just aren't that good. It drives me nuts, though, that lately a person needs to work extra hard to extract results that were easier to find 5 or 10 years back.