Happy Saturday All,
TLDR: I’ve been extremely frustrated with the increasing enshittification of search engines. I made this post to see how we all are coping with this.
I honestly feel like the past month or so, the functionality of web search has just completed dropped through the floor. The only sites that seem to get indexed are those littered with generated content.
I’m not the only one that thinks getting a list of synthetic text, especially one that reads like a machine-translated instruction manual isn’t the most helpful set of resources right? The “articles” go on forever without reaching a substantive conclusion or extending any bits of information to answer my original search query.
It’s very upsetting to see that it could somehow get even worse than it has been for the last few years. I miss finding individual blogs of people nerding out over common hobbies. Curated websites that actually could make it to the first page returned from a query. It also seems that social media websites are primarily indexed if it isn’t polluted with the automatic slopfest pages.
Let me know what y’all think. This really sucks
I’ve been just using more specific/targeted search engines. I put them on a bookmarks page I coded and that’s my homepage when I open my browser. And then when I need just a general Google search without ai summary, my new tabs page goes to udm=14. Still not great - but fine when I just need to double check a url or search images.
I highly recommend Wiby and Marginalia for more indie/non-corporate website searches!
Oh also searching directly in Wikipedia when I’m looking up something that might have an entry there (science/history/whatever) that I just need an overview or definition of
Any tips for managing bookmarks with an improved method from… “Autistic heap (corpus) of websites haphazardly chucked into similarly named directories”?
Low-key I wish I knew how to extend the functionality of Firefox or how to write plugins.
Great suggestions for Wiby and Marginalia! I will check those out. What was that service called that lets you download Wikipedia in its entirety? I was thinking of saving a local copy for information archiving purposes.
I’ve been using tags in addition to bookmark folders myself. And then using LibreWolf’s (and FF’s) bookmark and history search features (ctrl+b and ctrl+h).