Search Engines are Totally Useless Now...

They used to be useful back in the 90's when they indexed more than the same three sites for every single search, but now you can expect never to find new information on these engines, which have all been compromised by shills and spam anyway.

🆕 Book Reprinting Site:

[vengeance]

I remember back until 2012 or something, googling even whole specific sentences will get so many results, a lot of matching phrases from countless forums and websites. Internet felt alive back then, even huge. Nowadays, googling "my new car" gets me only 10 pages of search and 90% of it is just ads.

[icedlain]

Pinterest is the worst of these websites flooding every single search. Shows you a picture that does not exist when you want to open it, then puts all the content behind an unskippable registration wall, and finally leads you to nothing because Pinterest does not link the original source of that content. Infuriating AF.

[BCDeshiG]

What really gets on my nerves is when the 1st search result is someone asking a question on reddit only to be told to "just google it".

[andrewtucr]

Even up to the mid 2000s, the internet was pretty great. Tons of hobbyist/fan sites made by few people, 'portals' which collected links to cool websites, forums each with a distinct culture.

[debtminer]

I agree with this 100%. Even the ''good'' search engines today rely on Google, Bing or some other shitty service. The current internet is basically just modernized TV without the privacy.

[MrVecheater]

Google: "We want to prevent people from reading fake news"
Also Google: *puts Facebook and Twitter at the top search results*

[Monsuco]

It's known as the "Dead Internet Theory". Most of the content that's actually reachable on the internet today is curated by AI to the point that reaching anything original is damn near impossible.

[klnmn]

I thought I was the only one who noticed the AI-written spam sites. Thank God I'm not going insane.

[LittleMushroomGuy]

Something i realised and experienced first hand, google became so bad in the last few years its frustrating. Some weeks ago I remembered reading as a kid about the early history of Japan and how they were conquered by horsemen from the Korean peninsula in the late antiquity/early medieval period. Trying to search for it on Google drowe me insane, Google for some reason keept pushing "No you mean the Japanese invasion of Korea", "No, you mean about the Mongol invasion of Japan". I did manage to find it tho, in books in my library lmao

[___xyz___]

This is apocalyptic in nature. I'm getting flashbacks to my teen years, when browsing the web brought up homemade websites with interesting anecdotes and stories. It's only around 15 odd years ago. But now... I don't know what I'm looking for any more. The modern Internet is truly confusing me. Trying to get me to go places and do things I don't wanna do. The frightening fact is that this is all nothing but a frustration. Big social network shills are lulling me so hard I haven't had the opportunity to wake up to the reality that this is really, really scary. Where once there was novelty is being replaced by homogeneous low-effort "contents". A whole lot of noise. Everyone and their grandmas dog doing the same thing, and it's in the search engine's best interest you check out every single entry to find what you were looking for.

I think you're right. But I don't like it one bit.

[ChickenPermissionOG]

Someone needs to build a search engine the way google use to be. Where what you search for is what you get not just one word of what you searched.

[the-real-zpero]

I have noticed in recent times that I get pointed to useful websites more often by talking to people, than by actually searching for them on a search engine. It's really just sad.

[AdrianTechWizard]

I guess the telephone book doesn't look so old-fashioned now...

[citizensnips]

What broke Google for me was when it got to the point where any search leads to a half page of irrelevant "sponsored results" followed by a half page of irrelevant organic results.

[tozlink]

I think there's a big opportunity for a human-curated directory of websites, like the old Yahoo or the old paper Internet magazines like The Net.

[MrGCE]

THE EXAMPLE ABOUT CHANGING THE CAR OIL ABOUT A WEBSITE THAT STARTS TALKING ABOUT WHAT IS OIL AND THE BENEFITS ABOUT CHANGING IT... MAN, I FEEL U !!!

[InsertMyChineseUsername]

It seems like whenever I want an answer to a question, I HAVE to add "reddit" to the end of the search, otherwise it's just tons of stupid useless sites

[shocktohp]

Luke walking around a pine plantation and talking about how useless modern web is? Count me in.

[headphonejack]

It got noticeably worse in the last few years. I've searched for stuff that got me basically the entire first results page full of trash results. I thought the site got compromised or that I somehow got malware on my computer that manipulates something on the user-end. But no, it's just like you described in your video. AI/SEO trash sites gaming the search engines.

Same problem when searching for stuff related to current events. Just mainstream trash news with basically all the same articles slightly differently worded, over and over again.

[beachbum]

There needs to be a search engine that just blacklists all major sites. Allowing engine plugins so you can blacklist certain types of sites, or prop up more results from certain types of sites for your query's specifically would be nice too