Yeah, DDG quality seems abysmal for many of my searches now. I'll then switch to Brave, which sometimes finds what I'm looking for. I rarely ever check Google or Bing as a fallback, but when I do it feels like a screenful of ads and it isn't any more helpful (except Google Image search).
Part of the problem seems like a recency bias in search results. I notice sites frequently update pages with new timestamps, but nothing of substance appears to have changed (e.g. a review of something that was released 4 years ago, but the page was supposedly updated last week). So if I do pretty much the same search that succeeded two months ago, but repeat it today, I might not find the useful result I remember coming across.
I'm sure there are a bunch of other issues related to search and SEO that are affecting search quality. It seems insane that the major search providers don't combat this trend by arming users with more tools to tailor their search, but rather steadily degrade the user experience with no recourse.
Honestly, I think if Google was wise, they'd have a skunkworks team rethinking search from scratch (not tied to AI/LLMs) that starts their own index and tries to come up with an alternative to the current Google Search. Maybe they have that already, though I doubt it. I'm sure if they do have such a team, it's intricately tied to existing infrastructure and team hierarchies which effectively nullifies any chance it has at success.
I would be happy with an even simpler solution. Give me a blacklist domains or sites. There are 50 or so sites that I never want to see posts from. It’s not one or two that I can add an exclusion in my searches.
Second, give me a way to express semantic meaning of something. If I’m searching for rust, let me choose programming language for example. I find myself adding various one word tags to limit the search results.
Personally I have one use case left for Google: Product Search.
If I'm looking to buy something, I will frequently end up using Google. The engine that matches my product search to a relevant ad is excellent. Basically anytime you need to search for something that could lead to a purchase of a physical product, Google will be extremely useful. For services and software you can't use Google, you will get hustled by fake review or top 10 XYZ for 2024 sites.
I can't believe how terrible product search is on Instacart - I place orders on there pretty frequently for my mom, and Petco is the worst.
I will search for "wellness chicken cat food" - and wellness has chicken cat food in a few different textures, so it seems like those should at least be on the page of search results, if not the top results. Not always so! At the very least I will have to scroll a ways down the page to get anything even wellness.
And sometimes the top results aren't even cat food, they will be random other pet supplies.
Or she wants a few different flavors of the food, and I find one and then the other flavors I have to search a few different ways to pull them up and they don't show up on any "similar" displays.
It's painful. I hope Google doesn't go the same way - I think with Instacart it's because they want to promote whatever it is they put at the top, but even that doesn't explain how terrible some of the search results are.
Meijer (grocery store) is the same. Until a short while ago, you even had to match the capitalization of the product you were searching for. And we are not even talking about different writings of the same Unicode characters (ê etc.) with different bytes.
I use it for deterministic things. If I’m looking for something specific or a well known thing, it simply gets me the results I’m looking for.
For anything that’s indeterministic, it just brings me garbage. The same with YouTube as well. I’m searching for a specific thing about a particular library and it’s showing me stupid definition blogs or useless garbage. I apologize for my crudeness but no other words can describe it.
