To think Google search is busted?

[ThoseWeirdStones]

Increasingly awful, the vast majority of results for any search (no matter how specific I am) brings either totally unrelated results to the top, or more.....bloody questions.
And most of these 'questions' are ridiculous. For example, say I search for 'how to get more fiber in my diet'
Most results will presume and anticipate me to have wanted higher PROTEIN, not fiber. If I search for vegetarian recipes or health adjacent info, it presumes, off the bat, that I wrote vegan.

And those ridiculous 'questions' that appear several results down the page, usually badly spelled or with questionable grammar: so your search for high fiber meals will result in:

• What's the 30/50/70 rule for cancer
• What's did Kurt Cobain think about God
• What is fiber diets
• Does veganism cause cancer

It's a shit show. It is either optimised to answer very low IQ queries, or presumes that I am under the age of 10.
I get that the algorithm is spewing the most searched for stuff up to the top, but it is usually the very worst and often only slightly related to what I asked. I wonder how far this will go before the damn thing is rendered useless.

Google search is an advertising forum. With some search results tacked on.

Aye, you're not kidding!

I'm not even being sarcastic.

Use Ecosia instead

It used to be great. Now it’s been crapped up by all the nonsense AI slop that techbros all assume we want. But nobody wants this dross. It’s going to eat itself pretty soon once it’s finally crapped up all of the formerly-useful things about the internet beyond repair.

Yes it’s become shite and the sponsored results do not help.

I googled earlier which cars have front and rear cameras to get some inspo of what I might want at some point in the future as I find getting out from inbetween 2 cars on my busy street a challenge. A load of pics of cars for sale appeared along the top of the page, sponsored dealership ads, none of which had a front camera. The Google Ai result listed various models, looked up the first 3 on the list and they also didn’t have both cameras so I gave up.

Out of interest I googled the same search as you but using the English spelling of fibre and all of the first page of results did actually address the question. Do you think that because Google thinks you are American/you are American it's giving different results?

I am eternally confused by the spelling of fiber!, I have been known to use both spellings. You are right that many 'correct' results do appear, but the sourcing and presumptions are still dire. It gets really frustrating with vegetarianism, but if you really, really urge it on by adding 'ovo lacto', it will spew up several decent hits...... amongst a plethora of incorrect ones - still presuming you are vegan, so you don't eat cheese!

I searched for high fiber foods, with both spellings on an image search, and the vast majority of hits were high protein. IEven when they produced high fiber meals, they were pushing them as high protein, too.
tt recognises two things here, both food and the word 'high', so it runs ahead of itself, chooses the latest 'fad' and buggers it up.

I suppose it prioritises what is most popular at a given point, but it is a shitty way to run a search engine, enabling the crap to eternally float to the top. It also encourages a lack of diversity.

It is increasingly completely bloody useless. Much like everything else.

Typically I am making countless spelling errors myself today, lol. I can't be arsed nipping downstairs for my specs.

I thought it was AI making it useless?

But yeah, it's useless, I'm constantly having to explain to my elderly mother that whatever she's found is wrong.

This is why I downloaded perplexity. It actually searches and answers what you asked 😁

That sounds interesting, might have a look at it.

I think it's the 'people also ask' element that irritates me the most. My post might be more at home at pedants corner, but hey ho.
Of course, the irony isn't quite lost on me that here I am on xmas eve blithering on about google on Mumsnet when I could be watching that Doris Day documentary on BBC2. Or plundering the marzipan fruits.

I do have toothache tho so need a distraction!

Somebody with a reasonable IQ would be aware of what foods are high fibre. Therefore, the results will be for the dim and/or 10 year olds.

There is a technical term for this, it's called "enshittification".

I can't find the exact video I was thinking of but if you search on youtube "google terrible" it comes up with lots of videos explaining the entire process of how google search went from fantastic to awful.

Do you want to read that back and consider how rude that sounds. I'm fairly intelligent, had a professional job and really don't know, apart from bran flakes where you get fibre in food

https://start.duckduckgo.com/

I too am fed up with not getting the answers to simple questions I type. I did use Ecosia for a couple of years and found it to be fine but when searching for information on a tube station it came up with loads of explicit porn pics which was a bit 🤔, when I contacted them to let them know they just said sorry Bing brings up the search results so nothing we can do so I stopped using it (I wasn’t morally offended but I had set the kids up on it too).

I recently discovered you can change your google preferences to automatically use google web which cuts out the Ai nonsense and turn it back into the old search engine. I can’t remember whether they sift out the sponsored pages too but as the whole screen is no longer cluttered with suggestions and AI it is much easier to find stuff.

It will give you American results because you spelt fibre the American way ‘fiber’

If using the US version of a word returns more results then it will show that and tell you that you mistyped the search term.

That's Gemini. Obviously no one knows what Bong does.

We haven't yet reached the AI event horizon, but I suspect come 2027 it will be all you hear about.

I searched for your exact phrase "how to get more fiber in my diet" and every single result relates to that. The 20th is about how to increase gut health in general. That's the closest to a non-direct answer. All the "people also ask" questions are directly about gut fiber. I think this is a you-issue as I don't have the problem at all

It has been rubbish for years. I blame the late 2010s' obsession with "fake news", which was a great excuse for them to prioritise "trustworthy" corporate sites over those which might actually hold the information you wanted. If anything the AI summaries have improved things over what it was a couple of years ago, though you have to read them with a very skeptical eye.

Remember that search results are personalised (with the power of "AI").

Generally Gemini will throw up what it thinks I wanted to know, rather than what I actually asked, and tell me that I probably meant that.

Remember the lifts used in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Happy_Vertical_People_Transporters