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Are search engines, like Google, relevant at all anymore? Why use them? A relevant debate. It's not 2010 anymore.

Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?

well..

a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It's also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.

Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn't a good alternative search engines remained relevant as we users tolerated their direction.

Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it's still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.

On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what's happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is the *Windows cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that *disfavors it, or is in favor of WIndows 11?

It's all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you see, or some, or none of them and then move on with your day as it should be.

Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?

Brkdncr ,

Just wait for the bots. Also, search engines have been playing cat and mouse with SEO for a while. I don’t know why it’s gotten so bad lately.

Rob OP ,

Unlike on Google search, if you see a bot on Lemmy, or Mastodon, you can just block the bot and never see them again. Follow accounts/communities you trust to be reliable for finding info on various topics to eliminate the chances of running into the bots (since you more likely will be looking at your following feed.)

I wish seo would make the web more lively again but I just see them as a lost cause, and the Fediverse as the better future.

sramder ,
@sramder@lemmy.world avatar

So one bot watches and another posts, possibly from an established account farmed with real human labor.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I've been blocking bots for 6 months now, it's a neverending stream of new garbage.

Rob OP ,

That's a price to pay to have a free internet.

If bots are an issue, and I believe it can be sometimes, you could try suggesting to Lemmy developers to invest into bot protection for the platform. Also, the instance maintainers themselves.

XTL ,

Fvo "a while" that are about 25 years. The pressure has been going up all the time as more and more companies and spammers try to shoehorn themselves into irrelevant searches.

Sal ,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.

Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.

Rob OP ,

Good point. While Search Engines do have their place and uses. My issue isn't with the idea of the search engine itself but with seo deciding what resualts show up or will never show up regardless of the quality of the source. A lot of it goes against the open internet.

Kissaki ,

Do you know what SEO stands for? It's not SEO that is ranking results. SEO is the consequence of ranking results by relevance and quality.

What's your alternative? Give supposedly relevant results randomly? That'd be even worse.

Rob OP ,

My alternative is to deliver what people are actually saying on the search engine based off of what a user searches. Not just a handful of special outlets that know they are hand picked and take advantage of their position.

Sal ,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

You can take a lot of control by using search commands. Here is a list of commands for Google, for example: https://www.lifewire.com/advanced-google-search-3482174

By using commands like these you can narrow down your searches to the point that the impact of SEO is small. You give a much greater weight to the conditions that you have chosen.

It can be a bit of work to write a good search query, but the database that search engines search through is massive, so it makes sense that it would take some work to do this right.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I only find search engines somewhat irrelevant because I'm almost never searching for, like, a website. I'm searching for information or software that's compiled on 1 of 5 websites and I can usually use the search function on those specific sites.

Used to use search engines to find new websites. Back when Google was new and it was easier to find cool stuff with keywords rather than by adding .com to random words in the URL bar.

Rob OP ,

That is what we are missing. The Fediverse makes searching by keyword so simply easy, with it being decentralized, this feature will be preserved as long that people developing the Mastodon's and the Lemmy's keep supporting it. If they don't you won't ever actually lose that feature you would likely have to join another platform like Firefish, or Sharkey and search the Fediverse that way if something like this were to happen. This is why I still stand with the Fediverse being better for the longer term than Google as a search engine.

Teon ,
@Teon@kbin.social avatar

Here is some info about the decline of truth on google search.
https://bbbhltz.codeberg.page/blog/2024/02/seoshenanigans/

Rob OP ,

I'm not as worried about the decline of truth, but rather the decline of the open web. Google is favoring it's search engine for a few. Sites such as Quara, Reddit, cnn always get top resualts. It's never anyone else unless specifically searched for. If you don't specifically search for them others never get heard on Google search.

dariusj18 ,

Trash in/trash out. Small communities of experts can create quality content, but after becoming relevant enough astroturfing begins.

TruthAintEasy ,
@TruthAintEasy@kbin.social avatar

Google is free, Im searching recipies, websites of companies I might invest in, the law in general and pop-culture crap 90% of the time

Seems like a waste of water and energy to ask a highpowered LLM about it. I heard each query on GPT uses 12L of fresh water, seems wastefull when I could just use a basic google

Edit: it is approx .5L of water for 5 to 50 prompts, thanks google!

solidgrue ,

Search engines are good for what you might call "keyword searches" across websites. I'd say SEO spam has degraded quality of hits and made search results less reliable than even 5 years ago. There's a lot more chaff to winnow now in the main search services. You sorta need to discriminate on hits, and dig a bit deeper into the results to find that new nugget you didn't already see 3 or 4 times already in previous searches with similar, but different parameters.

I find the LLM AIs to be slightly better at turning up obscure info these days. The conversation sets some persistent context that's helpful when you need to dial in on obscure stiff like a driver issue, tuning problem or weird product spec. You still need to carefully vet your results, but the AIs understand technical jargon pretty well, and generally return some solid analysis for leas common scenarios.

They're also good for pick-and-shovel work in odd tech areas, but you really need to be careful with the results because they're confidently wrong in speculative conversation only slightly more often than they're confidently right.

That's just my opinion, but it's how I do search these days: use an AI to refine keywords, then use DDG or Google to find familiar sites with corollary content.

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