Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people's lived experience—says different.

For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline. Google disagrees.

  • Stuttgart273@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    The dangers of a monopoly. No matter how bad Google gets people will still use it because, in many people’s minds, there is no other search engine.

    • quatschkopf34@feddit.de
      0·
      10 months ago

      What are those? DDG, Bing, Ecosia etc. are all not really better than Google. I haven‘t tried Kagi yet, mostly because it costs money.

      • w00@feddit.de
        0·
        10 months ago

        You can use Kagi for free if you make an account and only use it when the others fail. Love Kagi, but won’t pay for it.

      • kusivittula@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        10 months ago

        i was struggling with DDG too, but in another post i saw someone recommend searx and it is actually really good.

        • Mixel@feddit.de
          0·
          10 months ago

          Fyi searx is deprecated or at least not maintained and discontinued Switch to searxNG which is an active fork and it is really good :D

      • Mixel@feddit.de
        0·
        10 months ago

        I agree it does suck in general One thing I tried is using a metasearch engine and for the least part I find the results better and way more customizable (for reference I am self hosting searxNG)

      • kosmoz@lemm.ee
        0·
        10 months ago

        You can actually try kagi for free. 100 searches/month should be enough for you to decide if it’s worth the money to you.

        (Not affiliated; just a happy user)

  • Undaunted@feddit.de
    0·
    10 months ago

    I’m using Kagi for quite some time now and it’s awesome. But recently I was using a different machine and did not have my login credentials at hand so I used Google and holy shit I didn’t remember Google giving such aweful results. I was not able to find what I was looking for. Then searched the same thing on my phone through Kagi and the solution was in the first three results. So yes I also feel that Google search is getting worse.

  • lichtmetzger@feddit.de
    0·
    10 months ago

    It’s gotten so hard to find authentic, useful results that people have started adding the word “Reddit” to search terms

    I have definitely done that multiple times.

    • GONADS125@feddit.de
      0·
      10 months ago

      I did for a long time, but it is only like 50% reliable now that I have abandoned reddit/never had the default app. So many subreddits are marked either NSFW (like weed related ones, or even certain games) or “under review,” which bars anyone not signed into a profile/on the default app from accessing the community/any page within it.

      So frustrating…

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
    0·
    10 months ago

    Google search results suck and I’ve actually heard regular people mention it. They just either don’t know how to switch search engines or they think Bing search sucks.

    • hannes3120@feddit.de
      0·
      10 months ago

      Or they still think they are entitled to a “free” search engine and don’t see the amount of resources needed for that and that it’s actually a service worth paying for, either through a subscription or through a donation-based service.

      Switching one private company for another is definitely not the way to go…