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
so far my setup using disroot’s searxng instance with ublacklist (already mentioned), some recommended blocklists for it, and banger for universal DDG bangs has been extremely non-frustrating (except one crashout i had when ublacklist updated with a method for adding custom search engines which forced me to write a custom entry for disroot that didn’t initially work despite it working OOB perfectly fine before that) and my preferred experience. another example of my linux user autism taking over.
but i direct most folks i know to udm14.org since they’re unwilling to give up google. :/