I’ll play devil’s advocate.
The author is basically complaining that search results aren’t tailored to their own search habits, and for all we know they are using tools to prevent Google data collection for personalized search.
Using the search term “YouTube downloader” and having the success criteria being the return of a fork of a command line Python tool is an insane test for the general public. How many of your family members who are looking to download a YouTube video would be helped by that result?
I searched “YouTube downloader” and received the usual ad-ridden websites that let you download a video. Then I searched “YouTube downloader Linux” and the top result was ytdl-org on GitHub. Seems reasonable.
I’ve seen many people complain about Google search lately. I wonder how many of them either have unrealistic expectations, never learned to use scoping keywords, or who stopped search personalization and lost benefits they didn’t know they were getting. And expecting a fork of a command line tool to be the top result for YouTube downloader is definitely unrealistic.
Anecdotally, I’ve used more or less the same search strategy for 30 years, and it still brings up relevant results. And while I agree that seo gamification can make certain keywords harder than others to use, this article and test really wasn’t testing search scenarios the average non-technical user of these search engines would have.
In my perception Google Search is far worse than it had been 10 years ago & I never cared about personalized search at all. I used to just sit down in an internet cafe, search some stuff & get great results, now that does not happen anymore, or at least not reliably. Google is better than its competitors at understanding your search intent if you use whole sentences instead of carefully selected keywords, but with a good search strategy even Duck/Bing are more than competitive now.
Of course the diversity of the web kind of dying could have something to do with this as well.
Tl;dr, use Marginalia for basic queries.
Tested to search for a stomp rust crate and got horrible results. So, I guess that you should test the different search engines with your use case and see which one fits that.
seems totally unusable for me too. even simple queries fail
Totally agree. I posted the comment just summarizing the article and then tried it (order of operations, I know) and I could not get relevant results for the life of me. I tried queries and simple phrases and everything was unrelated to what I was looking for.
Not sure if the terms chosen were dumb luck or what, but the article may need to provide some instructions if it was so good for the author. It sucks because many people want a search engine that worked like Google from 10-20 years ago.
I searched for “counter strike surf” and the first result was about the origin of the idiom “with all the bells and whistles.”
Much search engine.
I wanted to finish reading it, but that post was so friggin’ long! It’s good to know that the feeling of “wow, search results have really gotten worse” isn’t a unique one.
IMO, the only way to improve this is to have a decentralised/distributed search engine. Unfortunately, YaCY is written in Java and amazingly slow on the server as well as at getting results (see test instance). PreSearch is basically web3 crap. And I can’t think of another search engine with the same model.
Since the fediverse is picking up steam, maybe there’s a chance that a federated search engine could be made, but who knows…
