Thunderbird recently decided to follow the trend of searching for what it thinks you meant instead of what you actually searched for. Makes it fun trying to find the email about your court hearing in Teams when it pulls up any email with "team" or "hear" in it.
I had a lot of success with kagi. Yes, you have to pay for it, but that is part of changing internet culture. If you want to be the customer, you have to be a customer. I also think the pricing is really good for something you use hunderts of times a day. You'd never think twice about buying a good wrench, if you use wreches all day.
I miss when you could give a search engine something similar to SQL and it would seatch as requested. What I miss most is being able to exclude certain words or phrases.
DDG has been disappointing recently, returning pages of stuff that is almost, but not quite entirely, unlike what I asked for (HHGTTG ref).
Me, typing into the search bar: first-word second-word
Google: Here are the results without second-word. Include second-word in search results?
Me: No, thanks, I just typed that second word in there for the hell of it.
Every. Damn. Time.
There were much fewer words on the internet back then. Now, there would be a million pages containing those words. How to make the most relevant be in the first 10?
Back in the day, webmasters would put keywords repeated dozens of times in a font color same as background so it wouldn't be visible....because search engines prioritized based on keyword count. brave.com/learn/how-search-eng…
This article gives a primer on search algorithms, the basic building block of search engines, and the thing that powers the query results you see on search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search.
@rspfau O that those features (relevance and quality of content; recency; link structure, page layout, design, loading speed, and user experience; domain authority; social signals) were still used!
Often the top hits, not even counting the labeled ads, are clearly plagiarized or AI-generated pages produced merely to capture eyeballs. I can't imagine people are widely linking to these pages. Whatever happened to PageRank?
@peterdrake It's hard to imagine that many of those features aren't still used. I do lots of google searching (and others) and I'm not seeing the type of pages you describe (that doesn't mean that you're not seeing them--just that's not my personal experience). Can you give a specific example? I did [how to repair a bicycle tire] and got a variety of helpful resources that don't appear to be AI-generated or obviously plagiarized.
@peterdrake The content of the internet has changed dramatically from the 1990s, and I suspect that has a much more profound impact on what we see in search engine results rather than changes in how search engines rank sites. At the very least, both play a big role.
@rspfau @peterdrake I don’t have a link handy, but the head of search capitulated to the head of ads, who wanted more page views, so they reduced quality of results.
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
No doubt about that. More than one thing can be true! It can be true that 1990 search algorithms would suck when applied to today's internet just as bad as today's search algorithms suck. What we need is something better, not something old.
At least until recently you could override their "ignore what the user typed and search something else instead" behavior by using quotes, but lately even that is slipping...
@nazokiyoubinbou I’m still annoyed that they replaced + with quotes. I used to use quotes to search for phrases, and sometimes I wasn’t sure I remembered all the words right but the words not in a phrase would be completely useless, and those searches would work. That degradation of search didn’t need to outlive Google Plus
@irina Their ranking systems are... questionable sometimes. It's not even necessarily giving you the popular thing. I'd almost just describe it as the easier to search thing.
Meercat ✅
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in reply to Laukidh • • •Maybe rename Guess Engines?
🤷♂️ Engines
Gilgwath
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in reply to Mania Emma • • •Chris [list of emoji]
in reply to Laukidh • • •I feel you.
*screams*
sunflowerinrain
in reply to Laukidh • • •I miss when you could give a search engine something similar to SQL and it would seatch as requested.
What I miss most is being able to exclude certain words or phrases.
DDG has been disappointing recently, returning pages of stuff that is almost, but not quite entirely, unlike what I asked for (HHGTTG ref).
Laukidh
in reply to sunflowerinrain • • •@sunflowerinrain ah yes, that was the tea Arthur had made, right?
I miss altavista. I was good at altavista
Matt Jordan
in reply to Laukidh • • •I was just thinking the same thing.
mastodon.social/@muhkayoh/1136…
Matt Jordan (@muhkayoh@mastodon.social)
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rsp
in reply to Laukidh • • •rsp
in reply to rsp • • •brave.com/learn/how-search-eng…
How search algorithms power search engines
Brave SoftwarePeter Drake
in reply to rsp • • •@rspfau O that those features (relevance and quality of content; recency; link structure, page layout, design, loading speed, and user experience; domain authority; social signals) were still used!
Often the top hits, not even counting the labeled ads, are clearly plagiarized or AI-generated pages produced merely to capture eyeballs. I can't imagine people are widely linking to these pages. Whatever happened to PageRank?
rsp
in reply to Peter Drake • • •@peterdrake It's hard to imagine that many of those features aren't still used. I do lots of google searching (and others) and I'm not seeing the type of pages you describe (that doesn't mean that you're not seeing them--just that's not my personal experience). Can you give a specific example? I did [how to repair a bicycle tire] and got a variety of helpful resources that don't appear to be AI-generated or obviously plagiarized.
For Google, click Web to see just 10 plain links.
rsp
in reply to rsp • • •@peterdrake The content of the internet has changed dramatically from the 1990s, and I suspect that has a much more profound impact on what we see in search engine results rather than changes in how search engines rank sites. At the very least, both play a big role.
The original PageRank was targeted by SEO/spam (thus lost its value) and had to be modified. You can read about the evolution of Page Rank here:
ahrefs.com/blog/google-pageran…
semrush.com/blog/pagerank/
Google PageRank in 2024: What Google Search Leak Reveals
Erika Varangouli (Semrush)Laukidh
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in reply to Laukidh • • •The Man Who Killed Google Search
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1337 $#!+ I did that
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Dan V Peterson
in reply to Laukidh • • •Nazo
in reply to Laukidh • • •YES! Thank you!
At least until recently you could override their "ignore what the user typed and search something else instead" behavior by using quotes, but lately even that is slipping...
Laukidh
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