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Is it just me, or are search engines getting worse? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by DeltaWingDragon@sh.itjust.works to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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My main focus isn't on quality of results.

The real problem is, whenever I type a query that's even the slightest bit out of the ordinary, I get no results. Google, Duckduckgo, Startpage, Searx, all of them.

It strains credibility that these advanced pieces of technology could not find anything among billions of websites, when in the past, less-advanced versions of these engines could find results for similar queries among smaller numbers of websites.

To reiterate: My problem is not with SEO, or spam, or AI-generated websites, or irrelevant results. My problem is getting no results much more frequently than in the past.

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[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It’s all search engines and it’s a near-impossible task. SEO spam is drowning and strangling the internet. There’s far more fake sites out there than there are legit sites. They steal content from legit sites (with mass bot-crawling), they generate fake content with AI, they link to other sites to form vast networks of “fake engagement.”

The harder you try to filter them out the harder they try to trick you! It’s a never ending arms race.

[–] LadyButterfly@lazysoci.al 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Can you ELI5 what SEO spam is? And what you mean by fake sites steal content?

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

SEO spam is search engine optimization spam. These are fake sites full of ads that make money when people visit them and click on the ads. The way they get people to visit is via SEO: tricking Google’s search engine to rank the site higher than other sites undeservedly. The way they pull off this trick is manifold (since there’s an arms race of techniques to detect SEO and new SEO that evades detection). Classic techniques include:

filling the page with irrelevant keywords
creating networks of sites that link to each other (link farms; this targets the PageRank algorithm which uses sites linking to each other as an honest signal of credibility and relevance)
showing different content to the search engine’s crawler bots than you do to real users (cloaking)
stealing content from popular sites (scraping) and using it to bulk up your fake sites (classic targets include Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, and tons of recipe blogs)
tricking legitimate websites into linking to you (link farms tend to be detected and down-ranked en masse; legitimate sites linking into them help avoid this detection by reputation laundering)
hacking people’s social media accounts to promote your fake websites
hosting shady/illegal content such as porn, gambling, or TV and sports streams

[–] LadyButterfly@lazysoci.al 2 points 9 hours ago

Mate that's so helpful! Thanks for taking the time to write that out it's really easy to follow. I wondered why I sometimes ended up on bizarre sites like that...