Yandex is incredible for things that Google and Bing serves up useless spam for.
If you search “watch $MOVIE free” on google you’re going to get netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless of whether those sites even have it in their library. The remaining links are SEO spam that also don’t have it but pretend they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck or filtered.
Yandex on the other hand… the first result is generally exactly what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.
I do miss when google had a little footer that said “click here to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown requests”.
Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more, but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it’s not unheard of to have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It’s the same with seasons of TV series: exhausting.
For me, searching "Watch Oppenheimer Free" on Google returns mostly malware and fake media-purchase websites (that will probably try to steal my credit card), mixed with SEO spam about "how and why it's not available on Netflix or Hulu... yet".
To me that's significantly worse than showing no results.
Edit: this is the same domain that hosts documents on the latest laws for cybersecurity (Radio Equipment Directive, Cyber Resilience Act, ...). And the same body that airs strong opinions on client side scanning. The same org that wants to be in charge of a EU wide database of vulnerabilities so it can tell you if your patch management process is too slow. ENISA were informed about these problems over 8 months ago. Meanwhile they are publicly ridiculed on social media for not fixing it.
For people who didn't get the joke: these are indeed "hosted" by things like Google Docs, Scribd... but also by EU government websites.
But not willingly!
And yep, the bulk of Google results for me are those. Half those, half stupid blogspam, half fake-legitimate websites claiming to be legit sellers of media.
I've never seen this domain pop up in my searches. Most of the links on Google end up at a 404, though.
Who's benefiting from these weird PDF uploads? Is it the copyright industry trying to make it impossible to pirate their movies? The PDFs don't even contain a link to the ad fraud site that's supposedly generating these.
If they were using it to educate people about the consequences of piracy, I could understand why they would host that, but that's not the case here. What is the purpose of this?
Not sure if unpatched arbitrary file-upload vulnerabilities that rexult in blogspam and hosted malware, or doctored documents do serve any purpose? But maybe I'm just not thinking adversarial enough :-/
How else will digital sinners learn only to trust corporate streaming services if they are not shown that the alternatives are OBVIOUS ROADS TO DAMNATION?
AI generated websites have ruined "when does X come out". It wouldn't be as big a problem if studios could just announce these things on their website, but instead you need to get this information from interviews and news articles which get overwhelmed by AI trash in most search engines.
And the companies almost don’t want you to know - they’d rather you rent/buy the video online for $20 instead of waiting a period of time to rent it cheaper.
That's what I just searched and was able to watch Oppenheimer. The point isn't that it's crummy, the point is that Google or Bing are not answering your query or are answering with junk.
And Yandex reverse image search isn't neutered for copyright reasons either.
It almost seems like Google of yesteryear, but with far more Russian language results.
Google and Bing both changed their emphasis to finding things within an image rather than trying to find similar images. But one is not a substitute for the other.
Google Lens and whatever Bing calls their equivalent almost never find what I'm looking for. They barely function as a reverse image search anymore, and that's a real shame.
"In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 3 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org.
In response to a complaint that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at LumenDatabase.org."
If you go to that service they'll require an email but you can use a discardable one and still be anonymous to get the original blocked URLs.
I actually still use this for torrent searches sometimes, it just takes a few more clicks.
Yandex Translate is also much better for many languages, especially for eastern ones. And viewing words and their synonyms individually is a huge godsend if you are looking at slang.
I just tried out Yandex Translate on a few words. My only criticism is I find the audio playback too fast. Google Translate plays the audio at a slower rate which I find easier for learning the pronunciation of foreign words.
Yandex.ru seems to be the real deal, uncensored internet (except anything not politically compliant with russia) while yandex.com doesn’t give me that useful results for the movie query. Google.com feels so censored and crippled now.
I know this is old news by now, but Google really is becoming useless. I wonder, are they even aware internally that this is happening or are they so lost in their "Google is awesome" bubble that they have no chance of fixing it in time?
I hadn't even considered using Yandex. Tried switching from Google to Bing this year but results are not much better - half of Google's results are either ads or irrelevant "safe" results.
People spill a lot of characters on here about political censorship while ignoring that the existing Internet "speech" control infrastructure overwhelmingly deals in (a) copyright infringement and (b) CSAM. Those get slapped down everywhere by almost everybody.
Sure? I would assume many of the world's countries do not care about copyright infringements on the internet.
Also much of the existing speech control infrastructure is used to censor what people can see or say outside of copyright and CSAM (see China, Iran, Myanmar, UAE, Belarus, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Uzbekistan, ...)
searx is a search engine aggregator. searx.be is in instance of it and as i can see the only default general search engine which is on on this instance is google.
I'm not an american, I live in a small EU country.
I've seen wikileaks, and I know what US did and can assume that they did a lot more and worse after that... and the NSA catalog was a fun thing to read too.
And on the other hand, we have speculations ("not too far fetched") about russians doing bad stuff on a massively-used search engine, in english, about malware that will be detected, dissected and analyzed in a matter of minutes by pretty much every government agency of every nato country...
I'll take my chances. And also, i'm pretty sure UK wouldnt extradite a russian journalist if they posted about yandex doing bad stuff.
Amen. I've never understood why people fear speculated Chinese and Russian spying, while they never seem to recall the US spying that is well documented and confirmed.
Seriously. This is extremely well documented behavior of various regimes all over the world and you will not be able to produce even one example of America doing it.
The reason that the US and RU/CCP aren’t treated the same is because they do not behave the same.
Ahh the good odl “my version” of democracy. We go through this with every single thread about Singapore.
Fun variants to play:
- Show me one instance of my country performing extrajudicial killings by drone that take out an entire unaligned wedding party (Russian? American? Afghan wedding party probably doesn’t see the difference)
- Show me instance where “my country”’s law enforcement kills random people in their bed because they were in the wrong house
- Frequently chokes people to death because, uh, definitely their skin color, religion, sexual orientation? (Plenty of candidates here)
- At least my country doesn’t force down planes in contravention of international law because there’s someone on board we don’t like (Belarus? Any takers for more?)
- Randomly grabs people off the street and tortures them in black sites around eastern europe. (This is a fun one, so many competitors)
- Or “definitely doesn’t punish family” as long as you don’t count separating children from their parents in internment camps and losing them (Fun family game of “Things that happen along which border for 20$ ? Ukraine or Mexico?”).
I get it, I get it, it’s less bad than outright torture killing, so one can still feel morally superior to the Nazis or Russians. Unless one remembers the picture from the extraordinary rendition blacksites.
Seriously. It’s extremely well documented behavior of “regimes” all over the world, but …
One can absolutely be proud of their country for whatever reason of their choosing, not much wrong with that, but when you’re forced to narrowly cherry-pick definitions to arrive at “phew, still less bad”, you’re pretty deep down the rationalizing game already and may want to ask yourself what your redline is. Because the Reich set a pretty damn high bar in the last century when it comes to comparative rationalization.
The point here isn’t to make you feel bad about your country, you can do very little about these things, whether you are an individual Russian or American - I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons that play these inane games of “if you position the lens exactly this way, how dare you imply my country is as bad as yours”.
Ah the good ol’ “I don’t have a response so I’m going to just throw mud into the conversational waters.” This has nothing to do with “is my country better than yours.” Someone asked a specific question about a specific dimension of comparison and I gave a specific example as to why they’re treated differently. It’s clear as day.
> I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons
If you think the world has “slipped” to some local minima exemplified by modern US behavior, you haven’t been paying attention to history at all.
Reducing collateral damage in military operations is a great reason for more US spying, not less.
It’s actually pretty remarkable that we even think about a single individual dying by accident these days. Great argument for how carefully the US conducts warfare.
The US was at war with a non-state actor who committed an act of war against its civilians. State-to-state warfare is not the only form that has ever existed.
I would not consider USA LEO illegally detaining or using excessive force comparable to the Kremlin ordering the arrest of a dissident's family members. One is an individual acting on ignorance, racism, or poor training while the other is a concerted regime effort to maintain control by scaring potential dissidents. The message being "even if you escape punishment we'll go after your family".
Children separated from parents at the border may disagree with your notion of non family punishment.
“My country is less bad than your country” is a fun game, but at some point it does require a very large amount of cognitive dissonance to stay ahead of the game. Especially when the country is standing with one foot in a perpetual white supremacist coup
Children who cross the border illegally are also breaking the law. A law that every country on the planet has. The punitive familial separation was absolutely atrocious and I hope people go to prison for it, but it’s nowhere close to “my son said something mean about POTUS on the internet, now I’m being detained.”
So you’re suggesting that you’re concerned about the US arresting and/or drone striking you in the EU?
In EU’s case, the reason you should view US spying differently from RU/CCP spying is that US spying just saved your continent from being rolled by Russia, while RU spying/influence is what rendered EU leadership blind to the largest military operation since WW2 on their doorstep.
Maybe not bomb, but if I did something high profile enough, I'd be afraid they'd extradite me to USA, even if it's illegal. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't extradite me to russia.
And yes, russia definitely attacked EU and google+nsa spying on my phone definitely stopped them, sure.
Maybe nato shouldn't build so many bases and put so much american weapons all around russia (and china). The world would be a much nicer and peaceful place if US kept their army at home.... just the list of attacked countries is huge.
You mean US bombs flying over my head not that long ago to bomb a country 4 hours away with a car, while still acting as if nato is a purely defensive organization? Yeah... thank you, but no. I'd be much happier if US just packed their stuff and went back home, and maybe be able to afford some healthcare for all the people at home... and education... and maybe deal with the homeless problem, instead of wasting all that money for wars.
> Show me one instance America detaining someone for a family member’s political dissidence?
Nah we're not playing your game of restricting this to family members for political speech.
Your original point was to address
> Amen. I've never understood why people fear speculated Chinese and Russian spying, while they never seem to recall the US spying that is well documented and confirmed.
> In some cases, family members – including young
children – of “ghost detainees” have been detained themselves, and
held in CIA secret sites, including 9 and 7 year old boys.
"Nah we're not playing your game of [responding to the point you actually made]"
The question is why US spying is treated differently than Chinese and Russian. The answer is that China and Russia behave dramatically differently than the US does. I never made any claim as to the US being some flawless benevolent entity, but I made a clear argument (that you've not refuted) as to why most of the global community views them differently.
> The answer is that China and Russia behave dramatically differently than the US does.
yes. they are open about what they do whereas we do it covertly
> why most of the global community views them differently.
citation needed
"most of the global community"
you mean the west, which is not even a majority of the global community.
but even if it was a majority, again, because we do it covertly, we hide it and everyone only sees the good things until someone like snowden comes along and leaks our dirty laundry.
I mean, really any site I visit on the internet I assume is one mistake away from trying to exploit by computer. I don't trust the links off Google either, they are pretty apt to serve malware laden crap. Especially when you search up 'free' anything.
Google and Bing cooperate with various governments to a lesser or greater extent; we also know that the NSA subverted Google's internal networks for months or years (allegedly without their cooperation, but given the national security letter system, who knows).
Realistically anyone could be placing malware anywhere and the right defenses are an up-to-date browser and some level of common sense. But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
> But if we're going to start worrying about state actors, I think the odds of getting renditioned by the NSA/CIA are much higher than by "Russia", even if only because Russia is busy with a lot of other stuff at the moment.
Renditions are one thing, that's bordering on conspiracy peddling, but using computers from people all over the world to do your bidding in a botnet? That's been a thing for many years now. I remember this already being a huge issue 15 years ago, with people taking cracks of popular software, adding a piece of malware to the crack, uploading the malware-laced package to torrent trackers and manipulating UL/DL stats to make people believe their package was the authentic one.
If I were in an army and tasked to deal with cyberwar efforts, the first thing I'd do was to set up a botnet and let it run in stealth mode, so that I'd have the resources for massive strikes ready at a moment's notice. Basically the cheater way to win in Plague Inc - achieve worldwide distribution, hide away and then ramp up all of a sudden to overwhelm the opponent.
There's plenty of botnets, sure, but those are all over the internet, and mostly used for mundane spam (penis enlargement, crypto, or whatever the current thing is), DDOS extortion, etc.. No reason for them to be tied to the Russian government - if anything they're a commodity that gets bought and sold on the market these days.
I wouldn't trust Yandex for anything political, but for other information it should be fine. As for malware, not downloading and running random executables is going to already be sufficient for preventing infection, and disabling JS by default will catch the rest of exploits --- especially those that try to obfuscate their presence.
Which security risks are you talking about specifically? Malware can only run if you download and execute it locally, otherwise yandex is as bad as any other site in my book. The only thing I’m relatively concerned with is tracking, but it’s much more of a risk for russian citizens rather than for non-russian.
Your comment sounds like it’s a website or some hacker who decides if you’re secure and not your browser. Which is obviously wrong and smells of fringe security ideas.
Title feels quite misleading. This doesn't seem to have been Google itself going out of its own way to ban URLs as the title suggests, but rather the copyright holders submitting the Google takedown form before the content was indexed, as opposed to afterward.
> “Search accepts notices for web pages that are not even in our index at the time of submission. Nevertheless, we will proactively block such web pages from appearing in our Search results and will apply these notices to our demotion signal."
yes , the reading suggests pre-emptive disqualification of urls from the include allows. i have a hunch that if you somehow had access to that indexing blacklist, it would be all manner of unseemly things.
“For over two decades, we have observed that unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. If demand is unmet by legitimate supply, users will seek pirated content. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives,” Google writes.
Children will be childed by Google. Define: "piracy". Now, who should enforce ... piracy.
Google is a search engine and some other stuff - they should never, ever be involved in enforcement, let alone unilaterally involved in it and allowed to trumpet the same.
Law enforcement does law enforcement and not Google. If I was a policeman I would be absolutely incensed at this overreach into my domain.
> I think the definition is pretty clear in the DMCA, no need to play with words.
Corporations think the definition is applicable to anything under the DMCA. They play with words all the time.
> Sure, Google should keep linking to completely illegal content, correct? Scams, CP, drugs, all belongs to Google indexes, you say.
Sure, Google should keep taking down content on behalf of corporations, correct? SymPy docs [1], EFF tweets [2], product reviews [3], political speech [4], films of police [5], all targets for enforcement, you say.
There are abuses, pretty blatant abuses of DMCA in every corner of the internet. Most monopolistic platforms don't even get an actual human being involved to resolve issues.
Corporations might love the DMCA, but don't act like criticisms against it are unfounded.
I don’t think that blocking torrent downloads of movies is in any way interpretable. It’s illegal. Period. The rest can be debated, I’m not talking about that.
> on behalf of corporations
Who said that? I’m talking about illegal content. It’s on behalf of the government.
The items you mentions fall into the gray area. CP and pirated movies are not in the gray area, they are not debatable. The decision has been taken and confirmed in the court of law and Google has to follow it. It’s as black and white as can be.
> I don’t think that blocking torrent downloads of movies is in any way interpretable.
You can't do proper enforcement without interpreting. That's logically impossible. When it comes to interpreting, Google and others have a terrible track record.
> > on behalf of corporations
> Who said that?
That's what is happening right now under the current legal framework of big platforms being the judge, jury, and executioner. The legal framework you seem to support.
> The items you mentions fall into the gray area.
It's not gray. The things I mentioned, they should never have happened at all.
That's not a "canonical" site either. That's the domain name of "Digital Millennium Copyright Act Services Ltd.", a company which deliberately (and annoyingly) takes the same name as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for SEO purposes. They don't want you to file your own DMCA requests, even though you can. They want you to fall for their trick of searching for "DMCA", and to use their services.
The canonical location to find the DMCA is the United States legislation, specifically the Statues at Large. On the other hand, the best place to find the DMCA online would probably be https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-105publ304 , which offers downloads in multiple formats. This is also linked from the Wikipedia article that was offered before.
Always check the "External Links" and "References" sections of a Wikipedia article if you're looking for canonical sources like this!
Self-correction: I meant the "Statutes at Large". (I'd edit, but HN doesn't let you edit comments after a certain amount of time, and I only just noticed this mistake.)
I sometimes wonder why computer-literate people still use Google Search. Basically for all search queries I can imagine, DuckDuckGo or Yandex consistently give much better results.
It’s so frustratingly bad. I “-“ a search term and it’s in the title of the first dozen results nonetheless. DDG is slightly better (they say “-“ creates fewer results with the term, not none) and it’s only one in the top 3 say. Say you want to do -order but have switch or rearrange in your search. You’re just SOL on Google. It thinks these terms are interchangeable, related enough, so it overrides -order completely.
I think you’re right. I became computer illiterate by using Google.
You can also set your default search URL in your browser to use Verbatim. Result quality can still be a bit underwhelming, but searching without Verbatim feels like going back to the 1990s.
A lot of their products are very solid. We have, at home, Yandex Music which is way cheaper than Spotify (and is quite different) and Alice, which is their Alexa equivalent. If you speak Russian, its quite good :)
In general, while I was visiting Russia last year and the year before, Yandex Taxi (like Uber) impressed me quite a lot, too.
Russian engineering is next level. Just look at Telegram. The thing works flawlessly with billions of messages everyday and Slack struggles with some basic chat.
Duckduckgo is terrible for most of my search queries, it seems to suffer from the same SEO spam problems Google does. Yandex can't be trusted because of its Russian affiliations, which is quite sad because Yandex is quite good.
I've started using Bing Chat for search queries thst only produce spam results and while Bing lies and misleads in its direct answers, the links it provides to support its statements are usually quite good.
Its ongoing invasion of and atrocities in Ukraine, mostly, but aside from that the authoritarian regime (and outlawing the free press) also doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Russian companies.
Hmm, might be the way Russia is effectively a dictatorship, the heavily enforced political censorship, or perhaps the major war they started against another independent European nation.
I use other engines exclusively. The only time I have to switch back to Google is when I want to look for places where I can "purchase" a thing. It's very telling to me that that's the thing still keeping me on Google because it's so good.
One thing I'll recommend to everyone: Just set your default search to anything but Google. It takes a few months but your brain, internal search result filter and your overall search behaviour adjust. Google is like an addictive drug in some sense.
When I see people searching with Google or Bing I cringe. I have a computer-illiterate engineer friend who's default search engine is Yahoo - only because some program defaulted it to that and that's where he stays. Sheesh. There's a lot of them out there to be prayed upon unfortunately.
Amazing to see Dogpile still around! Search feels like an oddly under-remarked-upon topic on HN because it's always within the context of a few big names (or else massively criticized by Googists - saw a lot of sneering responses to Neeva and Brave search...).
You got downvoted because your comment is pretentious.
The nuance is difficult, but basically it's because you said "computer-literate". Your comment makes the suggestion that anyone who is computer-literate ought to be using Yandex/DDG, and if they are still using Google, then they are stupid.
A better comment would be "I've been using Yandex/DDG lately and the results are much better than Google!". That's just your experience or opinion - not judging other people or suggesting that they are stupid.
I wrote the comment initially without it, then thought about how many people don't even know there are alternative search engines, and added "computer-literate" to make clear I am not talking about normies, but people here on HN.
I can now see how my comment can be read as pretentious.
Because there are a large cohort of Googlers and Xooglers here who are resolutely in denial that their golden goose is not dying, and they insist it is in fact fine. Whereas nearly any knowledge worker using Google daily for the past decade can attest to it's rapid decline in quality.
Even spouses of Googlers suffer from this malady occasionally. I have a close friend who has a wife working for Google as a tech writer, and every time the subject of Google's decline in search quality comes up he passionately defends them as light years ahead of the competition, untouchable, always on the edge of innovation, etc.
I really don't get where it comes from, it's just a company - not a religion!
Funny, I see the problem in the opposite direction.
Google results seem perfectly fine to me, and I know they have metrics that track how well it performs. And it's their golden goose, so it doesn't make any business sense that they wouldn't maintain its quality.
The "religion" seems, to me, to be people who keep insisting its results are getting worse. And I don't get it, because I just don't see it at all in my own experience. As far as I can tell, it's just anti-Google bias or something.
This thread has someone else asking for actual examples of where Google gives bad results and other search engines are great. And once again, nobody seems to be able to provide any. If Google really were declining, you'd think people would have put together objective evidence around it, because it'd be a heck of a news story.
There are a lot of queries where it insists that the results come from common websites like Reddit or major media outlets. Smaller websites don't show up even if they have more relevant content.
There others where the results are all SEO content marketing spam.
The thing it rarely seems capable of doing now is showing legitimate non-spam content from smaller websites.
It also used to be possible when you were looking for a specific web page you've already seen, to type in a bunch of terms that you know are on that page and then it comes right up because it's the one page with all of those terms together. That doesn't seem to work anymore.
Lots of things that don't make a great deal of business sense still nevertheless occur in large corporations. Frequently. I'm not sure that's a useful metric by which to judge a situation.
I personally didn't reply to that other poster, simply because their tone suggested (to me) that they were more looking for an argument than a civil debate. Yours is very different, and thank you for that. This is something I'd genuinely like to bottom out, because from my perspective there's been a noticeable, ongoing decline in the quality of search results from Google.
So, challenge accepted. Here's an example for you, and it's not even that subjective: Run a Google search that includes a minus term and tell me how effective the search results are in regards to obeying that instruction. That was a feature I used on a daily basis until Google made it completely non-functional.
If you want an example that doesn't rely on specific features, trying searching for "<thing you might want to buy> review". Enjoy the avalanche of low-quality SEO and link spam you're about to receive.
Also consider the fact that many searches you perform on Google are already offered with a "reddit" suffix, because so many people can only find the information they're looking for by appending that term to their search. Google by itself just cannot find what you want any more.
If that's not enough for you and you want specific examples, that's certainly possible. I was searching for a solution to a programming related problem on Google just a few days ago, and came up empty-handed after 20+ frustrating minutes of it including "related" search terms that weren't relevant. Reconstructing that search wouldn't be terribly difficult, if there were an indication the effort was worthwhile. In the end I went to ChatGPT and got my answer, including a fully-functional example, in less than 30 seconds. An experience that is becoming more and more the norm as time goes on.
First of all, thanks for writing all that. I appreciate it, and so I'd like to respond.
> Run a Google search that includes a minus term and tell me how effective the search results are in regards to obeying that instruction.
Sure. I search for the movie I watched last night -- "How the West Was Won" (without quotes) -- and nearly all of the results are for the 1962 movie, as it should be. I search for "How the West Was Won -1962" and all the results are for the 1977 TV series, plus a Led Zeppelin album. Works great -- I use the minus operator all the time.
> trying searching for "<thing you might want to buy> review". Enjoy the avalanche of low-quality SEO and link spam you're about to receive.
I just typed in "dehumidifier review" and the first three results are from Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, and Good Housekeeping. Down the page includes more trustworthy sources like Tom's Guide and The Spruce. This is exactly what I want the results to be. I trust those a lot more than some random blogger of YouTuber, for instance.
> Also consider the fact that many searches you perform on Google are already offered with a "reddit" suffix, because so many people can only find the information they're looking for by appending that term to their search
Which is fantastic for me. I'll often find really valuable opinions in a single Reddit thread that provide a different perspective from Wirecutter, for instance. This isn't a failure of Google -- it's a testament to Reddit's success. (Indeed, Wirecutter and Reddit are often the first two things I want to read when researching a product -- but Reddit is more of a second pass.)
> I was searching for a solution to a programming related problem on Google just a few days ago
I definitely agree that finding incredibly specific solutions to technical problems can sometimes be hit-or-miss, but that's not a problem with Google at all, that's a problem with the entire concept of keyword search. But to my eyes, Google hasn't gotten worse over a couple of decades, it's gotten better. And I think it's noteworthy that your solution was ChatGPT, as opposed to a different search engine. That's exactly the kind of thing I turn to ChatGPT for as well. But again, I don't interpret it as Google having gotten worse, just as a new tool that's even better for certain types of tasks.
We're discouraged from discussing downvotes, but I have seen a lot of totally innocuous comments get greyed out lately. I'm suspicious that some are deliberately abusing the feature. I wouldn't worry about it.
There's been an influx of users since the Reddit snafu, I think they're just settling in. Might just be my perception, but I've seen the tone of the average comment shift a bit.
I downvoted because of what others responded. To put it another way, in keeping with the perceived tone of your post "Basically for all search queries I can imagine", maybe your imagination sucks?
(not attacking you personally, just doing this for illustration)
I haven't noticed any decrease in the ease to find what I'm looking for when using Google over decades, I always find what I need on the first page if not the first result.
Every time someone brings that up, I ask for an example of something they are looking for, and their search query, and every single time I either don't get an answer, or get an answer that shows Google has absolutely no problem at all.
Cmon now. Try to get a result for "UFC stream free" on Google. Now try that on Yandex. Live sports streaming is just one subject you can easily see Google actively censoring the organic results the web would give you if your search engine was information agnostic. Now try to search for anything politically related on Google that is not center-left/coastal US/mainstream power forces aligned, and you will stop believing in any result the corporate american search engines approve you to see.
I think the person you're responding to meant search quality, whether you're getting relevant results for a combination of programming terms for example.
Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.
And what the heck are you talking about with center-left? You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.
Indeed, to the contrary -- isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?
> Not in terms of filtering illegal content. That's a separate issue that has nothing to do with quality.
Au contraire, it's extremely common for measures designed to suppress illegal or disfavored content to have a high false positive rate and disappear from the results the very thing you're looking for even though it isn't illegal.
> isn't the whole criticism of YouTube is that is sends people down rabbit holes of right-wing and conspiracy recommendations? How do you explain that?
Google search and YouTube recommendations are different things entirely.
> You can search for literally anything on Fox News and Google will find it for you. There's no evidence whatsoever of Google results trying to show political bias.
It has a heavy mainstream bias. Fox News is right-leaning but it's the mainstream media. See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.
> See if you can get it to organically surface anything from a libertarian or communist perspective, for example.
Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.
But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for. But you can find whatever you want with the right libertarian or communist search terms. Google's not hiding political viewpoints. Again, especially as evidenced by the fact that YouTube will start recommending that stuff to you if you like it.
> Just put in the search terms and it will give those things to you. It's not hard.
Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS. Somewhat amusingly one of the results is the South China Morning Post, which is based out of Hong Kong and blocked in mainland China.
For "libertarian news" it at least gives Reason and Cato (which are fairly major outlets) but then proceeds with all the mainstream media outlets. No hint of anybody's blog or social media account anywhere.
> But obviously, for broad queries, Google is serving up the popular results most people click on. That's not Google's bias, that's just the bias of what most people are looking for.
It feels like the problem is that all the results are the same. Even if you search for some more specific subset of the news, all the results will just be the pages for that topic on each of the major media outlets who are all writing the same stories. Whereas better results might be e.g. the first three results are major media outlets but then it starts giving alternative outlets with varying perspectives.
Nobody is looking at the search results page and finding the coverage from CNN, BBC, MSNBC and CBS inadequate but finally finding satisfaction with NBC. These results are redundant with each other, or might be better served as an info box with a list of major outlets and a "more" button instead of constituting the entirety of the search results to the exclusion of anything else.
Essentially the problem is that it makes the search engine useless for discovery because the only things it will give you are the things everybody already knows about.
> Have you actually tried this? A search for "communist news" returns primarily pages about communism from major outlets like AP and CBS.
Trying this now. The second result is "People's World – Continuing the Daily Worker – Founded 1924", and the fourth is "Communist Party USA – cpusa.org".
Doesn't seem like Google's trying to censor anything authentically communist to me. But it is giving a wide range of results, from actually communist-written material, to mainstream news coverage of communism.
Yes absolutely. If your only argument is that Google won't show you hitmen for hire when you search for hitmen for hire, maybe you don't have an argument.
Are you saying you haven't seen Google return results that don't contain your search terms, or if they do contain the terms they're only in metadata (og tags and the like)? I know verbatim mode is supposed to help with this but afaict there isn't a way to enable it permanently, making it awkward to use (especially on the mobile site).
I've found Google search results to be poor these days but I don't keep a list of the searches that fail, so I don't have anything to share with you.
> you haven't seen Google return results that don't contain your search terms
Oh they absolutely do, and thank goodness. What turns out to be the most useful page often contains a synonym instead, which an exact query would have missed.
But I've never seen Google return results that don't have anything to do with my search terms at all. Is that a problem you've had? Do you have an example query?
The only bad searches I get are when a word/term has multiple meanings and the more popular one crowds out what I'm actually looking for... but then I just add terms to narrow it down and it fixes it.
I don't have an example query ready for you. I'll often see the problem when I include error messages, media titles, or model numbers in my searches, none of which have synonyms. Google will arbitrarily ignore at least one term, often silently.
I don't take issue with spellcheck or even synonym suggestions, FWIW. It's that the results which include/are relevant to specifically requested terms appear below results that don't/aren't, sometimes way below. It hasn't always been this way but I can't pinpoint when results started getting worse.
But that's easy to fix by putting in quotes. And Google will often highlight next to a search result "doesn't include <search term>", which you can click and Google will add the quotes for you.
If you put all terms in quotes, Google generally won't ignore anything. It will tell you it couldn't find any results though, quite frequently.
If you use Google for that query you won't find much of anything. Using Yandex you find all sorts of articles and information. The topic is considered transphobic so it is blocked on Google.
Only ones in the first two pages (or more) are Biden's campaign website (of course) and Marianne Wilson's website. No RFK Jr, no Vivek Ramaswamy, not even Trump's.
Either it is egregious incompetence, or it's deliberate.
No search engine seems to respond very well to the query "presidential candidate websites" (without the quotes), by your criterion. As an experiment, I tried it with a few of them from a private tab on my phone, looking at the first 5 pages of results.
Yandex.com (page length 10) doesn't link to any candidate websites.
DDG (page lengths 10, 20, 50, 50, 50) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Nikki Haley (page 2), RFK Jr. (page 2), Chris Christie (page 3), Marianne Williamson (page 3), Ron DeSantis (page 3), and Perry Johnson (page 4). It's missing Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.
Bing (page lengths 10, 14, 14, 14, 14) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Nikki Haley (page 2), Chris Christie (page 2), Marianne Williamson (page 3), RFK Jr. (page 3), and Ron DeSantis (page 3). It's missing Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.
Brave Search (page length 19) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Marianne Williamson (page 1), and Cornel West (page 3). It's missing RFK Jr., as well as all Republican candidates.
Yahoo (page length 10) links to Nikki Haley (page 2), Chris Christie (page 2), RFK Jr. (page 4), and Ron DeSantis (page 4). It's missing Joe Biden, Marianne Williamson, Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence.
Google (page length 10) links to Joe Biden (page 1), Marianne Williamson (page 1), Ron DeSantis (page 4), and Mike Pence (page 5). It's missing RFK Jr., Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie.
None of these search engines link to more than two candidate websites within the first 20 results, nor do they link to Trump's or Ramaswamy's websites, so Google is far from alone in that regard. (I haven't been able to test with Kagi Search to see if it is any different.)
Perhaps search engines are simply bound to see such a query as asking more for the concept of candidate websites in general, than for topical examples in particular.
Page 1: Biden, Williamson and link to an article Google hides campaign sites of Trump, RFK Jr. and other Republican candidates
Page 2: Biden again, Pence
No further pages. 5th result contains an article that claims to be linking all presidental candidate websites, but it's a Medium, hidden behind sign-up. I haven't find any result with a comprehensive list of the websites of interest. Kagi does aggregate results from Google and Yandex, so this is probably not too surprising.
Did it give you a result leading directly to their canonical campaign website? I can see Sanders and Clinton with international, but can't see DeSantis nor any other Republican candidate (not even Pence).
I can definitelly see pages with lists of candidates, but I couldn't find a single one that would also link their websites and thus satisfy the query, at least indirectly.
The results seem to change as we speak. I no longer have any republican candidates on the first page of search results, but the links in the results are to the canonical campaign sites.
Interesting query. Whilst it may be debatable what the ordering should be, there is a somewhat small set of objective correct results that should make the first page.
I wonder if this is also hitting things like right-to-repair; a lot of useful information like service manuals and schematics are almost certainly in the realm of piracy, and I've noticed they've become a lot harder to find recently.
Early last month, I found myself turning to Yandex in a search for the out of print manual for a 1980s mobile radio. Google had nothing. Yandex had almost nothing. But it was enough to piece together an answer.
This bans hasn't nothing to do with pirate sites that have scams and deceptive design patterns? The last time I visited the pirate bay without ublock origin, I was bombarded with ads with scummy copy like "you won x" or "stream for free now", fake search results, adult ads, and deceptive invisible clickable areas on top of the UI that opened new tabs with suspicious full page ads.
I never followed those links but I'm sure that it will ended up on installing malware or asking for credit cards.
I will understand if the Google Search algorithm de-ranks or bans sites like that, many people totally will fall to this scams.
Interestingly, this implies the people sending notices to google have a fresher index than google does.
Is the pirate bay still a thing, or is there some new competitor? (It’s possible the copyright holders are running their own crawlers, but that seems unlikely and also easy to block)
YouTube and other Google-operated services should do their best to crack down on piracy, such as the uploading of television programs. It's ridiculous that they only show off their "justice" that no one asks for on sites that they can't monetize.
This is a betrayal of Google's mission statement, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". It can be credibly argued that the DMCA requires Google to do this for allegedly-infringing indexed URLs. Nothing requires them to do this for unindexed URLs.
an easy fact to forget when thinking about their efforts to squelch/amplify propaganda at their own discretion, their funding and backers, and the lobbying that they do on behalf of themselves and others.
they're just as close to governmental agency as is allowed without taking the blame.
They are acting under the demands made by the republic. If there is a government mandate to override freedom of speech, imo, it should always be required to leave a paper trail.
Off-topic but: Does anyone know of a way to support TorrentFreak other than disabling adblock? They run next to no ads, don't have a donation form or paid offering, and yet have been a major source of news in "Big Tech vs Piracy" battles.
I have a hard time disabling ad block on sites of this ilk due to their tendency to inject malware into their JS to prey on the unsavvy. I don’t trust that if I enable JS I won get hit with an aggressive malware / zeroday.
it might be more than that.. here in the USA I typed "Serbia News" into youtube and got only Albanian and Slovak sites.. only two months ago, I did the same and I did get TV news in Serbia.. I wanted to know more about the northern border expansion of course, from both sides.. and what I got instead is predictable and disappointing in a "free" press environment
secondly, the only time I have ever gotten a suspicious pause in Google translate, was relating to this area in those languages..
I'm still miffed that when I search for "coronavirus" into Google, I seem to get hand-picked results about covid-19, which is just one of hundreds of coronaviruses.
The wikipedia entry (which is often first for most search results about generic topics) is on page 2 and still likes to their covid-19 entry, not the one on coronavirus genus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus
With all due respect, I think 99+% of people who Google “coronavirus” are looking for info about Covid-19, and as such the results being about C19 is pretty reasonable imo. It’s like how if you Google “watergate” you’ll near-exclusively get stuff about the watergate scandal (because that’s what most people who search “watergate” are looking for), and not about booking at the watergate hotel or other amenities of the watergate complex.
Hmm. Despite knowing what to look for it was a couple of goes before I could get a query to return https://www.rts.rs/sr/index.html - I had to ask for "RTS serbia".
(I am one of the handful of people watching Pesma Za Evrovisiju every year despite not understanding Serbian. One day AI will be good enough to give me subtitles)
Anything involving Serbia is subject to serious trolling campaigns. Serbia and its borders have been the cause of multiple wars in the 90s, and they're the only real Russia-aligned nation in the Balkans so Putin is spending a shit ton of money on propaganda campaigns for his friend Aleksander Vucic.
Personal guess, I think that Russia is also strongly responsible for the current bullshit going on in Bosnia where the Serbian minority is riled up beyond belief; I would not be surprised if that is the cause for the next war, and had Ukraine not beaten up the Russians so strongly I bet that the original plan was to violently break apart Bosnia after Kyiv had fallen and the Western nations were too busy to deal with Ukraine to open up yet another front.
> Personal guess, I think that Russia is also strongly responsible for the current bullshit going on in Bosnia
the 'current' bullshit has been going on for decades though; there's no need for Russian involvement to make it flare up occasionally (e.g. in the run-up to general elections usually). my impression is it's just Serbia feeling empowered and opportunistically using (the global focus on) Russian invasion of Ukraine to further their goals in Bosnia.
Serbia doesn't need Russia for the military part, they have enough goons on their own.
The key thing is, if had Kyiv fallen, do you think that the Western nations would have had time and resources to care about the Dayton accords and intervene again? I seriously doubt it and I'm pretty certain the Serbians came to the same conclusion.
Thankfully though, Kyiv held up, and the Serbians were forced to cancel their plans since contrary to expectations the Western nations did manage to get a reasonably united response against the Russian aggression.
The problem remaining is that ethnical tensions still are high and there's not much effort being done to defuse them, partially because everyone's attention is on Ukraine at the moment.
Local sentiment supports your view as well. Lots of my friends and family (hi from Sarajevo) hold belief that if Ukraine had fallen within couple of days there would be war here.
SEO spam is just as much of an avenue for propaganda farms as social media is. When people actively search for something, they'll turn to Google, so getting "your" narrative in the first two pages is very important for the propagandists - and it's made easier by the simple fact that no tech company invests money into moderation staff that actually speaks the language and knows context to determine if something is spam or not.
If you search “watch $MOVIE free” on google you’re going to get netflix, Hulu, prime, Disney etc as the first results regardless of whether those sites even have it in their library. The remaining links are SEO spam that also don’t have it but pretend they do, because the sites that actually do have all been struck or filtered.
Yandex on the other hand… the first result is generally exactly what you wanted in 720 or 1080 with no BS.
I do miss when google had a little footer that said “click here to view URLs that were removed due to copyright takedown requests”.
Edit: And I do pay for all of those streaming services and more, but in Canada if a franchise has 5 movies it’s not unheard of to have #1 on Netflix, #2 on Paramount, #3 on no service available here, and #4 and #5 on Disney or Crave. It’s the same with seasons of TV series: exhausting.