- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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I’ll play devil’s advocate.
The author is basically complaining that search results aren’t tailored to their own search habits, and for all we know they are using tools to prevent Google data collection for personalized search.
Using the search term “YouTube downloader” and having the success criteria being the return of a fork of a command line Python tool is an insane test for the general public. How many of your family members who are looking to download a YouTube video would be helped by that result?
I searched “YouTube downloader” and received the usual ad-ridden websites that let you download a video. Then I searched “YouTube downloader Linux” and the top result was ytdl-org on GitHub. Seems reasonable.
I’ve seen many people complain about Google search lately. I wonder how many of them either have unrealistic expectations, never learned to use scoping keywords, or who stopped search personalization and lost benefits they didn’t know they were getting. And expecting a fork of a command line tool to be the top result for YouTube downloader is definitely unrealistic.
Anecdotally, I’ve used more or less the same search strategy for 30 years, and it still brings up relevant results. And while I agree that seo gamification can make certain keywords harder than others to use, this article and test really wasn’t testing search scenarios the average non-technical user of these search engines would have.
In my perception Google Search is far worse than it had been 10 years ago & I never cared about personalized search at all. I used to just sit down in an internet cafe, search some stuff & get great results, now that does not happen anymore, or at least not reliably. Google is better than its competitors at understanding your search intent if you use whole sentences instead of carefully selected keywords, but with a good search strategy even Duck/Bing are more than competitive now.
Of course the diversity of the web kind of dying could have something to do with this as well.
Tl;dr, use Marginalia for basic queries.
Tested to search for a stomp rust crate and got horrible results. So, I guess that you should test the different search engines with your use case and see which one fits that.
I wanted to finish reading it, but that post was so friggin’ long! It’s good to know that the feeling of “wow, search results have really gotten worse” isn’t a unique one.
IMO, the only way to improve this is to have a decentralised/distributed search engine. Unfortunately, YaCY is written in Java and amazingly slow on the server as well as at getting results (see test instance). PreSearch is basically web3 crap. And I can’t think of another search engine with the same model.
Since the fediverse is picking up steam, maybe there’s a chance that a federated search engine could be made, but who knows…
I have a baseless guess as to who that unsourced quote from a “bluesky thought leader” might’ve come from although I’ve never been on bluesky. Naturally the search engines cannot find its source either, which suggests another reason why they’re less useful than they used to be.
Also, Bluesky only recently made it so posts can be viewed on the website without login, so search engines probably haven’t had time to scrape much of it yet, however that’s determined.
That you felt the need to use images instead of links exemplifies yet another reason search engines have trouble these days I guess. Interestingly, the search box on bsky.app is also unable to find it when I try from here. Mastodon search is often no better of course, but what with bluesky being completely monolithic and centralized you’d think it’d be easier for them.
I didn’t feel the need to post screenshots for any reason, I just post screenshots. Don’t read too much relevancy into that.
Why is google bad at the firefox query, the first result is from mozilla
