myrmepropagandist@futurebird@sauropods.win

I know we've talked about this before but I'm just so disgusted with how useless most search engines are now. They all second guess me.

The most obscure or unusual word is ignored so it's very hard to search for the intersection of a popular thing and an obscure thing.

I have a theory that for many people search has never worked well for them since they just didn't use computers very much, or it was not explained well. Now those of us who found search effective get to see what it was like.

myrmepropagandist@futurebird@sauropods.win

Replying to @futurebird@sauropods.win

The non-computer people I know don't really think search as gotten worse. The people I know who hate computers the most think it's gotten better... but they are in the minority.

I've always found obscure words powerful in searches. That power has been destroyed. Please don't tell me to put it in quotes or use a different engine... this is a design trend, made worse by "AI" I'm not asking for a solution or work around. I want to know WHY the software I depend on keeps getting worse.

Geoff Wozniak@GeoffWozniak@masto.hackers.town

Replying to @futurebird@sauropods.win

@futurebird At this point no matter what I search for I will mostly get back something that is pushing me toward commerce.

And independent of that I will get something that is polar opposite of what I actually searched for. To top it off, I'll get far too much that isn't even related!

I use DDG the majority of the time, and I use the "lite" version. About 99.999% of the time if I go to the second page of results might as well just be random web pages.

Geoff Wozniak@GeoffWozniak@masto.hackers.town

Replying to @mwichary@mastodon.online

@mwichary @futurebird I think that Marginalia is trying, at least. How successful they are is a matter of debate.

marginalia-search.com/

Marginalia SearchMarginalia SearchMarginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.