is losing has long since lost

These sites need to start allowing users to blacklist sites from results. We know which sites are useless but keep showing up, let us block them from showing up.

It’s comically bad now

At work, we have this tradition of naming our video call channels with random emojis.
Yesterday, I named it 🎍 and a colleague asked what that emoji is supposed to be.

The thing is, I had this conversation with another colleague before, when I chose that same emoji some months ago.

In the emoji selector, it’s called “pine decoration”, so as Firefox readily told me, I had searched for those exact words before, in this case on Qwant, not Google.
So, I directly opened that search result link from the browser history and the first page of search results just showed random Etsy links and such. For now, it still looks the same: https://www.qwant.com/?q=pine+decoration&t=web

When I searched it a few months ago, I was amazed that the first link, along with the whole inline-Wikipedia-blurb, was the relevant result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadomatsu
(This was also still in my browser history.)

I don’t need to be amazed every time, but fuck me, it feels like the internet is having Alzheimer’s.

I’m kind of concerned about search engines currently. Not that they’ll never exist but that they’ll fall to SEO stuff since major tech companies chosen option seems to be to pursue AI solutions. As great as I think they can be even if they’re flawed, they just aren’t a replacement for a traditional search.

Hell even DuckDuckGo is failing me now.

Past five years of google has been a shit show.

…I sure as heck didn’t need a study to figure this one out

Hell, Google opened up the whole thing by prioritising sites with SEO. I really can’t find any pity in my heart for them.

And honestly, by now we can just assume that SEO is spam. A search engine worth its salt should be able to find better results without it, just going on inbound links, traffic and (shock! horror!) relevant keywords in the actual content.

It’s a radical idea, I know.

Google allows ANYONE to submit links for crawling. It will also trust any hostname with any garbage content.

I’ve been fighting the battle against spam from their platform for the last two years. I can no longer trust their user agents like I did in the past.

If I see one more “SEO” query in Mandarin for “sexy little sister” or “sensual massage” with a telegram handle I’m going to lose my shit. They need some major policy changes if they want to maintain any source of credibility.

Had just posted on Mildly Infuriating last week how this scourge has gone through the roof in the last few years; this is my business email, that’s not even listed any more -

No, my name isn’t Poojah. Cheeky cunts

This is dumb, they are prioritizing paid adds for almost the whole first page of results.