this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

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[–] ward2k 95 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error

It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google

[–] Aetina 21 points 1 year ago

I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.

[–] setsneedtofeed 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.

[–] ahbi_santini 14 points 1 year ago

What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.

It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers

[–] cashews_win 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] ward2k 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)

Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause

[–] pwnstar 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wow that's pretty awesome, I'll have to give bing a try

[–] gimmemahlulz 1 points 1 year ago

That's a phrase you'd never have heard ~5 years ago lol.

[–] JoMiran 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm a beta tester for Google's Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it's easy to see that Google's focus on its AI seems to be search results.

PS: It's also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.

[–] ultranaut 2 points 1 year ago

Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.