People still use Google for search?
Do people still use the most popular search engine for search? I get you’re trying to be factitious but it comes across as naff.
It might be the most popular but it is utter crap and has been for a while. It has reached peak enshittification. You used to be able to say you absolutely wanted a term in the search or you didn’t want other terms. It ignores all of that now. Google stopped being about able to search years ago and is more about showing you the most relevant ad. I’m either DuckDuckGo or I self-host my own searxng. I’ve also tried using a locally hosted perplexica (running on my own local LLM) which uses searxng underneath the hood I think.
Btw: I’m a yank so I had to look up naff so I learned some cool new slang! Now I’ll admit I was being slightly flippant but serious in the fact that Google really sucks as a search engine now.
I just tried to use google a few hours ago and it got me the same bad results as other search engines, only that it gave me a bunch of advertisements and AI slop first.
Right… But you’re not operating under the misapprehension that Google is somehow an uncommon choice for search. I agree it’s gotten crap in a lot of cases, but equally I also know just about everyone uses it for search.
*facetious
DuckDuckGo is way better.
Maybe I just am using it wrong, but DDG consistently gives me completely irrelevant results, while Google still gives me what I’m looking for about 70% of the time. Maybe I just need to learn the proper way to search with DDG but so far it’s been next to useless in finding me relevant info.
Owner of product being sold says product is not bad.
Nice try Mr convinso
I believe it, chiefly because I read the slop answer and then have to check 5 more pages to figure out if it’s spouting nonsense or not.
I click the links to the source on the relevant part.
So he’s lying. Good to know.
Man who invented torture nexus claims torture nexus isn’t used for torture.
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Riiight… Next headline: “Pusher claims that his drugs not the cause sleepless nights and bugs under the skin”
Fox promises hens will be safe at his daycare.
AI is driving more searches
This is hilarious. People are searching more because they aren’t getting results they need from AI, which drives ad revenue so Google’s doing great!
Search engines are so significantly worse than they were a decade ago. The golden age of accurate searches is over, now it’s all SEO piss and AI slop.
SEO garbage has been around for much more than a decade. In fact, before Google got really good at search ranking, sites easily gamed the search engines.
To give credit to the people trying to make good search, the internet is so much worse than it was a decade or two ago.
Over that time the ad driven internet has encouraged low quality, high volume websites full of articles designed around common search terms.
It started before AI, but now you can drum up an article in seconds it has got much worse.
There are really two options, either
- Clicks on results have decreased because AI summaries are so good. Or
- AI summaries aren’t giving the answers people want so they’re clicking on results.
It’s good for Google to show that clicks are happening because that’s part of how they make their money, their clients need the clicks to survive. It’s good for Google to show that AI summaries are being used because it’s a product they’ve poured a lot of money into, that’s being sold to shareholders as a superintelligence.
Bubble is going to burst.
I run sites for a major NGO for addiction recovery. We often ask people how they found us. More than half now say AI. We don’t have ads in our sites, but for people monetizing their sites this must be dramatic.
Also, Google must be bleeding ads revenue,
Are we counting Gemini interactions as search?
Ding ding ding
If you make up a new metric then you can say there isn’t a problem.
Google search boss says words and no numbers :333
To computer, word is numbers
That’s not what the data said back in March. I highly doubt it’s gotten better.
Company fails to realize people circumvent their shoehorned tool
Amount of Google searches I’ve made since implementation of AI results: zero
I’ve only used Google a couple of times, and by accident. The ebook reader I have seems hard coded to search Google when you ask it to search the web for a word in the book. I intensely dislike the AI slop. I do not want an AI summary of the Wikipedia article. Just take me to the wiki article you dunces!
Reading bing, dogpile ddg and misc website aggregate requests as clicks
