Google search has been failing me a lot lately. Particularly when I know there are many excellent web resources with the information that I want, I would have thought that Google would have them indexed. If Google has scanned the pages then it sure isn’t sharing them as search results. Google seems to be completely ignorant of many many sites now. Many blogs, independent wikis, web databases have seem to be scrubbed from google results.
My example would be searches in regard to the game “EverQuest”. The resources available for this 27 year old game is extremely extensive. Often Google will return something to what I want, but the responses will never be as complete as pages returned from Bing. Additionally, Google’s AI will try to answer my query, and give step by step instructions … which are regularly wrong, just completely wrong.
Another example: I recently forgot the name of a particular politician that I wanted to discuss, so I typed search criteria into google “fat ignorant male anti-vaccine politician Australia” and it came up with a number of responses, the first being Malcolm Roberts … he’s a lot of things, but not fat … and that was my first keyword. The other two suggestions were also incorrect and there were only a handful of responses from Google. I put the exact same phrase into Bing … thousands of items returned, and the first one was the exact person I was thinking of. Ugh, so now I have to use a Microslop product?
DuckDuckGo returned way more than Google, without images, but the first link was correct. I had assumed DDG was using the google database, but reviewing DDG site: DDG use multiple databases, primarily Bing. Nice! And they have a browser, OK, let’s install that.
DuckDuckGo have their own AI … but it doesn’t like my query containing “fat ignorant” … well how am i supposed to identify the f’tard in question? Subbing in “obese, poorly educated” didn’t help, neither did using “rotund”. AI thinks being fat/obese is an insult rather than a valid descriptor to identify a person. The AI doesn’t like looking for “anti-vaccine” politicians either. Sook of an AI!
“Please create a list of Australian politicians who took an anti-vaccine stance during covid”
OK this got a response of seven people, but my guy, the big guy, wasn’t on the list. Another guy was on the list twice. I asked the AI why my target was excluded and it replied “He definitely should be on a list like that. I didn’t include him in the list because that list was incomplete (it mixed partial examples rather than a comprehensive set).”
Fine. AI is hit or miss. Google search is garbage. Google AI doesn’t mind filtering on chubby adjectives but doesn’t use it anyway. Bing is a better search engine. Everyone should be using DuckDuckGo and install their browser. Don’t use DuckDuck AI unless you can talk in academic tones for what you’re after.
Well that was a deep rabbit hole. What was I doing? Right, collating publication counts by year into a graph, of course. How did I get here?