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Google has been on a steady downward trend for several years now, to the point where it's getting nearly unusable.
It still works relatively well in English, but have you tried searching in other languages?? It's hot garbage. Google does not know the difference between Japanese and Chinese even in 2023.
I haven't used Google Search in years.
This may be confirmation bias, but I was thinking much the same thing before seeing your post, over the same time frame (last few weeks/days). Could be people are getting better at manipulating Google's algorithm, could be something else. But I've stopped going to Google as my first choice, getting much better results with Duck Duck Go (which is Bing I think).
I tend to use Brave search, since it is the default in by browser. Sometimes I don't get good results, and will go to another search engine. Google has become a bit unreliable though, since they started integrating these "ChatGPT"-style responses. These AI systems often seem to just make stuff up, and you really can't rely on the information at all.
Test
i've been using ddg, searx and others for years, sometimes startpage when i really need g** restults
There have been less relevant results on google for a while. The same can be said for youtube as well.
I have found my results to be more repetitive, filled with sponsored content, and less relevant. As a lot of what I search for is within articles/research, having equity company products shilled at me during the process is frustrating. It’s been a lot worse lately.
I'm surprised to see that Brave Search isn't mentioned more. Is there a privacy reason behind it?
So far I'm happy with it. It is pretty annoying to switch a different image search provider though...
I've been trying DuckDuckGo since I migrated to Waterfox recently. It seems more functional than when I last used it, some 6~12 months ago. And I've been noticing my searches are usually more successful on DDG than on Google too.
I haven't been using Google anyway since Bing got its redesign. It's just so much more useful now than Google.
I legitimately find this hilarious.
Are lemmy instances indexable to search engines? The reason I joined reddit 12 years ago was because I always ended up there next to the stack exchange for technical or programming problems.
DuckDuckGo with bangs! It's been pretty good as I am able to narrow down my searches by service which is more necessary than I'd like it to be.
I just made the switch from Google to DuckDuckGo in the last week.
Swiss Cows users: there are dozens of us!
I have mostly transitioned to Ecosia (which uses Bing) for most of my searches. I got sick of irrelevant results and half the screen covered by Google asking me to log in.
I still use google a lot. It has a lot of features and gives me accurate results. i have started to use Bing because of Microsoft Rewards