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Wtf is up with Google's search engine? I seriously can't be the only one that's noticed how god awful everything they offer has become right?

Google nearly anything right now and notice how all you get are listical buzzfeed/CNN level horse shit written by absolute troglodytes that write worthless trash for a living and know nothing about the subject they are writing about. For the last few months I feel like the ability to gain any sort of worthwhile information has gotten so much harder to find because of this.

Youtube as well, if you're trying to do something productive like learning a new skill and you use Youtube then good luck. Why the fuck am I getting trailers to super hero movies when I type in "Maya 3d tutorial" Why are all the top results some dick head Tik Tok zoomer shilling some kind of scam or the video is the most basic ass level 1 information packaged with funny haha tik tok sounds? Why when I look up anything news related I only get CNN, Fox, WSJ ect? I can not get basic fucking facts about a story sometimes about things that are objectionably correct.

Is no one else seeing this or did I have some kind of weird algorithm glitch on my account? Idk if its the absolute worst parasites that's figured out how to manipulate the algorithm, Google over correcting out "hate speech" and destroying their own algorithm in the process or both

Nope you're spot on I've noticed this over the past 2 years especially on youtube where you can look up the exact title and not get the result
really hope somebody comes up with a plugin

and I'd advise using duckduckgo instead of google

what isnt unusable online nowadays? Lots of changes for the worse all over the web look at youtube and the cringy corpse of what became of Cracked

I think it's just you because, personally, I find everything I search for in Google just fine, except from maybe very obscure stuff. Same thing with Youtube. Then again, I'm not from America, so maybe things work differently where I live and it's probably a country by country situation. In any case, if you are having this problem, try using a VPN to see if switching countries solves it. If it doesn't work, I guess just try using a different search engine

or searx for that matter.

I haven't been using it quite as much as I used to, but Google Reverse image search doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. I'm mixed about Google lens as sometimes I actually do just want to know what I'm looking at, though I would prefer it if finding an exact copy of the image was the default, with a single click away from "give me your best guess base don this one bit of the image."

But independent of Google Lens stuff, even when I do use Google reverse image search I don't seem to get as many results as I used to. Like, of all places Bing reverse image search gives me more results and those results are closer to what I actually want if I'm doing a search than using Google's reverse search engine.

Im curious about that objectionably correct thing you mention

Trying to find anything news related that isn't heavily editorialized leaving out a lot of context. I'm not talking about pizza gate illuminate shit I mean basic official or leaked documents.

its not impossible but the first page normally doesn't have the info i'm looking for.

Youtube is way more on the nose where it just straight up refuse to give you anything other then CNN, Fox, and other MSM only channels.

The main issue with all of this is trying to find a source that is actually trust worthy and not some creepy Google moderated garbage or finding some insane wack job.

The irony is ill hear someone say something weird or some shit, I try Googling it with no good results. The other day I was watching old Norm McDonald clips and he kept talking about Vince Foster. I tried Googling some of the shit he was taking about and found nothing, switched to a new search engine found every case fact I was looking for and more. And no I didn't find stuff from some Alex Jones like character.

Im not Googling shit like "Bill Clinton illuminate lizard transformation" Im looking for basic facts with the mindset of that can't be real right? It literally just makes conspiracy theories seem more valid when you try and do shit like this. The Foster case happened in the 1990s and most people don't even know or care about it so why even bother doing shit like this?

ANYWAY not trying to turn this tread into a conspiracy theory talk, just trying to prove a point that this kind of shit might do more harm then good at fighting off misinformation when you can't trust Google to just work properly in the first place

I've been doing my best to avoid Google and its services like the plague, so I wouldn't know for sure, but I assume it must be some kind of personalization issue.

I've been using Duckduckgo for a long time and have recently been trying out Brave Search, and the only real problems I can recall are that they're often overly eager to give me results for something similar in spelling to what I'm actually searching for no matter what I do (fairly common when I look up artists), that I'm pretty sure they're tripped up by search queries where non-alphabetic characters are important, and that Brave AI's output (a feature of Brave Search) clogs up a huge amount of space that actual search results should be occupying (its window is above all results, even stuff like dictionary entries and Wikipedia).

This could shove superheroes in my face (for example, if I try to search quicksilver if I want to look up the element mercury without results getting shoved away by ones for the planet Mercury), and I have been given an opinion piece by Brave AI one time thus far (I was looking for a formal definition of "boob window" to know whether I should include it as a tag when I was tagging this image (NSFW), and right above a relevant TV Tropes article was Brave AI spouting some weird anti-objectification nonsense). However, when my search query isn't being conflated with something else, my results are generally actually useful.

If you wish to use Youtube, but not its or Google's search features, you could probably use either of the above search engines (or literally any that doesn't belong to Google, for that matter), type in whatever you're looking for and also include site:youtube.com to find a video.

Also, since it might be a personalization feature, perhaps deleting your browsing history might help? I was once a far more avid user of Youtube than I am now, and after binging on a certain genre of videos for a long time, they wouldn't stop being recommended to me even after I'd gotten tired of them and deleted just some of them from my browsing history, so I erased my Youtube watch history in its entirety.

Google and DDG (which I believe uses Bing as a backend) seem to have forgotten the basic logical features that made Google popular to begin with. "Quotes" no longer restrict a search to exactly what you are searching for. They give you other results instead, and promote what is popular over what was requested. You can no longer -subtract a search term to filter out things you do not want. They show you random commercial results from your geographic area that have nothing to do with what you searched for, and these are put on the first page which promotes them above actual search results. If anybody can dig up the old design papers and develop a clone of 1998 Google, they might pull users away from the giant by having a search engine that actually returns what the user asked for.

For me personally, search results on Google and Youtube have been working fine (at least mostly). I can usually find what I want within the first few hits.

But you know what's really pissing me off? It seems to me that ads on Youtube have dramatically gone up in frequency. Lemme give you some examples:
You can have ads that are like 3 seconds apart from each other, and sometimes, when you click the "skip ad" button, you get yet another ad right after! So if you want Youtube to be watchable, then having an adblocker is mandatory (the creators don't get revenue from those ads anyways)

I stopped using Google years ago because I expected this to happen.
>especially on youtube where you can look up the exact title and not get the result
Not using Youtube is much harder because of channel's stubborn instance on posting on other video sites, so I have noticed Youtube's search being shit.

It just fucking pisses me off so much because I hardly use Youtube for entertainment anymore. I use it to look up Photoshop and Maya tutorials, yet half the results are the most dog shit waste of time brain filler bullshit ever.

"Can u beat skyrim with just a fork???" "Dead space but I dont shoot my gun or do anything fun" "Game grumps best of comp, even tho you haven' t watched a video of there's in 5 years" On top of all that the top videos are mostly shitty not informative and full of some jackass doing comedy skits. It takes so long to find anything of substance now.

It just drives me crazy seeing this happen to something that was soooooo soooo sooo good and full of potential. So much great shit use to be made all the time. Now I feel like I only watch RLM, stream high lights and history videos as background noise while I work. I don't even remember the last time I sat down and watched a video with my eyes fixed on the screen that wasn't a tutorial.

God damn it, Youtubes turning me into the angry "back in my day you could eat vomit cakes and say the n word" old man.

Strangely enough DeviantArt has been like this as well apparently. I can't wrap my head how to search for anything on that website post eclipse. Incognito mode somewhat helps though.

@Your Uncle Yonkers
you sound like you're surprised
the whole entire net's been like this for YEARS

@seventhsoul
Haha, no. I tried it and I only got results for Wikipedia pages. And that's only when I used one or two words; any more and I literally get nothing

I presume this has something to do with some kind of deal they've made with their sponsors and competitors. They no doubt prioritize certain sites to help them.

Just to throw some two cents in regards to Google being unusable: stupid ad links being the first few search results. Because money is so important to Google that they very likely won't bother vetting the content behind these linked ads until someone complains. This is in regards to people trying to look something up and not realizing the first link is just some ad that Google pushed out.

The other two cents to throw in is with Google images. I just want to find an image without one of the results being Etsy or Pinterest. I don't want to be linked to someones crafts store or to a site that requires me to sign up if I wanted to save an image.