Search Engine Rot or Fade

[hmelton]

I personally call what this video link below talks about "Search Rot" and back in 2019 when I first noticed it I blamed neural net optimization for speed, but  it has been steadily growing worse and I have to agree with what this guy is saying, the search engines are essentially deleting most of the internet.

Disturbing Proof They're Quietly Deleting the Internet...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI

Back in 2019 with Yahoo and Goggle I noticed my practice of  doing a Yahoo or goggle search and looking at or using pages 1,2,3, skip to 7 followed by 23, 37, 47, 71 and depending on the results back tracking or going to deeper pages that were often a higher prime number pages to see what turned up.



I have used this "1237 higher prime number" technique of search engine page hopping to successfully find very useful if obscure pages for decades, I developed it on Infoseek.

It has lead me to private family knitting webpages of really strange and lovely original patterns for my mom and pages for obscure websites for heavily modifying farm equipment to specific soil needs.

I've also used it to find obscure fan fiction for obscure subjects.

One thing I notice from the farm equipment searching and oddly fanfic searches is that search engines are very bias, especially toward money and advertisement popularity.

Using farm equipment, John Deere and the other implement makers always have the first 100 or so pages biased to them and this was true back in the 1990's, but at least then when you drop down to say search engine page 200 and the small builders would start getting listed.

I have been searching for fan fiction since the early 1980's and using computers to search since 88 or 89 and Disney's bias has always been deep, but in the last decade or so I've watched fan fiction dot net's bias creep ever deeper into the larger prime number pages I use to regularly sample for really obscure fanfics.

In the last couple of years I  had nearly come to believe that nearly all fanfics had been sucked into that ever growing pile with it's ever growing restrictions and rules, but using old archives from past browser links I started to see in late 2021 that in spite of search engines never showing them many obscure websites do sometimes still exist and are even maintained.

I have a habit of once a year in December of saving a dated backup file of links from Firefox and the one or two other browsers I use.

search engines not searching or "Search Engine Rot" is something that has bothered me quite a bit since late 2020 and I have yet to find away around it.

Having access to the internet use to make me feel like I could in some way actually come close to accessing the sum total of human knowledge and endeavors, now all I can find of the internet is what some neural net trained with rules carefully crafted by a international mega corporation to only list out a few hundred choices, with no chance of digging below their political, economic and greed bias set of rules.

Does anybody have suggestions about getting around this loss of the internet?

I've tried several dozen search engines and so far "Duck Duck" doesn't quite make it, but seems to currently to be slightly better than Yahoo, Bing or Goggle and the countless other "fake" search engines that seems to just a rebadged goggle or bing search.

I've also been looking into Gopher and it is still operational and seems to be expanding, but it is still very limited and far from "there" yet.

hmelton

[classicdrogn]

From what I've read, Duck Duck Go is just a rebranded, anonymized Bing, but I suppose being anonymized means it doesn't have some of the inputs normally used to pare results down to what the neural net says will sell to you. Search engines need huge data centers and network throughput that would be ruinously expensive to run if they weren't even more profitable to control, so I doubt it's a trend we'll see change, either.

[classicdrogn]

Hm, well, at least part of the problem has become irrelevant to me - some change in Google's site design yesterday-ish has made it so no results show up without enabling javascript. As my position is that (aside from media streaming which legitimately needs the extra features) if your site requires javascript to work, your site does not work, all I am left with is deciding which search engine I'll be changing to, with Duck Duck Go my first pick as least bad. If you or anyone else has found a better option since originally posting, by all means speak up.

[robkelk]

I find Duck Duck Go sufficient for my needs.

[Bob Schroeck]

I've switched to it on Chrome for my personal system and am giving it a good thorough test. On my other browser, Seamonkey, Google is semicrippled to begin with, but whether that's because of browser support or because I have so many anti-ad and personal security plugins/settings going there, I can't tell.

[Labster]

I haven't used it much, but Brave Search is now using its own indexes, so at the very least it will have different results than the others. It's currently ad-free, but they plan to transition to a paid ad-free version, and a free with ads version.