Google search results not what they used to be?

[CatalinaWOW]

I have been having some problems, but suspect it is not all Googles fault.  There is an explosion of crap pages out there, with a lot of them driven by people who are very clever at getting the Google algorithms to link their site.  That adds to Google's own efforts at directing traffic to their advertisers.  Several years ago I was forced to learn Googles rules for writing search expressions to improve my results.

Use of other services with different search algorithms might help by avoiding the "site tuners" but that is a temporary fix at best.  As soon as someone gets good enough to attract market share they will get their own flock of remora.

[ajb]

I pretty much give up on "mainstream" search for the above reasons.
What I have yet to find is a really good search engine that is really good for advanced users.

e.g. search input = SQL?  Great!

search input = real honest to goodness regex?  Great!

Can specify a *literal exact match* search and have it work?  Great!  I noticed that depending on what you're searching for you basically (unless there are tricks I do not know) CANNOT get a useful LITERAL EXACT MUST MATCH search for certain things, e.g maybe your search terms includes certain things like punctuation characters !$.,+-, whatever or maybe literal numbers of spaces / tabs or maybe certain fragments of XML / HTML / code & gt; or whatever etc. etc.

Is being able to make a "simple" LITERAL or REGEX or SQL search too much to ask for?  Does anyone (with a good search corpus of course to make it actually useful to find things) have it?

I always say that you could walk into a half way decent big city or university library in 1970 and use their PAPER CARD CATALOG / PAPER INDICES and do a better job finding semantically / topically what you're looking for than you can today with "the internet" and "search engines".  There is just no use of "the sum of human knowledge" at your digital fingertips if there's no way to actually FIND and PROCESS what you're looking for.  The "search engines" are like a bad joke that should have gotten someone flunked out of a library science class in 1970.  There ARE proper ways to catalog / search for information and Google (et. al.) SURE aren't it.

We need the semantic web.

Exactly, how hard can that be??
Google to me doesn't provide much useful results anymore, worse they are buried by (to me) garbage look alike results.
Tried duckduckgo and even with altered settings it keeps auto "correcting" my search inquiry into something much more mainstream. 

Anyone else has suggestions?

Yes, I'm sure allowing users to run arbitrary regexes across the entire corpus of the internet is totally simple to implement and not a tremendously inefficient use of computational and storage resources.

Here's a little experiment:  Pick an arbitrary technical topic.  Open an incognito window and start typing it into Google, letter by letter, and note what suggestions pop up as you type.  Start with the word "electronic", maybe.  How many letters do you have to type before it starts suggesting anything reasonable?  What does that tell you about the relative popularity of that term? 

Simply put, the vast majority of search engine users are not looking for specific, obscure technical terms in particular combinations.  They're using vaguely- or naturally-worded phrases that describe the general idea of what they're looking for.  So of course search engines are going to focus on processing searches like that.  Something else to consider, particularly regarding obscure part numbers and texts etc:  There may simply not be that much indexable information out there!  Lots of sites go dark over time, so especially when looking for older materials, there's a good chance that many references simply don't exist any more, and the information isn't sufficiently relevant for anyone to produce new references.  Obviously if you manage to find it on one search engine but not another, that's clearly a deficiency in the search engine, but more obscure terms are more susceptible to simple information entropy, and short of archiving *everything* there's not a good remedy for that.

[stj]

general search:
https://duckduckgo.com

technical stuff:
https://www.yandex.com
(also has email better than shitty sensored gmail, translator, and a map service)

chinese software / datasheets etc.
https://www.baidu.com

[floobydust]

I google something at work, find a hit on the first page. I go home, run the exact same query and can't find the same hit. Drives me totally nuts.

Duckduckgo I use but it does suck, it keeps returning bullshit datasheets and PDF's linked to bait websites. Some are close to malware.

I used (((Startpage))) for a long time until all the hits became personal and so I ditched it. It is tracking, obviously.

[stj]

duck can be configured, there is a page listing the options.

[TerraHertz]

Much of the Google search engine problems derive from Google trying to implement an AI 'censor'. They pretend it's to 'rate truth', but really they are attempting to build an AI that understands politics, and search-hides all content that doesn't conform to the views of Google internal culture and particularly Google management. Which is hard core Globalist, leftist-SJW and racist anti-white. Google has become a freaky cult.
So of course Google search engine is seriously bent and only going to get worse. Until Google is forcibly dismantled.

Amusing that immediately after Trump issues an executive order declaring a national emergency to combat human rights abuse, corruption and human trafficking ( https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-blocking-property-persons-involved-serious-human-rights-abuse-corruption/ ), Alphabet's Eric Schmidt (Mr 'our AI is magic') suddenly steps down as Alphabet CEO. I'm sure it's just totally coincidence and nothing to do with the part about confiscation of all assets in any way linked to the listed crimes. Or the massive number (10,000?) of sealed indictments pending. Or the ongoing large buildup of facilities at Gitmo.

If you want clear proof that Google is playing AI-political censorship games with search results, see pic.
(Which I just created from search screenshots I did just now. Search suggestion texts not photoshopped, though I moved graphics around a bit for a compact fit.) Links included are selected from a much longer list.

[Cyberdragon]

Same search for me led to "crybaby", "awesome", and "alien".

[julianhigginson]

Much of the Google search engine problems derive from Google trying to implement an AI 'censor'. They pretend it's to 'rate truth', but really...

SJW!!!

ANTI WHITE RACIST!!

GLOBALISM!

10000 SEALED INDICTMENTS!
 
KILLARY IZ A WITCH!!!!!

holy crap, dude.

Anyway - the's 2 issues with google's search results..

1) the act of sorting relevant hits needing so much work is not that they are trying to "censor" anything (I find most people old privileged white people screaming censorship have NFI what censorship even is, but that's for another day) but that their search result positions are commercially and politically very valuable and so very smart and very well paid people work day and night to understated and then game any system they have in place, to further their employees agenda... be it large corporations or political organisations... The act of filtering or curating the content is in fact an act of *UN*scrambling the damage done to what should otherwise be pure search results by vested interests.

2) Google are an ad company at the end of the day. That's how they make money, by getting people to see ads. In order to be more effective they need to be able to understand market segments to appeal to marketers (their customers) that want to advertise to market segments - and they need a bunch of regular viewers eyes in various market segments (their product) to sell.... SO they need to detect user preferences in order to do market segmentation.. Then also pander to their interests in order to have them use the service more so their market segmented eyes can be sold more. FB is exactly the same, so is anything else big that lots of people use and has ads built into it. This is a huge huge problem, basically creating virtual ghettos for people in different ideological groups that end up only seeing information targeted to them or by people like them, and over time this causes those divisions to become more magnified as this system shifts to more and more extreme/purified versions of their basic ideologies over time as the content targeted for search ability and search results and behaviours evolve.


A far bigger problem than tech companies with automated information curation algorithms is the actual people who will support any ideology to the death, no matter what as long as it's "their side" that's winning or right.....  The kind of people who promote and believe a made up story about a paedophile ring in a pizza shop that results in an assault rifle carrying wingnut running in to "self-investigate" and could easily have ended up with a bunch of innocent people getting shot dead... then, a few months later, turn around and vehemently support the election of Roy Moore, an ACTUAL paedophile (or at very least ACTUAL underage child abuser, if you want to dig into semantics) to office in the US.

[stj]

a made up story about a paedophile ring in a pizza shop

you have no evidence that was made up, it wasnt even investigated and the laptop of one of the people involved has become more elusive than the roswell "weather balloon"

you just chose not to believe it because of the implications.

i suggest you look into a guy called Larry Franklin.
a good search pattern would be "larry franklin affair"
(or you could take the blue pill and forget all about this post!)
 

[julianhigginson]

you have no evidence that was made up, it wasnt even investigated and the laptop of one of the people involved has become more elusive than the roswell "weather balloon"

you just chose not to believe it because of the implications.

i suggest you look into a guy called Larry Franklin.
a good search pattern would be "larry franklin affair"
(or you could take the blue pill and forget all about this post!)
 

Now you mention it, has anyone ever seen that laptop and the Roswell weather balloon in the same room at the same time??

I'm not saying that the laptop may just well BE the Roswell weather balloon, and its garaged in the dungeon under a paedophile pizza shop that has no dungeon under it, but I'm not saying it's not either.

think about it! you can't prove its not!

ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED, SHEEPLE!

[stj]

i'm pretty sure the laptop is with the corrupt FBI, and the "weather balloon" is at an airforce-base.
nobody would trust the FBI with a "weather balloon",
and nobody would trust the airforce with a laptop!