Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?
well…
a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It’s also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.
Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn’t a good alternative search engines remained relevant as we users tolerated their direction.
Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it’s still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.
On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what’s happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is the *Windows cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that *disfavors it, or is in favor of WIndows 11?
It’s all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you see, or some, or none of them and then move on with your day as it should be.
Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?
Is this a joke, hyperbole? To build on your example, what if I wanted to find out “how to disable Windows 11 update prompts” into lemmy’s search. Do you think I would get the answer I’m looking for?
I’m not saying I don’t want to be rid of google and all they do. I would pay for 10 proton mail accounts a month if just one of googles data centers spontaneously burst into flames right now!
…
Well I’m willing to wait a while longer… I have not tried Kagi yet, but I will as soon as I get bored with Midjourney. Hopefully someday we can collectively slip the yoke, but I suspect googles results will get a lot worse first.
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I don’t think you understand how difficult it is to search the amount of data that google sifts through before showing you results
How does the fact, that websites are written a certain way to please googles search engine, not apply to the fediverse? Even if all information was posted to or accessible through the fediverse, searching something will still use some kind of search engine. So people will also eventually start doing SEO, regardless if its Google’s search engine or the fediverse’s search engine that they are optimizing for.
Yes its problematic that google has a huge effect on what people see or don’t see on the internet. But that wouldnt be any better for the fediverse. Its only better right now because you know what kind of information is on here, and you are getting a kind of pre-filtered selection of knowledge because of that. You wouldn’t even start to search for washing machine repairs on here. You wouldn’t try to look for local businesses here. If literally all of these things were here, the fediverse would need to start working on their search engine to stay fast enough to be usable because its just so much data, so many possible results. That would also result in some kind of arbitrary rule set that will make your post more likely to be shown as a result. And that will cause people to optimize their posts for the search engine.
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And how exactly do you think google maps finds the results? If you think the search on google maps does not use a search engine, you have a lot to learn before having this discussion. Google maps is pretty much just a different interface for showing you results from the same, or at least extremely similar search engine as regular google uses
I agree its better to have several different options to pick from, monopolies are never a good thing. But that just means we don’t want google to have a monopoly. It does not mean that we want search engines to be gone.
You are mixing things up that have nothing to do with each other. How is the fact that Facebook does not interact with old forums an argument for not having search engine services like google, duvkduckgo or bing? The federation in the fediverse definitely is nice and I hope it becomes the standard, but I really don’t see how that would mean that we don’t need search engine services anymore.
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Okay fair enough, I’m just pointing out that your original claim that search engines are or should be irrelevant nowadays isn’t really true.
My point about maps just was that there still is a search engine under the hood, so only using maps and not google does not enable you to say that you don’t use search engines.
I agree about all that stuff you say about the fediverse but that has literally nothing to do with search engines.
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I’ve heard kids these days search tiktok instead of Google.
Kids are fucking stupid
I was driving my brother in law and he was trying to tell me some news he heard but couldn’t get the specifics so he spent ten minutes searching tiktok for it. I couldn’t believe it
I’ve heard that’s true for restaurants and stuff like that, such seemed pretty baffling to me considering Google Maps (and others) exists.
I mean there are cool channels that showcase the food instead of ratings. You can’t fake the restaurant AND their food so quickly
Example (Also available on YT): https://www.tiktok.com/@japaneat
The only thing it would need to be a true superpower is to limit an area and then show all restaurants displaying their food.
BUT: This will quickly by gamed as well as nothijg would stop the owner of just creating instagramable dishes that taste just meh but paying the creator to say otherwise.
Even the worst of Google searches pull up more relevant content than an empty Fediverse community.
There simply isn’t enough quality content yet.
True but I’m optimistic about the Fediverse long term.
The value of interoperability is recognized by tech users as well as institutions such as the European Union 🇪🇺. It’s only a matter of time until it reaches critical mass.
Disagree that’d be within the realm of possibility at the current trajectory the last few months.
The niche communities are on Reddit or individual forums.
Forums will almost certainly never federate and there’s no point in a community that’s found it’s ground outside of Reddit to take hold here. You’d get people coming in from /All shitting all over the place.
The worst part of the Fediverse are the people and that’s the most important part needed to sell it.
What kind of fediverse search are you talking about? Provide a link. That would do much, much more than any explanations or testimonials possibly could.
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I don’t think you understand what SEO is. That’s one of the problems here.
You must not have hard problems to solve if fediverse content is able to replace a search engine.
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Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.
Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.
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Do you know what SEO stands for? It’s not SEO that is ranking results. SEO is the consequence of ranking results by relevance and quality.
What’s your alternative? Give supposedly relevant results randomly? That’d be even worse.
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You can take a lot of control by using search commands. Here is a list of commands for Google, for example: https://www.lifewire.com/advanced-google-search-3482174
By using commands like these you can narrow down your searches to the point that the impact of SEO is small. You give a much greater weight to the conditions that you have chosen.
It can be a bit of work to write a good search query, but the database that search engines search through is massive, so it makes sense that it would take some work to do this right.
Search engines are good for what you might call “keyword searches” across websites. I’d say SEO spam has degraded quality of hits and made search results less reliable than even 5 years ago. There’s a lot more chaff to winnow now in the main search services. You sorta need to discriminate on hits, and dig a bit deeper into the results to find that new nugget you didn’t already see 3 or 4 times already in previous searches with similar, but different parameters.
I find the LLM AIs to be slightly better at turning up obscure info these days. The conversation sets some persistent context that’s helpful when you need to dial in on obscure stiff like a driver issue, tuning problem or weird product spec. You still need to carefully vet your results, but the AIs understand technical jargon pretty well, and generally return some solid analysis for leas common scenarios.
They’re also good for pick-and-shovel work in odd tech areas, but you really need to be careful with the results because they’re confidently wrong in speculative conversation only slightly more often than they’re confidently right.
That’s just my opinion, but it’s how I do search these days: use an AI to refine keywords, then use DDG or Google to find familiar sites with corollary content.
Trash in/trash out. Small communities of experts can create quality content, but after becoming relevant enough astroturfing begins.
Just wait for the bots. Also, search engines have been playing cat and mouse with SEO for a while. I don’t know why it’s gotten so bad lately.
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I’ve been blocking bots for 6 months now, it’s a neverending stream of new garbage.
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So one bot watches and another posts, possibly from an established account farmed with real human labor.
Fvo “a while” that are about 25 years. The pressure has been going up all the time as more and more companies and spammers try to shoehorn themselves into irrelevant searches.
Perhaps we use search engines for different purposes… 🤔
I don’t use Google, but I definitely use my preferred search engine numerous times daily.
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I’m not sure how abandoning search engines and only using specific Websites is supposed to help with this
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But you’re still limited to the opinions of people who post on Lemmy, which, as someone who occasionally posts on Lemmy, is not a shining beacon of quality.
Even if I just went by what I get on the first page of a Google search, I’d expect I’d find what I need much faster using Google than I would using Lemmy based purely on the volume of info Google has access to. And that’s not even taking into account things like Google’s ability to search within other sites.
Unless Lemmy has gotten like 100 billions times better in the last week, this isn’t even a fair comparison.
Edit: lol, just realised you’re the same guy from the Nvidia thread.
This is only true if you need news or opinions. You can’t really search Lemmy for technical questions or search for a specific site which are my main usages of a search engine.
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Guess this guy never has to look up syntax stuff.
I thought this post was going to be about ChatGPT. Instead it’s about how fediverse search is a replacement for the entire internet, which is utter nonsense.
Search engines don’t use search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is what people do to get their site to the top of a search engines results.
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That’s not how it works, like at all. SEO isn’t something to “comply” with. Their algorithm is what SEO is “optimizing” for.
