No Stupid Questions

If you use Google, try moving away from that! Half of its results are sponsored and the other half SEO optimised crap nowadays, and there are better search engine alternatives. I would push you towards Qwant and Ecosia, because they are working together to develop a search index independent from Google and Bing (which is being trialled in France and Germany!), and they both have much stronger privacy policies, being hosted in the EU after all. They are both as easy to use as Google, no excuses for something being too "different" (it's just a search box and your results)

Between Qwant (blue and glowy) and Ecosia (green and flat), the difference is mostly whether you prefer the look of one over the other. Ecosia is also a non-profit that uses some of its revenue to plant trees, which is pretty awesome! If you want to look at their reports, they're easily accessible on their website. Qwant is still great though, and you will get good results from either!

Avoid Startpage (owned by an advertising company as far as I understand) and Brave (involved in weird crypto stuff, replacing affiliate links, etc.). DuckDuckGo has become a lot closer to Google in terms of the number of sponsored results now, plus they are based in the U.S.

And of course, SearXNG is awesome too, there are lots of public instances (see searx.space for a list), and you can self-host it too. It basically aggregates results from the search engines of your choosing!

I subscribed to Kagi over a year ago. Once and a while I'll try another engine and they're all terrible by comparison.

Highly recommended if you can swing it.

well just make a post with the wrong answer and somebody will come to correct you

Yeah, search engines are shit these days. I make posts on help forums if I can't get an answer. Or am in various Matrix rooms where I might ask as well.

it's literally a skill issue

Search has gotten progressively worse over the past 10 years, and 5ish years ago it got so bad that it was a problem.

I gave up on Google as a search engine as the results nowadays seem like filler content tailored towards page rankings.

I started using Kagi about a year ago, and searching feels useful again. Highly recommended.

Search has grown worse IMO to push you to use ai more. Ai reviews, ai sites, they need to give the appearance of it working better so you'll use it. To do this they dumbed it way down.

Use something other than Google or Bing, like Ecosia, Qwant, or Mojeek.

It's gotten terrible over the last 5 years. AI slop is infecting everything and causing so much noise, it's impossible to find real info anymore.

Best I can suggest is searches across Starpage, DDG, Qwant and Brave. When one fails, try the next one.

Noai.duckduckgo.com

Still not the best, but it searches the web in the old school way, so it’s more reliable.

Search is not an easy service. The non-AI search relied on server farms, indexing what is on the internet, and pointing you at what just likely is the answer. There was a sweet spot somewhere between maybe 2005 and 2015 when Google search was fantastic. With the data it knows about you it got you there maybe 19 out 20 searches.

And then things started happening. Google realised that they could sell more ads if their results were a little more shit and they required you to do more searches or click thru more results pages. At the same time, the content of stuff on the internet may have also reached a point where the idea of indexing everything started reaching its practical limits. And the longer time has elapsed since the graphical internet came about, the more deadwood has accumulated. Websites built in ancient days, now unmaintained, services that ended, expired licenses and certificates, etc. The answer you're looking for may have been out there but for one reason or another can no longer be retrieved.

That's all before the slop tsunami hit. And this food of content makes it harder still.

So-called AI is technology that's being beta tested on everybody. I'm sure it's getting better. At the same time there are plenty of valid reasons to look at it with suspicion. The bullshit it has made up, the additional environmental impact, the stealing of training data, etc. There is every chance that sAIrch will be better in the future than the sweet spot search of the recent past. But we're not there yet in my opinion. We're in the in-between time and we just have to muddle thru.

Google is betting big on this prospect. It's self serving for them because they can downgrade their massive indexing operation and/or free up computing resources for other tasks. So I'm not sure if they're more driven by financial motivations or conviction in the idea. Too early to tell. Nobody in the late 90s saw Google coming and eating everybody's lunch in the search market. There is also a chance that a new company we haven't heard from yet is waiting in the wings.

I think what your seeing is search engines don't work like they used to. They give you what they think you want not what you asked for. Google might have been the first to make there search worse. They want you to use AI instead now. It also sucks. I usually try other search engines other than the main ones. Also indexing the entire web is not easy and would take a large amount of resources to do so some of the smaller ones seem incomplete.

my favorite searches are for a problem and you get plenty of forums and such with people who saw the problem but no solution.

I often times use the time filters to filter out content after 2020. (Of course only for timeless topics)
I also use uBlacklist to filter out obvious AI Slop especially those just reposting human stuff, like grokipedia. (there are also ready made lists for that) as well as highlighting great sources like wikipedia, mdn and what not.

Well, IMHO it depends on what kind of answer you expect and what question do you ask.

Maybe you're not good in asking. Maybe the question is to open ended. Maybe you're the first person asking.

I use Kagi for search. Between it and my self-hosted copy of Wikipedia, I'm pretty happy.

I love Wikipedia

Google has gotten tremendously awful at the basic fundamentals of searching.

So you've got this stupid AI thing of theirs that thinks it's helpful by giving you its thoughts about what it thinks about what you've searched for. It also brings up relatively irrelevant things.

Then you've got another block of some of the dumbest things that get asked. You know the "People also asked about..." section which is just an annoying rabbit hole that degrades your intelligence just by reading what's there.

Then you've got about the first page plastered with ads and suggestions that have nothing to do with what you're looking for. Forcing you to go through pages until maybe something is there.

Ain't it wonderful? /s

SEO slop was a problem 10 years ago. Now it’s AI generated SEO slop which is indistinguishable from the SEO slop because AI trained on reams of the crap.

I think that forums really dropped off in popularity; people move to Facebook, discord, or Reddit closed communities so it’s not indexed or it’s hard to access. That, and the value of a blog approaches zero with the volume of slop out there, makes it hard to find stuff online. It’s not being posted in the first place.

Use better engines like Kagi is the answer. Startpage.com is an OK free option. You could also try Ecosia, Qwant, or DuckDuckGo.

Google is absolute dogshit now because they went all in on AI with no regard for what the user experience is actually like (same shit they pulled when they killed Assistant to try and force people to use Gemini, which is horrible as an assistant - can't even reliably set a fucking timer and it still requires gigs of space on your phone and an active internet connection just to tell you to use the timer app, WTF?). Their search was well past its heyday, but things really took a nosedive with Gemini. Their goal is to make money now rather than correctly indexing data and helping people find things, they are not the company they originally were and haven't been for a long time.

Use ai