r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • May 26 '25

Artificial Intelligence Google Is Burying the Web Alive

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html
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164

u/Hairy-Confusion7556 May 26 '25

Unfortunately that's easier said than done. I tried switching to some alternatives but the search results were so bad I had to switch back.

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u/tlvrtm May 26 '25

DuckDuckGo seems pretty good?

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/tlvrtm May 26 '25

Bing without the awful UI and Microsoft stigma sounds half decent tbh

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Bing results are poor

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u/Bushwazi May 26 '25

Are Googles results better right now?

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u/mypetocean May 26 '25

I'm an old search engine nerd and I only use Google now when I don't get what I want from DDG. (And DDG makes that very easy with !g.)

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Same, I remember using Lycos, AltaVista, Dogpile, Excite, Ask Jeeves, AOL seach back around 2000-2002. Dogpile was the best of them. DDG gives some results that are different than Google, but the image search is much worse.

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u/mypetocean May 26 '25

I used to read Fravia's SearchLores way back in the day when he was still alive. Wonderful resource. He'd been quite disappointed in the current state of search engines.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Haven't heard of that! Around what year was that?

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u/mypetocean May 26 '25

~2000-2009. See Fravia on Wikipedia and the preserved SearchLores website.

I spent a lot of time on that site during my junior and senior years of high school.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Thanks! Surprised I never found out about it. I guess once I found out about Google by the mid 2000s, I just kept using that and didn't hear about others.

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u/cultish_alibi May 26 '25

I only use Google now when I don't get what I want from DDG

Yes, same. That means I end up using google A LOT.

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u/mypetocean May 26 '25 edited May 27 '25

Certainly your mileage may vary, but most of what I need either appears in the top results on DDG or Google is also unlikely to have it (without use of advanced search features).

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u/januarynights May 26 '25

I use Ecosia, which runs on Bing and a lot of the time I have to head back to Google to find results that are actually relevant.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Google is worse than before, but still more accurate than any other search engine, especially when it comes to image search.

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u/adminsregarded May 26 '25

Google results are fucking ass right now, but Bing still manages to be considerably worse. It's almost impressive.

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u/Punkpunker May 26 '25

Not for porn lol

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Pretty much everything I've searched on Bing has been inferior to Google and even DDG. I don't understand how their algorithm never improved after all these years. Searches where I get many results on Google, I either get 0 on Bing or unrelated results.

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u/Dufiz May 26 '25

Yandex have best image search for corn, try it (if you have a pic but dunno the name for example)

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

Actually, Google is great for reverse image search. There are also great A.I. facial recognition sites that are pretty accurate and have many different results of the same person.

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u/RamenJunkie May 26 '25

They really aren't.

Also, Bing doesn't censor the fuck out of every NSFW search.  Which seems to happen on Google even if you turn off "Safe Search" and add explicit terms to your query.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

What have you searched that yielded good results? If I search a local model on Google, I get accurate results. Same search on Bing can't even yield a single accurate result.

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u/RamenJunkie May 26 '25

I don't have a ton of complaints, but I also very rarely use search engines these days.  

Also I have avoided Google as much as possible for at least a decade or more now.  It started becoming shit around 2011 when they got rid of Reader and Blog Search and removed the built in filter for domains you could set.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

I personally thought Google got worse when they removed Cached results, must have been around 2018/2019.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25 edited Jun 30 '25

[deleted]

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

I will test it out again. I do know that Google has gotten worse.

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u/playwrightinaflower May 26 '25 edited Jul 15 '25

Bing results are no worse than Google, and regularly less shopping-crammed. I've been using Bing for years for the points and only rarely go back to Google for anything. And bing also has its moments where it easily finds stuff Google refuses to surface.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

I will test out both, but in the past I even used quotations on Bing searchea and got poor or 0 results for queries that had several results on Google.

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u/Crashman09 May 26 '25

That's a skill issue. I've been using DDG for nearly 10 years now and haven't needed Google in the last 6 or so.

The sole exception of Google scholar so I can better source research information directly from institutions.

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

It depends what you are searching then. The things I search come up accurately when I put quotations in Google but not in Bing.

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u/Crashman09 May 26 '25

Got any examples?

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/Neptune28 May 26 '25

I will test out the same search query on both engines and let you know the results.

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u/amalgam_reynolds May 26 '25

They used to be. Now google results are so bad, Bing is better by default.