I always bookmark sites I know I will use frequently. I didn't realize people didn't do that anymore lol
What happened to the search engines? They always seem to work fine for me
I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.
My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.
Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.
For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.
It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.
My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.
Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.
As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.
What do you consider advanced googling?
“Advanced” Site:google.com filetype:pdf -“consider” etc etc.
Using targeted operators to refine your search.
Plenty of resources on it by searching “Google operators”
Oh wow, they made it easier and people still didn’t use it
That's been there for decades. We were taught to use it in middle school (~2003 for me). There used to be a fairly prominent link to the advanced search page from the main Google homepage.
For a while, regular google searches were good enough to find everything you needed, so the skill became less common/important. My guess is that public knowledge of it has just atrophied over time.
AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.
The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.
I never stopped bookmarking. Type a word and usually the browser will find that long lost page from the bookmarks.
Don't even have to bookmark. You type few words separated by spaces of anything in browser history, browser will show it as a suggestion. Example:
"steam palworld"
"Jira projectname board"
Etc.
You don't clear your browsing history regularly?
Wtf? Yall have been using Search Engines to go to websites you've been to before? Why even, just type the url in...
"ne" presses enter for netflix.com
"l" presses enter for lemmy.world
Auto completing urls are so fast.
I accidentally used chrome the other day.
Tried to go to Gmail with "gm" enter.
No autocomplete, just a Google search.
Almost went to the General Motors website.
It’s a level of hell to watch other people continue to type out the full URL while the auto complete is already there, until they make that one typo towards the end and hit enter before you had a chance to tell them.
Even better, save specific search engines with shortcut codes: type 'w' + , start typing to search on Wikipedia.
Truth, but it's three more key presses when I can just click the bookmark under the address bar instead of clicking the address bar. Takes you three times longer!
Idk dude, I feel like there is more wrist movement involved in mouse control than typing.
I fucking hate the death of keyboard shortcuts and not being able to reliably tab through fields. Particularly in UIs designed for data entry.
All our patient care reporting software has gone to a touch-screen centric UI ... when half the fields still require typing information in.
I still find myself tabbing while signing in but it almost never works.
Unless you're like me with folders, sub folders, and sub sub folders of bookmarks. Sometimes it's easier to just search. It would be great if I can do a search within my bookmarks!
Firefox can search your bookmarks. I'd be surprised if another browser couldn't, but it probably isn't as easy as just using the address bar
I was only joking but you're right, this is already a thing, for Chrome too. TIL.
For any Chrome users here, type @bookmarks before your search in the address bar.
The only reason I don't bookmark much, is because I'm actively hoarding 517 tabs.
That was me, but I found bookmarking to be better. Very rarely I've had Chrome crash and not be able to recover my tabs. With bookmarking, I don't need to worry about that. And I can pick up my browsing on a different device very easily with bookmarking, as my bookmarks are automatically synced via chrome.
luckily for me, Firefox is probably the most stable part of my system
I just moved to a new computer and cleaned up all my tabs.
You have Tabs Disease™ and the cure is bookmarks. Spend some time organizing your bookmarks. Set reminders to read or do things so you can close the ones you won't need in the future. This is the equivalent of living in a messy room surrounded by trash, dirty laundry, and clean but unfolded laundry. Gotta take some time away from living and playing to clean up.
People stopped bookmarking?
Trust me, most people don't even know what that star in the URL bar is for
It's the Yelp review, duh.
Google has been so bad it's making bing better. No seriously, bing is better than Google.
Until SEO comes for Bing...
Arg.... I hope they don't. Mess up google. I don't care.
Yeah I moved to bing a year ago, it genuinely is.
Its pretty good. At least for now the results is not garbage on the top links.
The keywords for bookmarks in Firefox are amazing. I type the thing my brain thinks of when I think of a website and boom I'm there.
I already bookmarked but with this whole enshitification I began hoarding data. All those txts, images, videos, songs that I bookmarked? Am downloading and categorizing all of it
I've never let go of bookmarks and RSS. Still the best systems around.
I never use bookmarks. Not because of search engines but because of browser history.
People don't bookmark? I have dozens of bookmarks all set up in folders. It's just easier than typing every time. Plus, I have a PC connected to my TV for watching illegal sports streams. With bookmarks, I don't need my keyboard most of the time. I just have a wireless mouse and that's it.
illegal
Maybe you should not admit that you are breaking the law
Hey everyone! I'm breaking the law!
DDG seems to still function nicely. And I've never stopped using bookmarks. Didn't know people weren't using bookmarks anymore... I mean, what do you? Search for the same website you frequently use or just make a button that can do it in one click?
DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.
And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.
DuckDuck Go took getting used to for me due to it lacking all the convenient algorithms from Google that... used to in the past... contribute to getting better search results.
The lack of these conveniences is why I switched to DDG years ago in the first place. I realised Google was essentially helping everyone build their own Internet echo chambers and I didn't want to be part of that.
It does mean you actually need to be good at searching for what you want because DDG is very bad at "guessing".
Or to put it differently; I call you complaints skill issues. :)
You may call it as you wish. And in some way you might be right. But I've been searching the web since the 90's, from AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Google to DDG. I use operators in my queries etc. I'm not new to this. One thing that drives me mad with DDG is that it translates search terms, even if they're in quotes, and gives me results with the translated terms mixed in with the original term. That is never ever what I want. It really likes to decide for me what I want I feel like, like when I searched for screenshots of the software for a particular surveillance camera, DDG showed me nothing but product images of said camera. I tried several different queries, only got product photos. Tried Google and immediately got a whole bunch of screenshots, which DDG should have known given the term screenshot and other synonyms, in quotes.
SearXNG is better in some ways. It's a more literal search and doesn't try to guess what you're thinking as much as Google or DDG.
From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:
Ddg is great for the US, but shit outside.
I live in Denmark. I can't complain.
I bookmark so much these days. Other times I collect links with better descriptions in Joplin.
I know people that just keep all of their tabs and never close them rather than bookmark. Its insane to me, I don't get it.
I group tabs I'm working on and yes I could bookmark them but my bookmark folders are such a mess. I can clean them up. So what's the reason I don't bookmark you might wonder? It's lazyness
I bookmark a lot of the websites I'm using.
My bookmark folders are insane.
I almost never actually use them unless I'm looking for that one website I probably bookmarked 2 years ago.
Sounds like someone has been searching YouTube on google every time they wanted to watch YT
So I'm not really crazy right? Google has been going downhill over the past year or so?
Yes. Just today I googled "normal standing heartrate". What I received were a bunch of pages telling me a normal resting heart rate.
you are way more right than you think. Now that i think about it i started bookmarking more and more in correlation with the search engine enshittification trend.
bring back del.icio.us cowards
I didn't know something like that existed, I usually use a service as cloudhiker to explore interesting web pages, but I don't like the ads and the redirecting, so I am currently I am searching for alternatives.
del.icio.us back in the early 2000s before it was bought by (i think yahoo) was amazing.
Did You find alternatives that You use today?
nothing as good as del.icio.us.
pocket is decent but the tagging system is kind of basic in terms of remembering what you tagged before and reusing them. the tagging system in firefox (and the ability to drag tags to your toolbar) is ok but yeah nothing as good as del.icio.us
I understand, I think I will stick with my old system. Thanks for the info
RSS and bookmarks. I never stopped. Firefox even searches first on my bookmarks and offers them before the online search option.
Bookmarks and search engines serve different purposes, though search engines can replace bookmarks. But the main purpose of a search engine is to find sites you've never been to before because they contain specific information you're looking for.
I'm saying previously you may have not bookmarked it because you'd be confident you can easily find that info again. Now that search sucks, you may not be able to find it again. So you'll bookmark good information.
Offline AI is a better search engine now. Even at 20% fake or made up references, it is better than a search engine.
The reverse is likely true. Search engines suck because they are actively trying to edge out the AI competition as the products that will emerge from AI will soon make search engines unprofitable for peripheral data mining through stalking people.
Excuse me, my 783 loose bookmarks and I would like to have a word.
Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark
manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages
March 2024 Update - Support for Sub-Collections, Bulk Actions, API Keys and more.
I always bookmark sites I know I will use frequently. I didn't realize people didn't do that anymore lol
What happened to the search engines? They always seem to work fine for me
I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.
My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.
Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.
For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.
It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.
My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.
Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.
As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.
What do you consider advanced googling?
“Advanced” Site:google.com filetype:pdf -“consider” etc etc.
Using targeted operators to refine your search.
Plenty of resources on it by searching “Google operators”
Well yes, but also just any use of https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Oh wow, they made it easier and people still didn’t use it
That's been there for decades. We were taught to use it in middle school (~2003 for me). There used to be a fairly prominent link to the advanced search page from the main Google homepage.
For a while, regular google searches were good enough to find everything you needed, so the skill became less common/important. My guess is that public knowledge of it has just atrophied over time.
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
But also just anything from this page:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1
AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.
The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.
I never stopped bookmarking. Type a word and usually the browser will find that long lost page from the bookmarks.
Don't even have to bookmark. You type few words separated by spaces of anything in browser history, browser will show it as a suggestion. Example: "steam palworld" "Jira projectname board" Etc.
You don't clear your browsing history regularly?
Wtf? Yall have been using Search Engines to go to websites you've been to before? Why even, just type the url in...
"ne" presses enter for netflix.com
"l" presses enter for lemmy.world
Auto completing urls are so fast.
I accidentally used chrome the other day.
Tried to go to Gmail with "gm" enter.
No autocomplete, just a Google search.
Almost went to the General Motors website.
It’s a level of hell to watch other people continue to type out the full URL while the auto complete is already there, until they make that one typo towards the end and hit enter before you had a chance to tell them.
Even better, save specific search engines with shortcut codes: type 'w' + , start typing to search on Wikipedia.
Truth, but it's three more key presses when I can just click the bookmark under the address bar instead of clicking the address bar. Takes you three times longer!
Idk dude, I feel like there is more wrist movement involved in mouse control than typing.
I fucking hate the death of keyboard shortcuts and not being able to reliably tab through fields. Particularly in UIs designed for data entry.
All our patient care reporting software has gone to a touch-screen centric UI ... when half the fields still require typing information in.
I still find myself tabbing while signing in but it almost never works.
Unless you're like me with folders, sub folders, and sub sub folders of bookmarks. Sometimes it's easier to just search. It would be great if I can do a search within my bookmarks!
Firefox can search your bookmarks. I'd be surprised if another browser couldn't, but it probably isn't as easy as just using the address bar
I was only joking but you're right, this is already a thing, for Chrome too. TIL.
For any Chrome users here, type @bookmarks before your search in the address bar.
The only reason I don't bookmark much, is because I'm actively hoarding 517 tabs.
That was me, but I found bookmarking to be better. Very rarely I've had Chrome crash and not be able to recover my tabs. With bookmarking, I don't need to worry about that. And I can pick up my browsing on a different device very easily with bookmarking, as my bookmarks are automatically synced via chrome.
luckily for me, Firefox is probably the most stable part of my system
I just moved to a new computer and cleaned up all my tabs.
You have Tabs Disease™ and the cure is bookmarks. Spend some time organizing your bookmarks. Set reminders to read or do things so you can close the ones you won't need in the future. This is the equivalent of living in a messy room surrounded by trash, dirty laundry, and clean but unfolded laundry. Gotta take some time away from living and playing to clean up.
People stopped bookmarking?
Trust me, most people don't even know what that star in the URL bar is for
It's the Yelp review, duh.
Google has been so bad it's making bing better. No seriously, bing is better than Google.
Until SEO comes for Bing...
Arg.... I hope they don't. Mess up google. I don't care.
Yeah I moved to bing a year ago, it genuinely is.
Its pretty good. At least for now the results is not garbage on the top links.
Bring back personal homepages and webrings!
And visitor counters
Geocities!
Neocities is the successor! It's pretty cool
https://www.anarchymeanything.com/
The old internet done for a laugh
I never stopped bookmarking.
The keywords for bookmarks in Firefox are amazing. I type the thing my brain thinks of when I think of a website and boom I'm there.
I already bookmarked but with this whole enshitification I began hoarding data. All those txts, images, videos, songs that I bookmarked? Am downloading and categorizing all of it
I've never let go of bookmarks and RSS. Still the best systems around.
I never use bookmarks. Not because of search engines but because of browser history.
People don't bookmark? I have dozens of bookmarks all set up in folders. It's just easier than typing every time. Plus, I have a PC connected to my TV for watching illegal sports streams. With bookmarks, I don't need my keyboard most of the time. I just have a wireless mouse and that's it.
illegalMaybe you should not admit that you are breaking the law
Hey everyone! I'm breaking the law!
DDG seems to still function nicely. And I've never stopped using bookmarks. Didn't know people weren't using bookmarks anymore... I mean, what do you? Search for the same website you frequently use or just make a button that can do it in one click?
DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.
And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.
DuckDuck Go took getting used to for me due to it lacking all the convenient algorithms from Google that... used to in the past... contribute to getting better search results.
The lack of these conveniences is why I switched to DDG years ago in the first place. I realised Google was essentially helping everyone build their own Internet echo chambers and I didn't want to be part of that.
It does mean you actually need to be good at searching for what you want because DDG is very bad at "guessing".
Or to put it differently; I call you complaints skill issues. :)
You may call it as you wish. And in some way you might be right. But I've been searching the web since the 90's, from AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Google to DDG. I use operators in my queries etc. I'm not new to this. One thing that drives me mad with DDG is that it translates search terms, even if they're in quotes, and gives me results with the translated terms mixed in with the original term. That is never ever what I want. It really likes to decide for me what I want I feel like, like when I searched for screenshots of the software for a particular surveillance camera, DDG showed me nothing but product images of said camera. I tried several different queries, only got product photos. Tried Google and immediately got a whole bunch of screenshots, which DDG should have known given the term screenshot and other synonyms, in quotes.
SearXNG is better in some ways. It's a more literal search and doesn't try to guess what you're thinking as much as Google or DDG.
From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:
Ddg is great for the US, but shit outside.
I live in Denmark. I can't complain.
I bookmark so much these days. Other times I collect links with better descriptions in Joplin.
I know people that just keep all of their tabs and never close them rather than bookmark. Its insane to me, I don't get it.
I group tabs I'm working on and yes I could bookmark them but my bookmark folders are such a mess. I can clean them up. So what's the reason I don't bookmark you might wonder? It's lazyness
I bookmark a lot of the websites I'm using.
My bookmark folders are insane.
I almost never actually use them unless I'm looking for that one website I probably bookmarked 2 years ago.
Sounds like someone has been searching YouTube on google every time they wanted to watch YT
So I'm not really crazy right? Google has been going downhill over the past year or so?
Yes. Just today I googled "normal standing heartrate". What I received were a bunch of pages telling me a normal resting heart rate.
you are way more right than you think. Now that i think about it i started bookmarking more and more in correlation with the search engine enshittification trend.
bring back del.icio.us cowards
I didn't know something like that existed, I usually use a service as cloudhiker to explore interesting web pages, but I don't like the ads and the redirecting, so I am currently I am searching for alternatives.
del.icio.us back in the early 2000s before it was bought by (i think yahoo) was amazing.
Did You find alternatives that You use today?
nothing as good as del.icio.us.
pocket is decent but the tagging system is kind of basic in terms of remembering what you tagged before and reusing them. the tagging system in firefox (and the ability to drag tags to your toolbar) is ok but yeah nothing as good as del.icio.us
I understand, I think I will stick with my old system. Thanks for the info
Postmarks? https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/08/with-postmarks-social-bookmarking-is-back-but-this-time-its-built-on-the-fediverse/
What's that?
old social bookmarking site that pretty much popularized the concept of tagging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
RSS and bookmarks. I never stopped. Firefox even searches first on my bookmarks and offers them before the online search option.
Bookmarks and search engines serve different purposes, though search engines can replace bookmarks. But the main purpose of a search engine is to find sites you've never been to before because they contain specific information you're looking for.
I'm saying previously you may have not bookmarked it because you'd be confident you can easily find that info again. Now that search sucks, you may not be able to find it again. So you'll bookmark good information.
Offline AI is a better search engine now. Even at 20% fake or made up references, it is better than a search engine.
The reverse is likely true. Search engines suck because they are actively trying to edge out the AI competition as the products that will emerge from AI will soon make search engines unprofitable for peripheral data mining through stalking people.
Excuse me, my 783 loose bookmarks and I would like to have a word.
Never stopped using them!
@someguy3@lemmy.ca I have the perfect tool for you https://lemmy.world/post/12808358
Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages March 2024 Update - Support for Sub-Collections, Bulk Actions, API Keys and more.