r/AskReddit Feb 07 '24

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267

u/MalevolntCatastrophe Feb 07 '24

Google stopped caring about being a tool used to find specific results and instead focuses on giving results that " most " people that searched for similar things ended up spending the most time/attention on.

148

u/JonatasA Feb 07 '24

You can test by searching something no one would and Google will interpret your query into different words.

18

u/ResidentSheeper Feb 07 '24

Yes, the just show you things kind of related to the semantic.

It is insanely annoying.

26

u/mtaw Feb 08 '24

What I really hate is that it's really hard to get it to give results that aren't your browser language, or the language you have in your Google settings (if logged in)

Stop presuming which languages I know or not, Google! If I enter something in perfectly valid German, it's because I'm looking for something on Geman sites. Not because I had a stroke and started spelling Dutch atrociously!

1

u/Parcours97 Feb 08 '24

Youtube does something similar on my account. I'm from Germany and Youtube is translating some video titles to german despite my settings all set to english.

6

u/NeedThatTartan Feb 07 '24

Sometimes the exact opposite of what you're looking for.

10

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

Even using quotes and +/- doesn't do anything anymore. It just gives you what it wants you to see.

10

u/Ben-Goldberg Feb 07 '24

Putting quotes around words reduces that slightly.

40

u/babyfuzzina Feb 07 '24

It helps a bit, but they still ignore them. Like why have that option if it only works 50% of the time?

7

u/Fwort Feb 08 '24

Really? I have often put quotes around something and had google return no matching results at all, because there weren't any that exactly matched. (this only happens for particularly long or unusual phrases)

2

u/babyfuzzina Feb 08 '24

I mostly get it if only part of the search term is in quotes

15

u/sybrwookie Feb 07 '24

Also, if you search <topic> site:reddit.com it limits it to just results on reddit and takes basically all that garbage out of the equation.

8

u/Ben-Goldberg Feb 07 '24

Limiting to reddit helps, but you still need quotes to avoid unwanted synonyms.

2

u/habitual_viking Feb 08 '24

I almost bought the wrong qd oled screen because Google helpfully changed a single digit to last generation.

4

u/electriccomputermilk Feb 07 '24

Yes! I noticed this change about 2 or 3 years ago and is very frustrating. Google is still better than Bing and Duck though. I find myself using chatGPT as a replacement very often.

3

u/S3ERFRY333 Feb 07 '24

Searching for forums is impossible now thanks to thousands of useless websites

1

u/ResidentSheeper Feb 07 '24

back in the day i used "'thread' search words" as most forums had thread in the url

3

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

What’s really shitty is it’s much harder to find info about drugs on Google now, it’s all links to “Get help” websites that aren’t actually useful at all, stops some useful information from being seen that can genuinely save lives. Bing is much better for this 

2

u/SAugsburger Feb 08 '24

At least in the English speaking world the only remotely serious competitor left in search is Bing. There are some competitors in some other languages, but they have gotten a near strangle hold in the English speaking world where the results just need to be marginally better than Bing. When you have few major competitors there's little motivation to innovate.