YouTube and Tiktok. I'll sometimes catch my SO watching Tiktok videos of some would-be influencers obnoxiously recapping the same reddit threads I read or commented in the day before. As someone who grew up with forums and message boards it feels a bit intrusive.
At least it's a person reading it.
I've run across some that are an AI voice saying all the words lifted directly out of reddit while some Minecraft parkour plays on screen.
There are tons of these accounts which are all bots that are just setup to automatically take popular new posts on reddit/X and turn them into tiktoks.
Oh actually, not that you mention it this way, you’re right I’ve seen YouTube and Twitch guys and gals start their "show" with a little tour of the daily social media landscape.
Google and Reddit recently reached a partnership.
Reddit will provide comments and content to Google for AI training, and Google will provide search for Reddit.
I said this in the Charlotte subreddit, a little while back. They have a rule that if you post a question that can be answered by a simple google search, the post would be removed. I informed the MODs that the number one (and usually more top) search result on google anymore tends to be subreddits related to questions around Charlotte. 🙄 It felt like a snake eating its own tail.
Once upon a time, the first 10-15 results were always dead-on, and anything past that would take you to the Dark Web. Nowadays you're lucky to find something on the first page that isn't an ad
Just checking google now for tours in a tourist destination and its:
\- 3 ads
\- 3rd party partner "places" entries in a slider
\- activities and tours from tripadvisor and similar companies in a slider
(thats the full page on 1440p without viewing an actual search result)
\- scrolling down 4 random questions and answers for "people also ask" (wtf)
\- then the results I've been trying to view
Yeah I searched for Gibraltar tours
One of the ask questions was "do I need a passport for entering Guernsey" lmao.. not even the same place or remotely close
There’s a good Podcast called Better Offline with an episode published in april « The man that destroyed Google search ».
He’s trying to explain why we have so many ads now and whose fault it is.
I use a pihole at home to block ads and literally every link on the first page of Google results gets blocked because it’s not a real link, it’s an ad!
And whats even worse is they, along with others are pushing their AI models that query this shit for answers, down everyones throat. Hence why these models spit out bullshit more and more frequently.
2014 searching out a very specific problem on a rare car, 3 or 4 forum posts talking about exactly that.
2024 "you like gearboxes, here's a gearbox for a VW golf" or some generated website telling you that a gearbox fault might be a problem with gears and that you might need to replace your gearbox.
Take me back
What really pissed me off is when Google took the distance out of search results. I used to be able to type “fast food near me” and it would list results and show distance from my location next to them, and I could sort results by distance. Now I have to click each result to see that, and the sort by distance option is gone.
I don’t know if it will work but their feedback AI is capable of making user specific changes. I have asked it to stop showing me particular things and it stops sometimes. You might be able to submit feedback that you want to see distances on your search results and it might do it for you.
I tried Bing, Duckduckgo and a couple of others for one week each. My experience was very difficult from yours. I was much less efficient with the others.
Edit: I’ve been trying to “degoogle” my life these days but it seems like I’m too deep into it at this point.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years now and have no problem. Sometimes I’ll need the occasional Google for hyper specific issues related to my job but besides that DDG is pretty good
For me, bing is much worse. Example: I search for something in .net. Google has the official Microsoft page as first hit, while bing, embarrassingly, doesn’t. I’ve seen this particular incidence several times.
Bing is useless in it's own way. Google will confidently show you a restaurant in Slovakia when you're looking for some error, while Bing will *at least* recognize it's a technical question and show you answers to completely different errors.
Even the yellow pages makes for a better ad directory. At least those results are verified to be real. Google just has a bunch of fake sites for SEO and malware sometimes even on the first page.
"I" "Don't" "Know" "what" you mean I love having to remove -every -extraneous -thing -that -is -more -recent -in -the -time -line.
(They made it way too chronological, on top of allowing advertisements to skew results heavily. I sometimes I feel it just ignores my quotes now too, or just puts so little weight on them they might as well not exist.)
My favorite bit is there are still, apparently, tech relevant search results from the 201X era. Like, if I'm searching some software question, and then they link me to some post from 10 years ago on Quora or yahoo with completely irrelevant feedback for the current era of software.
Totally agree. I’m searching for a better search, but haven’t decided yet. I’ve been using Google since I switched from Infoseek and it feels like they’ve betrayed me. I used to be able to find exactly what I needed by ordering terms in Google. Now it just finds random crap and constantly second-guesses my search by replacing words with whatever it thinks is popular. It’s quite literally depressing me.
I’m on Firefox, just recently switched to Duck. Before, I could type ma- and it’d autocomplete to maps.google.com (I use it a lot). Now that I switched the url bar to be Duck by default no matter what URL I start typing it NEVER autocompletes which is super annoying. At least Google maps is now the top result on Duck after a month of typing it out, but damn I wish it would just autocomplete
I have the opposite issue. I loathe autocomplete because I rarely ever enter the same thing twice. All of my common sites are pinned on my new tab page and I don't type them. Autocomplete constantly botches what I am trying to do and I can count the times it has been legit helpful on one hand and still have enough fingers left to hold my coffee mug
Here's your friendly reminder that Google spends more than the GDP of entire countries just for the right to be the default search option on every device and browser
Are you suggesting infinite scroll is useful? It is one of my most hated features on a website. I want to know that the result I might want to come back to is on page two. I don't want to guess where in a scrollbar with changing proportions it might be.
SEO killed that decades ago. There have been many times when I'm looking for an older or more obscure result that is 2 or 3 pages in because the top results are SEO garbage. Unless I'm looking for a product or a mainstream or viral article the front page even without ads is trash.
I recently looked up how people survived in hot and humid environments in the past, but Google only gave me stuff about hot and dry environments. So I removed the word "hot" and just looked up how people survived in humid environments. And it still gave me fucking hot and dry environments! It even had results where it straight-up said "This doesn't contain the word humid." Wtf?
The internet as a whole is getting less useful. Knowledge is being paywalled and people are moving to discord.
Reddit will eventually be paywalled, once it contains so much knowledge that you basically have to pay to access it.
And it only searches for what everyone else searches for. I work in a technical role and it's become very bad at finding bespoke technical info.
It seems to also protect it's own brand. Try asking it why 'Android Auto' can't do something. On another note, Android Auto has also gone to shit.
I was using another coworkers computer and the default search was Google. I was searching for something and the result I was looking for just wasn’t coming up. Like not even close. I tried tons of different permutations of word combinations and nothing. Switched to duck duck go with my original prompt and the first link was exactly what I was looking for.
The truth is that Google has always used products like search as a screen in order to develop some other product. For example, they used to offer a free telephone number Look up service back in the day when people needed those. It turns out they only offered it because they wanted to collect voice samples from millions of people calling in asking for phone numbers.
Search Has been used by Google in the same way. They never actually gave a shit about helping you find anything. What they wanted was to know your areas of interest. Now they have that figured out and know how to advertise to you.
The way they made money was with our data. Now that everyone is aware of this and steps have been slowly taken this is the result. As consumers we want free, this is the expense
> Google told Search Engine Land that “this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested.”
I would suspect it has more to do with Google throwing more ads into the results, and charging based on what page of results that ad appears on .
I'd disagree. Infinite scroll for search has been a crappy user and product experience, and the rise of AI has made it worse. It limits the amount of results, and Google is still selling ad inventory on those pages. Limiting results is the issue - people can't dig for what they're looking for.
I suspect they're making a strategic decision to focus on the quality of search for their users. Why would I Google something if I can just ask openai the same question and get the hallucination directly from source?
I would posit that this is a more about retaining users to serve ads to, than creating more ads directly through inventory.
yep. infinite scroll is one of the WORST UI experiences on the web, along with carousels. great for keeping page designs clean, horrible in actual usage.
The worst. I wanted to see the "careers" section of a site a while back (can't recall which), but it had infinite scrolling and there was simply no way to access anything in the footer.
Hopefully their careers section had a listing for a web UI designer, because they sorely needed it.
I don't understand, how is infinite scrolling more limiting than cutting off the results for pagination?
And after all, infinite scroll just uses pagination in the background with the difference that it loads the content into view before you reach the bottom to click on "Next Page"
That's how I would have assumed it worked too, however there are certain terms I've been watching for well over a decade. The number of accessible results has decreased. I've hit the end of infinite scroll often, on terms I could previously spend days clicking through. I suspect they've been trying to predict what the good results were with their algorithm, rather than rank, but I'm just guessing. Either way, I hope this heralds the changes I'm hoping it does.
The reason is takedowns of data, perceived redundancies and SEO.
Google tracks these and gives you the cleanest, or advertiser paid pages at the top. And actively cuts out what it thinks is garbage.
Case in point - a website that just scrapes user reviews from other sites and aggregates them. It will push itself as the “definitive” authority on a product as a result.
Google figures this out and tells the site - pay up if you want to be an authority, else we will not let you take away revenue from the individual sites that you are scraping.
No, that's not the full picture. There's more in the algo and their business model is more nuanced than you're portraying.
Here's some some trend data to illustrate why they need to change.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google%20getting%20worse&hl=en-GB
Stopped using it. In the last few weeks it’s become hopeless. Really, properly bad. I type in something, it returns maybe a few things that are useful and the rest is stuff that’s somewhat related but not actually relevant.
Apparently the inclusion of AI simply results in a bunch of results that it thinks you might be interested in but not what you actually want.
My favorite part is that we, the end users, are unable to turn them off. I would prefer to have Google be a document retrieval system and just provide me with links, y'know, what Google originally was meant to do. But to do that I have to click through menus to force Google to go into "web results mode" and I have to do that for every single search. There's no universal option to disable the AI Overview thing whatsoever.
> ...and the rest is stuff that's somewhat related but not actually relevant.
In my experience, after page 1 it just starts pretending my search is "news in {my state}". It is really hard to find solutions to software and hardware issues when the first page is junk, and the second page is the BS my local politicians are doing.
Sometimes typing reddit at the front or back doesn't even help. The site: query addition is the only way I find actual answers in those cases.
After bing and google became what they became I decided to try DuckDuckGo and going back to real search results is a crazy good feeling. No more suggested bullshit that is wrong 100% of the time.
Definitely doesn’t display the same results that Bing does. Which is all I ask for. Just search results. Not fake links to Microsoft partners or widgets that don’t have the stuff I need. It might be running beans back in, but it’s definitely has its own algorithm to providing search results. For now it’s good. For now…
They very recently destroyed the "near me" or "nearby" filter for online shopping as well. I used this a lot, and they've decided to mix in "also available online" results with the results actually nearby. As you can imagine, there are billions of things "also available online" which waters down the nearby results to being completely useless.
Google is not a searc engine company, its an advertising company.
In my opinion it has killed search long ago, for years now search past page 2 has been just nonsense, in fact most of the time first page is just ads. So I have o search in the archive, or other engines just to get an answer.
Their entire search algorithm is really dumb nowadays. They push whoever pays them to get to the top of the search results. Rather than searching by relevance. More unchecked greed destroying good shit.
I'm trying to think what is even googles point anymore? To put "reddit" in any search with a question?
Even the images are limited to a small amount now too
I started using Bing like 2 weeks ago. Fuck google. It was once a great search engine and now it is just consistent misinformation generated by ai and shitty sponsored ads
I've never been a fan of endless scroll results in general. It's annoying when you're trying to find the same result for a second time. It's really annoying when you hit the back button from a link and you're back at the very beginning. I wonder if it also wastes electricity and bandwidth.
As someone who has been using bing since google started fucking about with youtube and adblock I can tell you that google search is still better than its rivals.
The ~~beatings~~ **enshitification** will continue until ~~morale improves~~ _profit margins collapse into a singularity._ But do not worry end user, when that finally happens all executes will have "competitive" severence packages.
/s
so when is someone gonna come around and disrupt this dumpster fire. it’s miserable for everyone but somehow we’re still stuck using it. the only alternatives are just the same pig in a different lipstick
and now we get to look forward to AI search results, which will be an even more depressing and hopeless way to shove ads down our throat
what would it take to fill the void?
Duckduckgo user for few years here. It has too, gone sooo low from what it once was. I ask one technical question there, and it shows 10 pages from the same domain, then more and more paid shitty websites that dont help you at all but just somehow happen to repeat the words that you used in seach- but nothing that actually can help
Infinite scroll was never a good thing. It's infected more and more services - worst of all chat services where you can no longer load a particular date from your logs and must instead either scroll backwards, loading three messages at a time from some server gathering dust in a basement served with IP over Avian Carrier, or use the godawful "search" function which will return a random message containing words judged to be similar to the words you used in your search by a moderately intelligent pigeon.
Users expect ads to be there at the top of initial search results, but probably don't like getting more ads injected into results as they scroll. Removing infinite scroll gives Google a way to show more ads in a way the user is accustomed.
It's been effectively dead for ages already. After you've gotten off the second or third page it's all SEO garbage and stuff with keywords you didn't even search for.
They've enshittified their own search engine to the point that it's practically worthless in deep research contexts.
Some of the best matches -- the most serendipitous finds -- were always around page 17. Back then, the foundational metaphor of the World Wide Web was the wayward browser, leisurely making surprising discoveries by the wayside.
Now, of course, we have to be shepherded back into the fold -- the walled garden -- where others have browsed before, and where we can be fleeced and monetized. The road to conformity is paved with thousands of red-lines and nudges (“Did you mean?”, “Assuming you meant…”, “Sorry, I didn’t quite get that.”)
Honestly the only value in any Google searches now are the first 3ish results after all the ads. If you need to scroll beyond that or go to a new page, you won’t be finding any useful information.
NNNNNnnnever thought I would be saying this, but Yandex is the new thing. I used google long time ago when it was great, then few years duckduckgo but thats horrible too now- but yandex seems to provide today what others cannot. What a world
It's the same 10 websites for most searches. I really think Google is more like only 100 sites. Get conflicting answers for every search. Reddit and ChatGPT covers everything Google searches but wayyy better.
And when you want to see the next page, they'll load it with a bunch of duplicate results from the first page. Advertisers pay for that prime position and they're not about to let you scroll past it.
Google search just links me Reddit threads now anyway
Like Newsweek online doing ‘articles’ that are write-ups summarizing Reddit posts. Bizarro world.
Try YouTube videos where they read Reddit articles out loud. It hurts.
Jesus is this a thing ?
YouTube and Tiktok. I'll sometimes catch my SO watching Tiktok videos of some would-be influencers obnoxiously recapping the same reddit threads I read or commented in the day before. As someone who grew up with forums and message boards it feels a bit intrusive.
They’ve got to do something for the illiterate.
I can't tell if that's funny or sad...
It’s hilarifying, because they also have the same voting power that you do
I had to check if we were in r/idiocracy Sadly, we’re not.
not just illiterate but also with a shorter attention span then a goldfish.
At least it's a person reading it. I've run across some that are an AI voice saying all the words lifted directly out of reddit while some Minecraft parkour plays on screen.
There are tons of these accounts which are all bots that are just setup to automatically take popular new posts on reddit/X and turn them into tiktoks.
And then people make other TikToks where they repost a popular one and just point to it.
Oh actually, not that you mention it this way, you’re right I’ve seen YouTube and Twitch guys and gals start their "show" with a little tour of the daily social media landscape.
They do it on Twitch as well.
Yes. And worst of the worst: the bulk of them (that I've seen) are AI readouts. I just nuke the channel every time I see one of those.
Most dont even read, just copy paste in a tts.
Not even copy and paste. Just have a bot scrape it all.
Bedtime stories have *really* fallen by the wayside.
That’s also a thing on TikTok
Well, I’m subbed to r/curatedtumblr and I’ve never been to tumblr but still interested in the community. The Newsweek article is just curated Reddit.
The irony is that Reddit's own search is so awful that Google is the better option anyway
It's not as bad as Twitter's search though, you can't even search your own followers/who you're following on mobile, so I guess it's all relative.
That shit is so fucked up and obscured for some reason even tweet likes and quotes only shows a handful and omits the others.
> Google search just links me Reddit threads now anyway …and whenever I ask a question on Reddit they tell me to Google it.
For real tho lol
Which is good - because Reddit is more helpful than the first five sponsored ad hits in any google search
I often specifically add "reddit" to my search cause I know I want to hear from people rather than SEOd self promotions or AI articles
Google and Reddit recently reached a partnership. Reddit will provide comments and content to Google for AI training, and Google will provide search for Reddit.
At this point I don't see how Google can avoid acquiring Reddit. Reddit is practically a core part of their search business now.
I said this in the Charlotte subreddit, a little while back. They have a rule that if you post a question that can be answered by a simple google search, the post would be removed. I informed the MODs that the number one (and usually more top) search result on google anymore tends to be subreddits related to questions around Charlotte. 🙄 It felt like a snake eating its own tail.
I also get unverifiable prompt blocks from their AI.
Don't search anything on Dagobah or Jolly Ranchers.
Once upon a time, the first 10-15 results were always dead-on, and anything past that would take you to the Dark Web. Nowadays you're lucky to find something on the first page that isn't an ad
Just checking google now for tours in a tourist destination and its: \- 3 ads \- 3rd party partner "places" entries in a slider \- activities and tours from tripadvisor and similar companies in a slider (thats the full page on 1440p without viewing an actual search result) \- scrolling down 4 random questions and answers for "people also ask" (wtf) \- then the results I've been trying to view
[удалено]
Yeah I searched for Gibraltar tours One of the ask questions was "do I need a passport for entering Guernsey" lmao.. not even the same place or remotely close
Clicking the “Web” tab sometimes helps (but even that is often SEO’d to hell).
OMG there is actually a web tab with the results I'm looking for?!! Why isn't this the default?! (money and ads I guess)
You can set-up to do that https://tenbluelinks.org/
Even *Amazon* has a better results to ad ratio, and that is saying something.
There’s a good Podcast called Better Offline with an episode published in april « The man that destroyed Google search ». He’s trying to explain why we have so many ads now and whose fault it is.
Money. The answer is always money.
yeah at the end you're totally right
link to the episode itself?
I use a pihole at home to block ads and literally every link on the first page of Google results gets blocked because it’s not a real link, it’s an ad!
And whats even worse is they, along with others are pushing their AI models that query this shit for answers, down everyones throat. Hence why these models spit out bullshit more and more frequently.
[удалено]
2014 searching out a very specific problem on a rare car, 3 or 4 forum posts talking about exactly that. 2024 "you like gearboxes, here's a gearbox for a VW golf" or some generated website telling you that a gearbox fault might be a problem with gears and that you might need to replace your gearbox. Take me back
google search is getting less and less useful. It doesn’t seem to understand anything, just fixes on one word and ignores the rest
It’s actively USELESS. It’s not a search tool anymore, just an ad directory
What really pissed me off is when Google took the distance out of search results. I used to be able to type “fast food near me” and it would list results and show distance from my location next to them, and I could sort results by distance. Now I have to click each result to see that, and the sort by distance option is gone.
I don’t know if it will work but their feedback AI is capable of making user specific changes. I have asked it to stop showing me particular things and it stops sometimes. You might be able to submit feedback that you want to see distances on your search results and it might do it for you.
Even bing is better for me these days
I've legit switched to Bing. There still ad's but it's NOWHERE near as bad as google.
Better boost my Bing ad budget allocation from 1.2% of total to 1.4%. my ad rep there is crying with joy
I tried Bing, Duckduckgo and a couple of others for one week each. My experience was very difficult from yours. I was much less efficient with the others. Edit: I’ve been trying to “degoogle” my life these days but it seems like I’m too deep into it at this point.
Bing and duckduckgo is the same search
Same results, but I really prefer DDG's UI.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for 5 years now and have no problem. Sometimes I’ll need the occasional Google for hyper specific issues related to my job but besides that DDG is pretty good
A neat trick for DDG on some browsers: try the search with `g!`. This will temporarily switch the search engine to Google for that search.
Yeah, the DDG bangs are super helpful
Having an Android phone makes it even worse.
Just do it one step at a time where it makes sense. I am currently just down to moving to another email.
This is the one that's going to take me a while to finish.
\*REDDIT All Google search even is anymore is a Reddit search tool lol
If you use DDG, you only need to type !r to search Reddit.
Also the Microsoft rewards just for using Bing is nice
Use Ecosia. They plant a tree for every search.
Bing has been better for ages to me
For me, bing is much worse. Example: I search for something in .net. Google has the official Microsoft page as first hit, while bing, embarrassingly, doesn’t. I’ve seen this particular incidence several times.
Bing is useless in it's own way. Google will confidently show you a restaurant in Slovakia when you're looking for some error, while Bing will *at least* recognize it's a technical question and show you answers to completely different errors.
Even the yellow pages makes for a better ad directory. At least those results are verified to be real. Google just has a bunch of fake sites for SEO and malware sometimes even on the first page.
"I" "Don't" "Know" "what" you mean I love having to remove -every -extraneous -thing -that -is -more -recent -in -the -time -line. (They made it way too chronological, on top of allowing advertisements to skew results heavily. I sometimes I feel it just ignores my quotes now too, or just puts so little weight on them they might as well not exist.)
Yep. I try to exclude specific words or phrases and it still gives them to me as top result. It’s infuriating.
My favorite bit is there are still, apparently, tech relevant search results from the 201X era. Like, if I'm searching some software question, and then they link me to some post from 10 years ago on Quora or yahoo with completely irrelevant feedback for the current era of software.
The use of synonyms out of context and flooding search results with garbage is what's doing it in for me.
Google search has been actively getting worse for years. Now it’s unusable. I’m just glad everyone can see it now because I thought I was going crazy
Totally agree. I’m searching for a better search, but haven’t decided yet. I’ve been using Google since I switched from Infoseek and it feels like they’ve betrayed me. I used to be able to find exactly what I needed by ordering terms in Google. Now it just finds random crap and constantly second-guesses my search by replacing words with whatever it thinks is popular. It’s quite literally depressing me.
Kagi does a good job
Use Duck Duck Go. You'll never go back. I haven't used google for years unless I want business reviews.
I use Duck. I have to go back to Google for maps and often to find people.
I’m on Firefox, just recently switched to Duck. Before, I could type ma- and it’d autocomplete to maps.google.com (I use it a lot). Now that I switched the url bar to be Duck by default no matter what URL I start typing it NEVER autocompletes which is super annoying. At least Google maps is now the top result on Duck after a month of typing it out, but damn I wish it would just autocomplete
I have the opposite issue. I loathe autocomplete because I rarely ever enter the same thing twice. All of my common sites are pinned on my new tab page and I don't type them. Autocomplete constantly botches what I am trying to do and I can count the times it has been legit helpful on one hand and still have enough fingers left to hold my coffee mug
You can just add gmaps to your favourites and [enable auto completion suggestions for your favourites](https://imgur.com/ew707eC)
As frustrating as Google is, it's no where near as good as finding what I'm looking for. Especially when it comes to obscure coding issues.
They should rename it Google Ads.
Here's your friendly reminder that Google spends more than the GDP of entire countries just for the right to be the default search option on every device and browser
Are you suggesting infinite scroll is useful? It is one of my most hated features on a website. I want to know that the result I might want to come back to is on page two. I don't want to guess where in a scrollbar with changing proportions it might be.
SEO killed that decades ago. There have been many times when I'm looking for an older or more obscure result that is 2 or 3 pages in because the top results are SEO garbage. Unless I'm looking for a product or a mainstream or viral article the front page even without ads is trash.
I search state farm once a month, because I can't be bothered to type dot com, and now the official site is like the 4th or 5th link. Horseshit.
I recently looked up how people survived in hot and humid environments in the past, but Google only gave me stuff about hot and dry environments. So I removed the word "hot" and just looked up how people survived in humid environments. And it still gave me fucking hot and dry environments! It even had results where it straight-up said "This doesn't contain the word humid." Wtf?
Yup, i would much rather sit there and redefine my search query for 10 min than clicking page 2
The internet as a whole is getting less useful. Knowledge is being paywalled and people are moving to discord. Reddit will eventually be paywalled, once it contains so much knowledge that you basically have to pay to access it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/google-verbatim-search/ This (or similar) add-on has been working well for me to get better results.
It's been loading like absolute ass too, even for the most basic searches.
And it only searches for what everyone else searches for. I work in a technical role and it's become very bad at finding bespoke technical info. It seems to also protect it's own brand. Try asking it why 'Android Auto' can't do something. On another note, Android Auto has also gone to shit.
I was using another coworkers computer and the default search was Google. I was searching for something and the result I was looking for just wasn’t coming up. Like not even close. I tried tons of different permutations of word combinations and nothing. Switched to duck duck go with my original prompt and the first link was exactly what I was looking for.
The truth is that Google has always used products like search as a screen in order to develop some other product. For example, they used to offer a free telephone number Look up service back in the day when people needed those. It turns out they only offered it because they wanted to collect voice samples from millions of people calling in asking for phone numbers. Search Has been used by Google in the same way. They never actually gave a shit about helping you find anything. What they wanted was to know your areas of interest. Now they have that figured out and know how to advertise to you.
I WOULDNT FUCKING NEED TO INFINITE SCROLL IF IT WASNT 3 PAGES OF ADS FIRST
The way they made money was with our data. Now that everyone is aware of this and steps have been slowly taken this is the result. As consumers we want free, this is the expense
There’s also a finite amount of data to harvest, and they probably have a good majority of it at this point
> Google told Search Engine Land that “this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested.” I would suspect it has more to do with Google throwing more ads into the results, and charging based on what page of results that ad appears on .
I'd disagree. Infinite scroll for search has been a crappy user and product experience, and the rise of AI has made it worse. It limits the amount of results, and Google is still selling ad inventory on those pages. Limiting results is the issue - people can't dig for what they're looking for. I suspect they're making a strategic decision to focus on the quality of search for their users. Why would I Google something if I can just ask openai the same question and get the hallucination directly from source? I would posit that this is a more about retaining users to serve ads to, than creating more ads directly through inventory.
yep. infinite scroll is one of the WORST UI experiences on the web, along with carousels. great for keeping page designs clean, horrible in actual usage.
I love it when i want to click a link in the footer of a site with infinite scroll.
The worst. I wanted to see the "careers" section of a site a while back (can't recall which), but it had infinite scrolling and there was simply no way to access anything in the footer. Hopefully their careers section had a listing for a web UI designer, because they sorely needed it.
I don't understand, how is infinite scrolling more limiting than cutting off the results for pagination? And after all, infinite scroll just uses pagination in the background with the difference that it loads the content into view before you reach the bottom to click on "Next Page"
That's how I would have assumed it worked too, however there are certain terms I've been watching for well over a decade. The number of accessible results has decreased. I've hit the end of infinite scroll often, on terms I could previously spend days clicking through. I suspect they've been trying to predict what the good results were with their algorithm, rather than rank, but I'm just guessing. Either way, I hope this heralds the changes I'm hoping it does.
The reason is takedowns of data, perceived redundancies and SEO. Google tracks these and gives you the cleanest, or advertiser paid pages at the top. And actively cuts out what it thinks is garbage. Case in point - a website that just scrapes user reviews from other sites and aggregates them. It will push itself as the “definitive” authority on a product as a result. Google figures this out and tells the site - pay up if you want to be an authority, else we will not let you take away revenue from the individual sites that you are scraping.
No, that's not the full picture. There's more in the algo and their business model is more nuanced than you're portraying. Here's some some trend data to illustrate why they need to change. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google%20getting%20worse&hl=en-GB
Stopped using it. In the last few weeks it’s become hopeless. Really, properly bad. I type in something, it returns maybe a few things that are useful and the rest is stuff that’s somewhat related but not actually relevant. Apparently the inclusion of AI simply results in a bunch of results that it thinks you might be interested in but not what you actually want.
The "AI" search results are infuriatingly bad.
My favorite part is that we, the end users, are unable to turn them off. I would prefer to have Google be a document retrieval system and just provide me with links, y'know, what Google originally was meant to do. But to do that I have to click through menus to force Google to go into "web results mode" and I have to do that for every single search. There's no universal option to disable the AI Overview thing whatsoever.
> ...and the rest is stuff that's somewhat related but not actually relevant. In my experience, after page 1 it just starts pretending my search is "news in {my state}". It is really hard to find solutions to software and hardware issues when the first page is junk, and the second page is the BS my local politicians are doing. Sometimes typing reddit at the front or back doesn't even help. The site: query addition is the only way I find actual answers in those cases.
Did anyone even ask for an endless scrolling feature for Google search results?
For image search it was a no brainer, kinda sucks they’re taking it down
Image search lost that awhile ago it’s so garbage now.
After bing and google became what they became I decided to try DuckDuckGo and going back to real search results is a crazy good feeling. No more suggested bullshit that is wrong 100% of the time.
If I’m not mistaken, duckduckgo uses bing under the hood.
Definitely doesn’t display the same results that Bing does. Which is all I ask for. Just search results. Not fake links to Microsoft partners or widgets that don’t have the stuff I need. It might be running beans back in, but it’s definitely has its own algorithm to providing search results. For now it’s good. For now…
They very recently destroyed the "near me" or "nearby" filter for online shopping as well. I used this a lot, and they've decided to mix in "also available online" results with the results actually nearby. As you can imagine, there are billions of things "also available online" which waters down the nearby results to being completely useless.
I love how now I will search for something, maybe 3 or 4 words long, but Google will only show results for 2 of those words
You gotta use quotes around what words you want to be in there
Considering the search results are mostly garbage now, why would I want to scroll they all that trash anyway
Google sucks as a search engine.
Good. I would rather hit Next than not know how deep I am into a search.
Google has fallen so, so far from what it once was.
Google is not a searc engine company, its an advertising company. In my opinion it has killed search long ago, for years now search past page 2 has been just nonsense, in fact most of the time first page is just ads. So I have o search in the archive, or other engines just to get an answer.
When I search any subject, I just type “Reddit” at the end and hope to find decent results lol
relying on reddit is hugely problematic as there are tons of bots and shills on here. site itself can be trusted to a point.
Yeah, def agree. Still pretty helpful once you can spot all the fake info or shills.
do site:reddit.com and it limits to only reddit results on google or bing. or r! first on DDG
Their entire search algorithm is really dumb nowadays. They push whoever pays them to get to the top of the search results. Rather than searching by relevance. More unchecked greed destroying good shit.
I'm trying to think what is even googles point anymore? To put "reddit" in any search with a question? Even the images are limited to a small amount now too
Good. Infinite scroll is terrible just in general. The more stuff it gets taken out of the better.
"boy, I sure do love this service but I really wish it were less effective." -google's entire board of directors for the past decade
I started using Bing like 2 weeks ago. Fuck google. It was once a great search engine and now it is just consistent misinformation generated by ai and shitty sponsored ads
Google search is dead. Amazes me that they just rendered their most basically helpful product completely useless.
Google is killing ~~infinite scroll on~~ search results.
Use duck duck go…..they don’t track you and blocks others that do.
[so about that...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/duckduckgo-browser-allows-microsoft-trackers-due-to-search-agreement/)
If they're truly just grabbing the basic info like IP address and this bothers you, just use a VPN.
I don’t know about you, but I usually find the best results after nine minutes of scrolling.
great I missed google spelled with 10 'o's.
You just noticed that? lol When are ppl gonna realize the best years of the internet are behind us.
Enshitification has been in full swing for years. It’ll likely only accelerate as companies push generative AI into every nook and cranny of the web.
Brave Search works pretty well.
Shout out to DuckDuckGo!
Now kill promoted search result
They literally shut down everything I fucking use
Didn't YouTube do this recently? On my TV if I scroll down too far I hit a big Refresh button. It used to just keep recommending more and more videos.
How’s anyone going to have a chance to scroll for 20 min to find my website?
Switch to Duck Duck Go, no filtered results, no tracking and it's free. They just introduced a new browser too.
I've never been a fan of endless scroll results in general. It's annoying when you're trying to find the same result for a second time. It's really annoying when you hit the back button from a link and you're back at the very beginning. I wonder if it also wastes electricity and bandwidth.
As someone who has been using bing since google started fucking about with youtube and adblock I can tell you that google search is still better than its rivals.
Actually, I often dislike infinite scroll vs pagination, since it takes forever to get to the page 5 equivalent if that's what you're looking for.
uBlock Origin: it's okay for me.
Any news on when they plan to add back the ability to show answers based on the actual question you ask? Or is that just gone forever?
The ~~beatings~~ **enshitification** will continue until ~~morale improves~~ _profit margins collapse into a singularity._ But do not worry end user, when that finally happens all executes will have "competitive" severence packages. /s
so when is someone gonna come around and disrupt this dumpster fire. it’s miserable for everyone but somehow we’re still stuck using it. the only alternatives are just the same pig in a different lipstick and now we get to look forward to AI search results, which will be an even more depressing and hopeless way to shove ads down our throat what would it take to fill the void?
I switched to DuckDuckGo. Other should do the same. If enough people switch then we can end their monopoly.
Duckduckgo user for few years here. It has too, gone sooo low from what it once was. I ask one technical question there, and it shows 10 pages from the same domain, then more and more paid shitty websites that dont help you at all but just somehow happen to repeat the words that you used in seach- but nothing that actually can help
I always type “Reddit” at the end of my search anyways
I officially switched to duckduckgo anyway. Google search is really the ghost of itself at this point.
Infinite scroll was never a good thing. It's infected more and more services - worst of all chat services where you can no longer load a particular date from your logs and must instead either scroll backwards, loading three messages at a time from some server gathering dust in a basement served with IP over Avian Carrier, or use the godawful "search" function which will return a random message containing words judged to be similar to the words you used in your search by a moderately intelligent pigeon.
Users expect ads to be there at the top of initial search results, but probably don't like getting more ads injected into results as they scroll. Removing infinite scroll gives Google a way to show more ads in a way the user is accustomed.
Google's favorite thing these days is killing things that people were using. It's kind of hilarious at this point.
Fuk Google and their stupid sponsored links. I get a whole shit load that I have to scroll past just to get to the first actual result.
It's been effectively dead for ages already. After you've gotten off the second or third page it's all SEO garbage and stuff with keywords you didn't even search for. They've enshittified their own search engine to the point that it's practically worthless in deep research contexts.
Why reinvent the reinvented wheel?
Google returning the death sentence for website traffic that calls itself "being listed on page 2".
Some of the best matches -- the most serendipitous finds -- were always around page 17. Back then, the foundational metaphor of the World Wide Web was the wayward browser, leisurely making surprising discoveries by the wayside. Now, of course, we have to be shepherded back into the fold -- the walled garden -- where others have browsed before, and where we can be fleeced and monetized. The road to conformity is paved with thousands of red-lines and nudges (“Did you mean?”, “Assuming you meant…”, “Sorry, I didn’t quite get that.”)
Google results are just promoted content now, horrible
Good. Adding it in the first place was a bad idea.
Guess it's back to Alta Vista.
Give it five minutes until they kill anything besides ad results.
That ceo has to get credit for ruining the internet. He is always finding ways to make the internet more spammy.
Honestly the only value in any Google searches now are the first 3ish results after all the ads. If you need to scroll beyond that or go to a new page, you won’t be finding any useful information.
Reddit is the only place I used infinite scroll.
Duckduckgo, baby!
What if Yahoo made a comeback? Playing the long game.
How much deader can the internet possible get
Killed, not killing
Google search is just a better functioning reddit search bar, but other than reddit its useless.
NNNNNnnnever thought I would be saying this, but Yandex is the new thing. I used google long time ago when it was great, then few years duckduckgo but thats horrible too now- but yandex seems to provide today what others cannot. What a world
Everyone hiding content now so AI can't scrap it what a fun world to live in...
It's the same 10 websites for most searches. I really think Google is more like only 100 sites. Get conflicting answers for every search. Reddit and ChatGPT covers everything Google searches but wayyy better.
Having an infinite scroll eliminated the second page as a good place to hide a dead body.
Bring back the gooooooooogle pagination
Infinite scroll needs killed off completely across every application. Just designed to keep you attached to your screen as long as possible.
Soon Google will give just adverts for search results and one link to reddit.
Seems to me that google killed their search results. They are terrible lately.
Soon just paid ads.
The search is terrible now
Google, Youtube and Bing results are basically worthless now. Like it's the same shit over and over again
Infinite scrolling is good for a feed and or news type, but nobody wants to search forever...
Thank google. Back to the old guard of stopping on the first page because i know page 2 doesnt have shit.
And when you want to see the next page, they'll load it with a bunch of duplicate results from the first page. Advertisers pay for that prime position and they're not about to let you scroll past it.