What's going on with Google's search engine?

MadBabs@lemmy.world to Out of the loop@lemmy.world – 124 points –

It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can't find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?

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It depends on which bit you’re talking about.

ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.

The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.

If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)

DuckDuckGo has some of the same problems too. It is mainly just a proxy for Bing search results. But they are less full of ads and crappy personalisation indeed. Also search.brave.com is worth a try.