this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Google *had good search. It's been dogshit for some time now though.
That's because a good search engine is diametrically opposite of advertising.
A good search engine shows you only what you want to see and shows it quickly.
Advertising shows you want its sponsors want you to see, for as long as possible.
Good free-to-the-user search engines aren't profitable. Advertising is massively profitable. Google can only try to thread that needle for so long before our "line must go up infinitely" corporate culture forces them to sacrifice the one for the other.
And that's just talking about Google itself, not even mentioning the issue with SEO and how human nature causes websites to game the system to be more visible.
The craziest part is that when I use Google search to search for a service, that's when I have the most trouble. Like many tech problems here on Lemmy (was similar on Reddit too), I find the outrage to be a bit overblown, but holy shit, if I want to find some kind of service where I want to exchange my money for something, Google fails me almost every time.
Yeah. When I'm looking for information on how something works or a problem I need to solve (which usually ends up with a Wikipedia or Reddit result being what I need) it's usually one of the first three (non sponsored) results. But if I'm looking for a new light weight breathable rain coat? Awful experience
And Bing search is not bad at all. CoPilot is firmly mediocre though
Bing search is still terrible. I frequently paste the same exact term from Bing to Google, and Bing won’t have a relevant return for pages, whereas Google still gets it in the first 3 links. I have Bing as my default on my work PC so I get to run this comparison frequently. I genuinely am curious how people think Bing returns better results than Google. It’s a night and day difference.
Copilot is no worse than chatGPT which is the current standard.
Where Google absolutely fails for me now is if I ever want information about a product beyond where to purchase it, especially if I want a review. I have to go through pages and pages of shopping links before I can hope to get relevant information, if I ever do.