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You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds (gizmodo.com)

submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people's lived experience—says different.

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[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

DuckDuckGo finds some things. I'm no expert.

[–] sturlabragason@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but those are just privacy protective Bing results, right?

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 6 points 10 months ago

I've heard people say that the answer is no, but in looking into it just now myself it looks like rather it is sometimes yes as well.

Basically the best way to describe it seems to be that it is "NOT Google, and MOSTLY does not want to be FULLY Bing (but still is somewhat, they're wanting to work on it, but to be clear they do have embedded Microsoft trackers that they are forced to leave in due to their licensing agreement)".

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I would NOT use it for shopping, I tried that recently and got a ton of really sketchy looking sites with way too cheap products that had no internet presence before this month. This might be more pronounced if you search specific product model numbers like I was rather than general terms.

I’ve had it be mostly okay on other stuff. I use it over Google but mostly because I don’t want to pay for a search engine.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Tbf, do those sketchy sites also show up with Google?

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’d have to repeat the search to check again, but I don’t remember seeing the same sites when I repeated the search on Google, at least not on the first page in the top few spots the way it was on DDG.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So maybe that's the genius of DDG - you skip right past the predatory SEO-optimized sites straight away to the predatory sketchy ones:-D.

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

LOL! Yeah I’m paranoid enough about buying from strange sites that it’s not a problem, and frankly I expect the AI generated SEO optimized spam to be more likely to be riddled with malware.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 3 points 10 months ago

Hrm, maybe Google screens those, so they are more purely a waste of your time rather than something that can be actually reported to a federal agency? :-P Or perhaps it is just a better scam, to keep a site up there for longer = more clickbait dollars, with less risk of angering someone so much that they track the scammers down and send them a "package" of explosive fun!:-D (the easiest profits come when the harmed party does not even realize that they have lost anything)