this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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It's been said before: Google does not find you the best result for your query. Google finds you the result that makes them the most money from AdSense and has words from your query.
If Mozilla wasn't funded by Google, the best thing they could do is include a helpful/unhelpful ranking for websites, then filter Google results by that. Search should be social, not commercial.
Google's method of ranking results has clearly had a detrimental effect on website content and structure as well. I can't believe how much nonsense junk padding there is on all the top results. You can understand why people are happy to have an LLM sift through the junk and make up an answer, even if it's wrong half the time.
Even a junk made-up answer would be an improvement over the results I recently got after trying both Google and DDG to search up a random question that came to me. I wanted to find a list of animals with vertical pupils, and all I got were pages with headlines like "Why do some animals have vertical pupils?" that didn't answer my question or even the question in the headline!
this would be gamed by companies in the same way social media is used to advertise businesses.
Potentially, but there is a reason adding "Reddit" to the end of a search is so common. It's basically up-voted search results.