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?
Perhaps we use search engines for different purposes... 🤔
I don't use Google, but I definitely use my preferred search engine numerous times daily.
Maybe, care to elaborate your purposes.
Typically I might search for something specific like an answer to a question, and maybe or maybe not it shows up in a Google search. Or I might just search for a specific website which 9 times out of 10 it will show up.
The main problem I see with both Google and Duckduckgo is, Sometimes if I just search for information, some sites will show up and others just won't. So because of this you may be missing out on helpful and relevant information that just isn't seo friendly enough.
I'm not sure how abandoning search engines and only using specific Websites is supposed to help with this
By using say Mastodon, it is federated with other instances that focus on certian things and people posts about said things. You can search from Mastodon posts and even beyond Mastodon to other platforms that are using using Activity pub. and vice versa.
Because of this you will have more independent control rather than one company controlling the flow of everything. With Google everything goes by Google. With Duckduckgo everything goes by Bing and Duckduckgo. With Mastodon, whatever you see goes by various Mastodon server criteria.
But you’re still limited to the opinions of people who post on Lemmy, which, as someone who occasionally posts on Lemmy, is not a shining beacon of quality.
Even if I just went by what I get on the first page of a Google search, I’d expect I’d find what I need much faster using Google than I would using Lemmy based purely on the volume of info Google has access to. And that’s not even taking into account things like Google’s ability to search within other sites.
Unless Lemmy has gotten like 100 billions times better in the last week, this isn’t even a fair comparison.
Edit: lol, just realised you’re the same guy from the Nvidia thread.