You’re Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds::Google swears everything is fine. A new study—and many people’s lived experience—says different.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    211 months ago

    I would NOT use it for shopping, I tried that recently and got a ton of really sketchy looking sites with way too cheap products that had no internet presence before this month. This might be more pronounced if you search specific product model numbers like I was rather than general terms.

    I’ve had it be mostly okay on other stuff. I use it over Google but mostly because I don’t want to pay for a search engine.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        111 months ago

        I’d have to repeat the search to check again, but I don’t remember seeing the same sites when I repeated the search on Google, at least not on the first page in the top few spots the way it was on DDG.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          411 months ago

          So maybe that’s the genius of DDG - you skip right past the predatory SEO-optimized sites straight away to the predatory sketchy ones:-D.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            111 months ago

            LOL! Yeah I’m paranoid enough about buying from strange sites that it’s not a problem, and frankly I expect the AI generated SEO optimized spam to be more likely to be riddled with malware.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              311 months ago

              Hrm, maybe Google screens those, so they are more purely a waste of your time rather than something that can be actually reported to a federal agency? :-P Or perhaps it is just a better scam, to keep a site up there for longer = more clickbait dollars, with less risk of angering someone so much that they track the scammers down and send them a “package” of explosive fun!:-D (the easiest profits come when the harmed party does not even realize that they have lost anything)