There was a Google search engineer on Reddit who claimed the opposite personally, Google is going down the trash but the alternatives aren't any better. Of course I can find it now, thanks Google.
I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
Unfortunately, content farms can push new websites and blogs faster than you could ever downvote them. LLM are going to make that task increasingly easier. I've no idea how we're ever going to be able to search anything anymore using classic search engines. We either go back to website directories, or forward to AI generated content..
Perhaps that is one additional layer of friction that will make human moderation / social voting feasible. The fire hose of AI trash content will come too rapidly for it to work at layer 1 (all content), but if the barrier to entry is a financial transaction to take over placement in a human-curated webring or directory it becomes easier to moderate / vote away the trash.
Add a trust metric and chains of provenance. Bad ring link -> bad trust percolating up that chain. Little trust, your site isn't always shown as part of the ring. Too much loss of trust, you're out.
(Ultimately, this is a bad facsimile of human group behavior - all the way up to shunning people who deeply violate group norms. And I don't think it'll scale super-well. )
Except there's no provenance or root of trust. There is (IIUC) no back-propagation of a penalty if sites violate trust, just an overall observational measure.
And I'd still say pagerank did work really well in an Internet where there was overwhelmingly trust. But in a world where default-trust is a bad stance, I believe there needs to be an equivalent of what "You can trust X" does in small in-person groups. (Or, alternatively "Sheesh, X went off and just destroyed all trust")
I do think it'll need to be more than a single metric, too. Trust is multidimensional by topic(E.g. "I trust the NYTs data science folks, I have zero trust for the OpEds"), and it is somewhat personal. (E.g. I might have experienced X lying to me, while they've been 100% honest to you - maybe in/outgroup, maybe political alignment, maybe differing beliefs, etc. Ultimately, what we call trust in an indirect situation is "most of my directly trusted folk vouch for that person)
Keyservers. You decide which keyservers to register with and to trust for verifying others. Browsers would handle en-decryption automatically and allow you to flag, filter, or finger (in the Unix sense).
I used DDG for a while, but DDG's quality fell precipitously a few years ago (similar issues where it ignores quotes and won't find pages even if you search for the title string exactly, etc) and I eventually came back to Google which has also been increasingly frustrating.
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
There's no way this won't get abused, but the SEO stuff is out of control. Not even spammer blogs, but if you have a quick question like "how do I check tire pressure" you will only get articles that start with a treatise on the entire history of car tires and the answer is deeply buried somewhere in the article. My guess is that Google sees that we're on the page for a longer time than we would spend on pages that just return the answer, and they assume that "more time on page" == "better content" or something.
DDG has become ridiculous. They seem to be merging "local", geoIP based results no matter what country I select on the region list (or I disable it). Very often completely unrelated stuff (but local) appears on the 5th or 6th result, midway the first page.
Most egregiously I will search for something very rare (e.g. about programming) and DDG will return me results regarding my city's tourist/visitor info. It's as if it just keeps ignoring words from the search prompt that return no results until it runs out of keywords then it's just the geoIP results.
I hate this forced localization so much and its everywhere. The internet used to be a place where you would actually encounter stuff outside your locale.
That is because DuckDuckGo started relying almost entirely on Bing for their regular search results after first Yahoo gave up maintaining its own index then Yandex became part of a natio non grata leaving them to choose between partnering with Bing and partnering with Google or creating their own index https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
The tire pressure query is exactly the kind of thing that AI should be able to handle easily, though. At which point google has an incentive to sort their competitiveness out.
Love kagi. The first time I got the "your payment was successful" notification I felt like I'd never get that much value out of it. But now, a few months later, I feel like I could never go back.
No? At least not like you are implying. Kagi queries multiple data sources and synthesizes results. This means Google’s failure to index does not impact Kagi in the same way as it would DDG (with Bing).
Though a subscriber myself, Kagi doesn't really add results, does it?
It merely weeds out the trash for you. So you can get to the bottom of search results.
Looks promising, though I noticed that it doesn't encode queries properly when searching. For example, if you go to the homepage and search for "../robots.txt", you'll be redirected to the site's own robots.txt file
What I want is a "serious mode" that makes it favor primary sources, peer reviewed papers, and raw data. When I search for economic data, I don't want a million news articles referencing pieces of it. I want the raw data release. When I search for some video going viral, I don't want a million videos of journalists talking and showing clips. I want the full raw video.
Beautifully said! As a thinker of philosophy, I have come to understand that our clip-society is based by design. People can express power over others if they tell you a construction and then show a clip to support it. They really don't want you to see the source/what it is/the truth. They want you want you see what they show you. This problem is accelerating in western societies and it is a fundamental problem of human nature. Journalism is the healthy expression and what we see in today's media is the sickly end.
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
This is sort of what I've been trying to do with Marginalia Search, except I don't really believe a voting system would work. It's far too easy to manipulate. Been playing with the thought of having something like an adblock-list style system where domain shitlists can be collaborated on and shared without being authoritative for the entire search engine.
My search engine is still pretty rough around the edges and limited but I think it works well enough to demonstrate the idea has some merit.
> Been playing with the thought of having something like an adblock-list style system where domain shitlists can be collaborated on and shared without being authoritative for the entire search engine.
Even just personal shitlists would be golden and make just about everyone happy.
Something I've wanted (which probably exists as an extension in Chrome?) for Google searches is a simple blacklist. Just a little button and confirmation next to a result, telling it to never show this blog-spam-ad-laden-SEO-mess of a page to me ever again. Maybe it's an uphill battle, but for some niche topics (like certain games) there are some sites I keep having to scroll past and sometimes accidentally click that are written in SEO-speak and say a lot without saying anything at all.
Remember Guestbooks? you'd visit a website, and volunteer your name and which country you were from and leave comments. And it wouldn't be a cesspool of spam and porn and XSS attacks? How quaint!
Oh gosh, yes! And reading the guestbook was always so fun. An elderly friend of mine passed away in 2018, and in doing a (google) search of him, I found guestbooks he'd signed 20 years ago.
You would look for a thing and the first five pages were random mailing list discussion archives discussing how the thing was 5 years before... Altavista was impressive, but there is a reason why it went away.
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
I want this too, but I think an often understated aspect of this issue is that by this point Google has absolutely trashed the web of that era. In these threads people will say "the content you want isn't out there, it's all on social media now" -- and they're largely right, but I think Google is the party most responsible for mutilating the web to the state it is in now, and users fled to social media partly because it seemed like a safe haven.
What we need is a concentrated effort to rebuild the web. Take the best parts of what we've learned and combine with the best parts of what we've left behind and try to build something better, for humans, not for advertisers and hyper-capitalists.
That will take time, energy, and people who remember what we lost and believe we can build something better. A better search engine alone is not enough.
Largely right, but actually a lot of that stuff is still out there. The personal and hobby pages, forums, blogs, etc.
Google just doesn't know that they exist anymore, or rather doesn't want us to know, because those sites are not commercial enough or big enough.
Almost without fail, no matter what you search for, it tries its best to turn it into a search for a product or service. And those content oriented websites don't fit that, so it just pretends they don't exist.
The web changed when every kinda slimy business bro realized they could monetize gaming search results. No matter what your fantasy web looks like, be assured, people will game it to the point it's not what you intended.
If I take that viewpoint on everything I might as well live as a recluse in the woods and avoid people altogether. I have to believe that there are enough of us are out there that genuinely want to build better things for people.
The web, just like the real world isn’t static. Becoming and staying intellectually, emotionally and physically mobile may be the only long term strategy to avoid ending up in one or the other dystopia, sooner or later.
When rates of change were slower, you might only have to “move” once in your life, but with increasing rates of change in our human experience, staying nimble is arguably of ever increasing importance.
And my point is that there are probably a lot of those motivated people working on the problem today. You make it out as though we've arrived at this state by either lack of effort or competence by Google/Microsoft. My guess is that every time they change the algorithm, the spammers adapt too. That's inevitable and would be just as much of a challenge for your supposed utopia. If you have some secret they don't, there's certainly plenty of money to be made.
I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.