A few years ago anything you wanted to search for would generate hundreds of pages of results. From sources all over. If you structured your query well you could dramatically cut down the irrelevant results and then spend a bit of time skimming through the offerings until you found your target.
Searching felt like a hunt, it could take you to far flung corners of the web, and hitting the jackpot on some obscure forum was part of the fun.
Now searching anything feels incredibly frustrating. You know what you are looking for is out there somewhere but it feels impossible getting to it. Basically we have only two main routes now, Google and Bing (and I swear Bing is just copying Google's homework). I've tried a handful of others and they all fall very short.
Something has changed dramatically under the hood.
It seems like the results are very shallow and no amount of prodding will get either search engine to produce anything besides the laziest output. Any subject has a limited pool of sites they lean on and then pretend that that's all of the Internet.
It generalizes very quickly and if you try to counter by putting things in quotations it gives up.
Even in the rare moments I've buckled and used their stupid AI, it takes even more time browbeating the program to just deliver the damned specifics.
What is going on??
How do we get our old search back?
I swear every day of trying to navigate the web feels worse than the day before.
How did we get here?
There's got to be something better, right? Or something we can do to pave a new structure that benefits the denizens of the web better than the lazy slop our tech overlords scrape off the table for us. What can we do?
Google in particular getting worse to get you to click through more results pages or to run more queries so they can sell more ads on each of those is well attested. I used Bing for a while and didn't think it was better or worse than newly bad Google. So now I use an equally shitty non-US search engine (start page) and just give up sooner.
In their defence, I think the exponentially increasing content of the internet, and the not insignificant portion that just sits there dead or unmaintained, plus the bits and bytes that just disappear as subscriptions or support run out are difficult problems. It's getting ever harder to write an algorithm to sort through that as well. That plus greed equals shit.
Pre-Google we had very shitty search results. Than Google became the Kleenex, the word everybody used. Then Google got worse. While my faith in "American Intelligence" is somewhat limited, I think we will get back to better results soon. What Google had to do (build big server farms to look at all of the internet to index it) may become trivially easy for a sufficiently good LLM eventually. Although we're not there yet. Given that it's not just Microsoft or Google fighting in that market for dominance, I live in hope that competition from OpenAI etc. lights a fire under their arses.
Startpage is owned by an American advertising company.
Try Qwant or Ecosia. They're working together to develop an independent search index (Staan) and it's already in use in France and Germany.
Eff me, really? Can you back this up? I only see a company in The Netherlands.
Just check their Wikipedia page.
Good points.
Legacy stuff is definitely getting buried under the new wave. Exacerbated by the fact that "new" sells while old "costs somebody to maintain".
Speaking of costs, I guess the free lunch is about over. Besides the cost to access, most of the web was essentially free. A little bit of banner advertising paid for a simple website. But between then and now it's becoming clear that the continued expansion of increasingly invasive marketing and data collection to pay for larger and large sites, and their complexity, is not sustainable.