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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT (danluu.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

While in this particular case I agree with you, I've noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for "best linux distro" to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.

On the other hand, people aren't making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren't being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I do agree that the content farms are frustrating, and I'd like to see more done to combat them. I also agree that discussions happening on locked platforms is net loss for the sharing of information. I think search engines can do more about the former, but not as much about the latter. I think folks like us having discussions on the open can help.

I went ahead and searched "best Linux distro" and the top three results for me was

I then turned on my phones VPN, opened edge (normally use Firefox), went to Google, and repeated the search with the same top three results. I tried to bypass personalization, but might need to use a clean VM with VPN to succeed.

I actually thought all of those results were pretty good from a quick skim.

I will say I have custom DNS filters and plugins that block ads and untrustworthy domains and I can't guarantee that didn't influence my results.

I tried other searches like "best Linux distro" plus "programming" or "gaming" and received similarly helpful results. But I can't tell if I'm in a personalization bubble.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

This is the direct result of Google diminishing the importance of forums and blogs in the first place.

There used to be a "discussion" tab in Google search and forums used to have higher placement in Google. At some point they decided that "professional sites" are more important than discussions. Forums and blogs getting less traffic means more people decide to create content on SNS instead.

Google created this issue in the first place.