- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14100831
"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov
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I genuinely think Google’s success is its own undoing.
If everybody had carried on making sites in the same way they did when Google came out, the results would still be good.
Bit they didn’t. There’s gold in them thar hills, and now SEO and generated bullshit are a way to make money, while Google’s algorithms seem easy to game if you have the resources to do so.
There’s like a hundred large companies doing this, and if you blocked all their sites in the Google results it’d give results similar to Kagi and other flavour of the month search engines.
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.
It’s been easily 15 years since I thought Google search was good.
It was not long after the SSL thing that it became actively garbage. that was what, 2018?
But yeah, it’s been bad since at least 2012.
What SSL thing?
Google stopped indexing all websites without SSL certificates in July 2018.
For example, darklyrics.com is a website I and many others grew up using as a resource to understanding lyrics. They’ve stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches. However, without an SSL, they do not show up in Google search results.
This is one of literally millions of examples. Some more reasonable than others, but it still was a massive blow to the efficacy of their search.
Hmm I hate Google as much as the next guy and am actively trying to de-Google myself, but I’m not sure I can get behind the outrage here. Certificates are free and easy to obtain with LetsEncrypt, so there’s really no excuse for sites not to accept unencrypted traffic these days. I’m sure Google does lots of things to delist the small guys and promote their big payers, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Free certificates expose your subdomains. It’s not more secure if you don’t transact data in a meaningful way such as the example I provided.
I don’t mean to insinuate that the example I provided is the majority of cases, and in the majority of cases, I do support sites with SSLs being indexed higher than websites without them, but I think the interstitial this website is not secure with the requirement of the advanced click followed by The continue anywaysclick…
Idk
Especially in 2018. Like, when we look at it from today’s perspective, it’s very easy to agree. And I do agree. But in 2018, it was not this way. Anyone who was a web developer with a bunch of clients, such as myself, was all the sudden in a very interesting hot seat. Not only did I need to try to upsell my clients, but I needed to convince them that not doing so was quite literally at their peril. It was difficult. And certain cases, it was impossible.
If your subdomains being public is a security issue then I’d argue something else is wrong. Otherwise you’re using security through obscurity.
But I appreciate the insight and I see how this was a harder sell back when it happened. Thanks!
Not necessarily. Let’s say you’re a known contributor to a closed source project. You don’t want people knowing you have a locally hosted gitlab instance at gitlab.mydomain.com, for example.
They’ve stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches.
Even if sites do not store user account data, such as passwords, ALL websites, and I mean ALL, handle user data, because merely accessing pages (urls) is user data.
Stubbornness is not a good reason not to setup SSL. Encryption should always be on, all the time, for everything.
Ssl doest hide the url you’re visiting
Yes it does. You can derive the domain from snooping DNS lookups but the URL is part of the encrypted get header.
What kagi can’t fix is that most forums nowadays don’t exist anymore and moved over to discord which is also a big reason for worse search results.
For example I had a technical problem with a device of mine, searched for maybe half an hour on Google until I joined a related Discord. Searching there in the support channel and I found the fix for my problem. Would Discord not exist and all the content be queryable by Google I would have found my answer within seconds.
I don’t understand this trend and i hate that it’s a thing. I also hate Discord.i shouldn’t have to go to a fucking chat room when a forum works better.
I really want to see more from the commune-os to make matrix communities more publically accessible or even selectivily. The AP bridge especially
Absolutely despise discord, fucking internet herpes.
Yeah, Matrix is way better, but the search there is way too slow on busy channels.
Just post stuff on the open Internet…
I guess my point was that locking all that knowledge and troubleshooting behind chat interfaces, and obscuring it from search engines makes the internet worse
I’ve used it for quite a while now, so I can safely say it’s not just the honeymoon effect. There are certain specific searches that I will prefer Google, for example if I know an exact string from a document that I’m looking for. Google still has a larger search base so if there’s information that can only be found in one or two places, Google is more likely to work. Image and video search on KAGI is still a little bit finicky. I might use Google, DDG, or Bing for those (Actually, DDG is just a front end for Bing in this regard). For everything else, when I’m looking for information or answers to questions, Kagi is the best there is.
Fuck off with your ads for a paid search engine.
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”, of making a blog post that’s really an advert…? Really???
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”
wow, what a genius. he’s going to solve world hunger next. he’s totally not “milking” nerds who think that word is the best thing since sliced bread.
