Interesting, I remember a lot of people switching from Google and even seeing billboard ads for DDG. Even Ecosia, the site I use myself, is just returning Bing results (which are somewhat less ideologically curated compared to Google results). I don't like Bing either (Microsoft are a criminal enterprise). Has anyone used another search engine to recommend for privacy and good social values?
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i think this is low key wrecking minds. our brains are being SEO'd. it becomes harder to refer to a thing itself, and instead, it's now whatever is boosted by the algo
also, shit, i made a bad choice many years ago. i stopped focusing on memorizing things because i could always just google it
Idk if this is just me, but I feel like there was also a transitional period post-2012 where I'd put "quotation marks" around every word to make sure it didn't ignore it. But even that doesn't fucking work anymore.
Yeah a couple of years ago Google stopped recognizing search operators like quotation marks,
AND,NOT, etc.EDIT: I may be wrong about this, haven't used Google in a while
Wait really? No wonder its got really shit for me too. feels bad man, just want classic google back.
So I just checked and apparently the
-and quotation mark operators are still supposed to work. I wouldn't be surprised if Google does its natural language fuckery anyway though.I think this is a documented shift in the psychology of a lot of young people who grew up with the internet. People use their brainpower to remember where and how to find things rather than remembering things directly. It's not necessarily a bad thing, since it's more efficient overall I think.
Of course, it is kind of a bad thing when a lot of human knowledge starts to depend on the existence of a dozen major websites
unless it's on your hard drive, and backed up, it doesn't exist
It's because of "search engine optimisation", where people sort of "game" the algorithms to get their website featured higher in Google results (in particular, Google SEO is the most well-known).
The top Google results for most images are from Pinterest and require an account to view them full size. I've heard "they are good at SEO" as an explanation, but I think Google would rather boost Pinterest to further the goal of a closed internet.
the worst is pornhub. Sometime around 2018 their search function because babby's first programming project
yea I know volcel yadda yadda
Same here. A search I did last night, in fact: "best mecha tabletop game" returned a bunch of clickbaity articles that were mostly useless - but "best mecha tabletop game reddit" linked me a bunch of threads of people talking about and linking to what I was looking for that were way more informative.
reddit is effectively the new google. It's the best low-tech/accessible way to see what people actually talk about, and to see what those people are like.
This is absolutely how I search for things
Yeah I hate this shit and I don't know how to fix it. It seems like the last 2 years it has become especially bad. You really can't find shit any more.
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Yeah and it's always half-irrelevant articles and blogs and never any primary sources or actual discussion.
yeah I do the same with "forum" a lot of times to find actual discussion