Are search engines, like Google, relevant at all anymore? Why use them? A relevant debate. It's not 2010 anymore.
Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?
well..
a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It's also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.
Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn't a good alternative search engines remained relevant as we users tolerated their direction.
Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it's still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.
On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what's happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is the *Windows cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that *disfavors it, or is in favor of WIndows 11?
It's all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you see, or some, or none of them and then move on with your day as it should be.
Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?
Is this a joke, hyperbole? To build on your example, what if I wanted to find out “how to disable Windows 11 update prompts” into lemmy’s search. Do you think I would get the answer I’m looking for?
I’m not saying I don’t want to be rid of google and all they do. I would pay for 10 proton mail accounts a month if just one of googles data centers spontaneously burst into flames right now!
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Well I’m willing to wait a while longer… I have not tried Kagi yet, but I will as soon as I get bored with Midjourney. Hopefully someday we can collectively slip the yoke, but I suspect googles results will get a lot worse first.
if more people used the Fediverse and inputed information overtime, it would get to that level and it would less likely just become another seo situation because it isn't centralized. Even right now, on Lemmy you can find more specific things for anything that is available then Google would give you even if if was available to them to give if it doesn't meet their seo standards.
I don't think you understand how difficult it is to search the amount of data that google sifts through before showing you results
How does the fact, that websites are written a certain way to please googles search engine, not apply to the fediverse? Even if all information was posted to or accessible through the fediverse, searching something will still use some kind of search engine. So people will also eventually start doing SEO, regardless if its Google's search engine or the fediverse's search engine that they are optimizing for.
Yes its problematic that google has a huge effect on what people see or don't see on the internet. But that wouldnt be any better for the fediverse. Its only better right now because you know what kind of information is on here, and you are getting a kind of pre-filtered selection of knowledge because of that. You wouldn't even start to search for washing machine repairs on here. You wouldn't try to look for local businesses here. If literally all of these things were here, the fediverse would need to start working on their search engine to stay fast enough to be usable because its just so much data, so many possible results. That would also result in some kind of arbitrary rule set that will make your post more likely to be shown as a result. And that will cause people to optimize their posts for the search engine.
I understand that Google has a lot of data to shift through, and that maybe the Fediverse probably can't do everything it does. When a user tries to search for certain things it's like Google goes out of it's way to hide it. I guess what I am trying to say is the Fediverse is best for finding discussion, and up to date topics, and opinions from more voices. When it comes to local stuff, I would probably use Google maps or something like that just so I can say I don't need a search engine for that, but that's just me when it comes to local searches.
If one server were to get too big and do ads and all that, guess what, it's not like with Youtube for example where that's your only option you can just switch your instance and you won't be censored you just won't show up on that corrupted instance. The fact that the Fediverse is decentralized and federated absolutely will prevent this from being as bad as it was with the og old internet.
The reason Facebook took over was essentially the fact that it was it's own platform, and you couldn't communicate with your friends from that old forum site.
When one or 5 servers get to a certain size I would assume some instance would bloc some of the largest instances, but would still be usable as other servers it could still federate with. The Fediverse designed to combat this, while the old internet, really had no plans to combat this. Sure it thought well for people it just wasn't built to give people enough power to avoid bigger instances and still have success and activity.
And how exactly do you think google maps finds the results? If you think the search on google maps does not use a search engine, you have a lot to learn before having this discussion. Google maps is pretty much just a different interface for showing you results from the same, or at least extremely similar search engine as regular google uses
I agree its better to have several different options to pick from, monopolies are never a good thing. But that just means we don't want google to have a monopoly. It does not mean that we want search engines to be gone.
You are mixing things up that have nothing to do with each other. How is the fact that Facebook does not interact with old forums an argument for not having search engine services like google, duvkduckgo or bing? The federation in the fediverse definitely is nice and I hope it becomes the standard, but I really don't see how that would mean that we don't need search engine services anymore.
I really mean, not getting rid of search engine services as they were originally intended to be used, but ultimately rather getting rid of as they are used against smaller sites today and preferring select sites.
Idk if Maps uses the same search engine as Google, if not while I agree maps uses a search engine, to search the info stored on it or that the user searches for, mostly what's stored on maps, I think is stored on one server dedicated to maps or perhaps multiple servers being a Google. It's not like it's picking sites and services to get it from, it's data they collected for sure but it's all stored on that service as I understand it.
The Facebook bit was really to address the potential take over of the Fediverse which since it's built to litterally protect users from just that, sure it won't help everyone who is ignorant to how the Fediverse works, but if you do know how it works you can still free yourself and jump to another instance using the exact same familiar interface on whatever platform you are using on the fediverse, like Mastodon. Also newer platforms on the Fediverse will also show up with their own servers seperated from Mastodon or Lemmy so things will be refreshioned again and again when new Platforms arrive. Most of them being open source also means no one can really buy out Mastodon or Lemmy just like that it just doesn't work like that.
Okay fair enough, I'm just pointing out that your original claim that search engines are or should be irrelevant nowadays isn't really true.
My point about maps just was that there still is a search engine under the hood, so only using maps and not google does not enable you to say that you don't use search engines.
I agree about all that stuff you say about the fediverse but that has literally nothing to do with search engines.