A web search tip to avoid AI generated SEO junk

I feel like Google’s crap results predate the AI tech by at least five years. It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
- I feel so bad for the younger folks these days.
  Way back when, if Google couldn't find it and we did some good Google Fu, it probably wasn't readily available online.
  Now, you know it probably is there, just buried in nonsense generated purely by layer after layer of people's selfishness. And they never even knew it could be any other way.
  
  It's a sick joke that we've celebrated being in the "information age" for the last 20-25 years, and now that information is being obfuscated by various means again.
  SEO, censorship, paywalls.
  
  Google has also disabled some of the search operators that made refining results more useful.
- Woah, with 5 years you guessed correct, google decided to kill search accuracy for profits 5 years ago, in 2019
  https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
- It does.
  Straight out of college in 2015 I did some SEO sidehustling. We'd get blogs writing for cheap by fiverr people, adjusted it a bit, and they ranked high very easily based on certain keywords for the industry. Those blogs were just random bullshit (AI does a better job for a short story), jargon was on point but the content was just snakeoil. Business went thriving.
  
  This unironically is what I/my peers do with resume/cover letters for job/internship applications nowadays. My friend actually has a decent beer moneymaker for building optimized resumes for other people on campus.
  The whole system we're playing in is so fucked.
- But the SEO garbage sites active up to 2023 have updated since 2023 to keep up with each other.
  So it works really well.
- It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
  garbabe SEO has been there since almost the beginning. More recently google started to promote sites base on their profitableness.
  Remember when you could suppress sites from Google search results? Due to "unknowable reasons", they got rid of that feature. Enshittification is real.
  
  Yeah I was looking the other day to block certain sites because every time I google shit I can't get an answer or it's just really an add. Along with fucking Qora or whatever it is.
  Unfortunately the option is gone
- Yes, but the SEO methods and Google's ranking methods have been evolving together over time. Meaning SEO used in content from some time ago may have less impact on the results you see today. Of course, this is just a hypothesis based on a thing I read a few months ago that I can't even tell you the name of lol

This has the bonus side effect of being able to ignore any news that happened since 2023 to gaslight yourself into thinking that we're not all living in a hellscape of a world
- I think the news in 2022 was still pretty hellish. I'm going to go with (before:2013). Some hell still, but a naively optimistic hell
  
  Probably more poverty/starvation but a fraction of the climate change?
- You'd need to go back to pre 2012 for that
  
  Little further than that. Further... Keep going until you see fish legs.
  
  Before 2007 gets one well before the 2007 financial collapse.
  https://www.britannica.com/money/great-recession
- No the news from 2024 is an improvement over the news from 2023. Moderately anyway

And then SEO optimiser add the tag "before:2023"
- Thanks, I hate it.
- I know its a joke but using Google dorks has always been the most effective way of searching. There was a period of like 4 or a bit more years where you didn't need them anymore because engines actually got good. Now though they're more useful than ever.

nowadays, all tabs look like the shopping tab
- also the shopping tab, if you're actually shopping, is completely fucking useless.
- Commercialization of everything.
  That's what inevitably happens when you give a mega corp like Google all of that power over you, your life, and your data by simply using their products. Ultimately, they then get to decide who you are and how you act. And it's in their benefit to shape everything, including you, in their corporate image.
  People don't notice how much they're getting fucked on an individual basis until the consequences of the actions of millions or billions of people adds up and comes back around in the form of something stupid and obvious like Manifest V3, SEO everywhere, WEI, or the doublespeak "privacy sandbox" comes to bite you in the ass. Enshittification everywhere and even then most people still don't care.
  We're their cattle and we're choosing to walk into a slaughterhouse with our eyes wide open. In more ways than one. As fun as the game is, I really do not want to actually live in Cyberpunk.
  
  ive been saying this for 20+ years, and people still don't fucking listen. fuck, apple users still exist!
  also: what about a 'shadowrun' campaign gm'd by a severely concussed Kurt Vonnegut as he dies of dysentery at the table?
- I would love to hack the local shitty news source and stick a shopping cart on their page...
  Nothing more, just subtle criticism to see how long it lasts

This beats using "reddit" because that site has also become full of ai generated and bot spam/product astroturfing
- And now Reddit won't let me see the content while I'm on a VPN if I'm not logged in with some trite "whoa there partner!" bull.

Google's slow demise is entirely expected late-stage enshittification.
What is frustrating is that search is mostly a solved problem. Crawling and indexing are solved problems. Fighting adversarial SEO is a continuous task, that Google Search is essentially refusing to perform but is clearly cheap enough for an upstart like Kagi to do reasonably well (their only added-value is the aggregation and filtering of other indexers such as google and mojeek, and let's be honest it's probably 99% google's index powering Kagi).
This shows that the lack of meaningful competition in the space is actually merely a matter of capital. There are too many webpages to scrape, process, and save and nothing short of "indexing almost as much stuff as google" is going to cut it.
In the software world we're used to seeing FOSS alternatives to most things, because software's capital costs are typically almost equal to manpower costs. However for search this doesn't work, just like it historically hasn't worked too well for some really expensive software (such as audiovisual creation tools, with the notable exceptions of Blender and to a lesser extent Krita).
There should be a well-funded non-profit building and providing a high-quality, exhaustive, transparent and open-source indexing service for the world. It definitely sounds possible, and even rather easy in the grand scheme of things. Yet current economic incentives do not favor such models. However I do wonder if there are not options to be explored, such as distributed crawlers or even a distributed index (after looking it up, YaCy seems to be doing just that though at a glance it seems, uh, old and clunky). Or maybe the EU should finally put a real focus on meaningfully funding indigenous FOSS R&D so the enshittification process of American tech giants doesn't crush us as well.

Just done 4 searches and got the exact same results regardless of "before:2023"
- It's because these are two idiots trying to sound smart. I have used pre-2015 searches, because sometime between 2009-2016 is when SEO in general started being used. The AI generation just kicked it into high gear. Stuff before 2015 at least appears to offer information that isn't just reworded lists of advertisements.
  
  ..interesting...
- Yeah, tried it when this first got mentioned. Doesn’t do squat.
  
  I imagine google have changed the settings.
  I also note Duckduck doesnt give great results these days either.

I started switching everything to duckduckgo. So far it's been a much better experience.
- I set DDG as my default a while back and I'm finding myself having to open Google all the time to get results.
  
  I committed to using ddg for a couple years, finally quitting about a year back, and I have to agree. I found myself using bangs for nearly every search. Google is absolutely getting worse and fast, but I'm not sure there was ever a point where ddg had better results than Google. After all it's just reheated bing.
- Bing
  
  DDG gets their results from Bing

Works great for old stuff, now how do I look up stuff on the bridge collapse near me last week?
- go to the actual site, it's near you.
  
  Oh good I am sure I can find out the eta of when the bypass will be built from the broken bridge.

The new episode of the Better Offline podcast is the first in a three part series on the death of the web. I'm halfway through and would recommend it. It's a good show just in general.
- Is this podcast available online?
  
  No you have to send a postcard to a PO box and then they send you back a cassette tape. With a free pencil to fix it when it inevitably unravels.
  
  https://betteroffline.com

The year is 2235, and the warp drive has been invented. I go to search Google for the latest news on the tech but remember this old bit of advice from an old meme that was floating around almost 2 centuries ago I saw once while lurking in the Ancient Memes community. All I find are things taken from fiction. Only about 25% are factually accurate.
- At this point, 25% is pretty solid.

This only makes sense for a very limited set of things tho. The things where AI makes a difference are art stuff, news and creative writing stuff. What purpose do news from before 2023 have? Maybe for research purposes it filters out some bullshit but then you also miss out anything relevant that happened after 2022.
- I think you've got it backwards. This only excludes new information from the past two years. Literally everything else is majorly improved.
  
  I believe they're arguing that AI is particularly used in news, and when looking up news, you're typically seeking current events, in which case excluding post 2023 content doesn't work.
  In my opinion, the place I encounter AI content the most is in list content, not just clickbait lists but also stuff where multiple products are compared. If I'm looking up what laptop to get, AI articles pop up comparing 10 products with inaccurate and messy details, but also I don't want to see old products.
  Also IMO, in many cases Google search has been useless for 6+ years now. I think it was around 2018 where I started ending my search terms in 'reddit' because the first few articles were poorly advised clickbait, especially when looking for any advice (Reddit of course went to shit anyway). Google is only useful now for navigating to popular sites that will inevitably float to the top of any search query due to popularity. The only other common use for me is correcting typos when autocorrect is stumped.
- Sadly, most of my searches need more recent answers. Software & hardware (when it comes to coding/tech/IT) and information about local businesses can change quickly and old information usually ends up being just wrong.
  Google is really, really letting me down and wasting a lot of my time these days.
  
  I get that people think that but I just googled a really long serial number for a washing machine with no other context and the first result was the repair manual. So at least in my experience it seems to be okay.
- It also makes a difference for historical, medical knowledge and basically everything tha you can attach an affiliate link onto (e.g. product reviews), so... My guess is that covers a huge amount of searches.
  
  and basically everything tha you can attach an affiliate link onto (e.g. product reviews)
  Y'know, something you'd want up to date results for so you're not potentially buying older worse products.
- Not news. Things like recipes have been put through the AI filter to add a lot of useless crap. Try looking up "how to roast a chicken" and getting useable results.
  It's always someone's life story when all I want is a discussion of the cooking process. That content is hard to create. It's a lot easier to just have AI make up a fake life story.
  
  That's why I've started using ai with web scraping abilities for my searches nowaday.
  Find me how to roast a chicken, and make an instruction list
  if I get decent results, double check the source site just to be safe and you're set. Basically fight fire with fire.
  It sucks? Yes, adding another layer of complexity for filtering bullshit is not useful at all.

Just imagine - everyone who write content that's worth anything these days start dating their newest posts as if they were written in 2023, creating a community within still frame of a better time. It's like Old School RuneScape, but for the internet.

- For what? DDG results are just as bad, if not worse.
  Ironically I find myself using Bing more often than not, for it's Copilot AI. It has a tendency to just repeat the same incorrect information when it can't find what you want, but it's still better than anything I get from a search engine, that is, not without adding site:reddit.com to my queries, and for obvious reasons, I don't want to have to keep doing that.
  Please share your secret. What magical unknown search engine are you using that is immune to AI-generated nonsense?
  
  DuckDuckGo primarily uses Bing results, mixed with a few other smaller sources. Kagi (paid) uses AI, but in a way that benefits the user, not the advertiser. They were an early adopter of AI.
  
  https://kagi.com/
  
  I use DDG and keep adding words until I get what I want. Especially quoted words.

An alternative that actually uses its own web crawlers https://mojeek.com
- issa me!
  
  Okay, beat your chest, tell me about what you got.

Many Google users are reporting that their results are not as good as they used to be.
If you're suffering from this annoying problem don't worry. Simply follow the steps below.
Install Driver Easy.
Run Driver Easy.
Pay for Driver Easy.
It won't fix your problem obviously, but here we are on the front page of the search results for every fucking Windows problem regardless.

but i don't use google search

I was using Kagi, but I'm not sure I can justify $10/month for search results that weren't that great. DuckDuckGo is basically Bing. I do love Qwant because their results felt really good to me, but they won't let me use it without an ad blocker.
What's an alternative that gets actually good results?
- 4get.ca is pretty decent

Who exactly this is for. When I'm searching for stuff on the internet I'm searching for information I don't care if it was written by a human or not.
Perhaps it's more useful if you're looking for actual articles but I'm generally looking for manuals or documentation, both of which are perfectly fine to be written by AI as long as they work.
- You've never searched something and when you clicked on something that looked relevant it turns out to be a garbage bin full of basic loosely-related and barely-formatted information not pertaining much to your search?
  Though lately when I search for things it's usually something somewhat niche and google just fails to give me the specific topic and instead shows more popular/general things with somewhat similar terms unless I start adding quotes. Date isn't fixing that.
  
  No not really. What sort of things are you searching for?
- Are you for real? I also use search engines to find manuals or documentation, if I want to know how to open a jar I want to see something like, "Twist jar lid counterclockwise with firm grip for opening." Instead, with the internet as it has now become, I get:
  "Opening a jar might seem like a trivial task, but mastering this skill can save you from frustration and potentially embarrassing moments. Whether it's a jar of pickles or a jar of pasta sauce, the techniques for opening them remain largely the same. In this guide, we will explore the art of jar opening, providing a comprehensive step-by-step guide that anyone can follow.
  The first step in the jar opening process is to ensure that you have a firm grip on both the jar and the lid. Holding the jar securely with one hand will provide stability and prevent it from slipping. Meanwhile, using your other hand to grasp the lid firmly will give you the leverage needed to twist it open. This initial grip is crucial, as it sets the foundation for the rest of the opening process.
  With a secure grip established, the next step is to begin twisting the lid counterclockwise. This motion may seem straightforward, but it requires a combination of strength and finesse. Applying too much force can result in the lid becoming stuck even tighter, while too little force will yield no progress at all. Finding the right balance is key, and it may take some trial and error to get it just right.
  If the lid proves to be particularly stubborn, there are a few tricks you can try to loosen it. One common method is to tap the lid gently on a solid surface, such as a countertop or table. This action helps to break the seal between the lid and the jar, making it easier to twist off. Alternatively, you can try running the lid under hot water for a few seconds. The heat causes the metal to expand slightly, further aiding in the loosening process.
  Persistence is key when it comes to opening a stubborn jar. If your initial attempts are unsuccessful, don't be afraid to try again. Sometimes, a fresh approach or a little extra force is all it takes to break the seal. However, it's important to exercise caution and avoid using excessive force, as this can result in injury or damage to the jar.
  Once the lid begins to loosen, continue twisting it counterclockwise until it comes off completely. This may require multiple rotations, so be patient and persistent. As the lid loosens, you may hear a satisfying pop as the seal is broken, indicating that you're on the right track.
  With the lid successfully removed, you can now enjoy the contents of the jar to your heart's content. Whether it's a delicious spread for your morning toast or a savory addition to your favorite recipe, the possibilities are endless. Just be sure to securely reseal the jar after each use to maintain freshness and prevent spills.
  In conclusion, opening a jar may seem like a simple task, but it requires a combination of strength, finesse, and patience. By following the steps outlined in this essay, anyone can master the art of jar opening and conquer even the most stubborn lids. So the next time you're faced with a tightly sealed jar, remember these techniques and approach the challenge with confidence."
  
  I cannot stress enough how much this reads exactly like every bot-written tutorial ever. They spend pages beating around the bush and filling the site with useless word-salad, and if you ever have a slightly unconventional problem, you can be positive that it will not even be mentioned in the guide.
- In as little as ten years that may be so but the garbage that AI is producing today is exactly how I describe it. Garbage.
- I somewhat agree.
  I've never really encountered AI spam while searching for something.
  I guess generally I know what site is going to have what I need so I just search directly, or include the name of the site in search.
  That said, I wouldn't argue that AI spam is as useful as information written and maintained by a human.
  
  Depends on the human. Sometimes you'll find engineering manuals and they look like they've been translated from Korean into English by someone dyslexic and couldn't speak either language.
- I used it for my job when I'm troubleshooting Windows or some software. The AI websites generally just have the same script over and over where I when I was able to find the forum/blog post it was more helpful.