• lichtmetzger@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    It’s gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly “intelligent” by suggesting search phrases you didn’t even input, watering down the results.

    I’m a web developer and when I google for “string”, I don’t want to get results for “yarn” to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I’m looking for and I don’t need assistance with that.

    Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.

    It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.

    I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      For my development work, it works fine… haven’t had any issue (but i mainly do a lot of LUA / React). With bing though, a lot of links I got last I tested (a year or so ago) were literally dodgy websites

      • abhibeckert@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Bing is definitely worse than Google especially for dev research, but it’s not as good as it used to be.

        Google seems to be losing their ongoing war against spam companies flooding the internet with garbage content.

        Websites like reddit (and beehaw) are somewhat of an oasis – actively moderated with absolute garbage content deleted straight away and questionable content at least has replies where people have pointing out if they think it’s wrong.

        If (when?) Reddit goes away, that’s a whole bunch of really good content that will suddenly disappear from google results, which will be sad.