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Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com

Not crazy, I always resort to yandex when I know google is not showing me the results I am looking for

DDG doesn’t click for me sadly, and I cannot point my finger to where or why

Someone round here said Yandex shows you what you searched for, while Google shows you what it thinks you should have searched for.

I just tried "McDonalds" and only got 50 straight McDonalds results. "Burger King" nets 23 Burger Kings, one "Spareribs King" and one "Burger Chicken King". Gotta love inconsistent experiences between customers / regions.

Also, Apple is gearing up to stuff ads (cough "sponsored results" cough) into Maps, at which point it will probably start suffering the same problem..

Gmaps always zooms out when I search. No idea of that happens for others or not.

Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably.

Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?

Why don't you use an adblocker or Brave browser?

Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.

I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.

Get a custom domain. Strat using that. Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple.

It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail

I'd still recommend doing searches for common spam topics to see if you have "bad" stuff. On our wiki everything looked fine until you searched for (say) "finance" (which most users never would) ... and then you'd find a mess of spam finance stuff.

As for whether it's responsible or not, obviously I don't know. What I do know is that, without all the info, "Google saw malicious content on your wiki" is a far more logical theory than "Google just decided to hate us out of the blue".

As I said above:

>As for whether it's responsible or not, obviously I don't know. What I do know is that, without all the info, "Google saw malicious content on your wiki" is a far more logical theory than "Google just decided to hate us out of the blue".

AI slop wouldn’t be on my top ten list of annoying wiki spam, having been the one dealing with such things in the past. You can be free of slop and still overflowing with spam.

I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.

I don't think so. "sleeper" accounts are a thing. A more sophisticated spammer could create a "high-reputation" account over some time that only posts useful info, then turn up the spam after the trust level is high enough - or even turn the tree system into a business opportunity and sell vouches to other spammers.

It doesn't solve as much as it sounds.

- You can't vouch for downstream invites, so the tree aspect isn't useful.

- It's not your fault if someone's account gets taken over by a spammer.

- Just because you vouched for someone once doesn't mean you vouch for them in the future.

- What should the punishment be if you accidentally invite a bad actor?

- Your community has to be large and desirable enough for people to bother. The vast majority of sites will die before anyone cares about jumping through hoops.

Addressing issues like these ends up kinda defeating the ideals of the proposal and regresses it into a mechanic that simply makes it harder to register. Which might be useful wrt anti-spam, but it has its own issues, like people having to constantly grovel for invites, shutting out earnest contributors, etc.

You still need criteria to handle reputation: does an account invited years ago and now spamming affects the reputation of the inviter, how much? What about the hacked accounts?

For small platforms it makes a lot of sense, for larger the potential for abuse is still there in different forms.

Now you just created a market for farmed "legit" accounts.

That’s literally how Facebook started

I remember begging my older step brother for an invite since he had the college email to get in

Then it’s just hacked account whack-a-mole and deciding who legitimately got their account hacked and who is lying.

It raises the bar at least somewhat though!

Interesting to compare this site and lobste.rs for that

Also running a wiki. Similar. Had a sign-up based on in-game knowledge. LLMs now crack it and I had to turn off signups about a year ago. Now people email me directly if they want an account.

From the perspective of a web search engine indexing tens to hundreds of billions of documents 500k docs is not very noticeable.

This seems akin to saying that humans shouldn't be personified because their brains are made of millions of neurons that are all doing different things. But the actions or motives of individual processing units are hardly relevant, especially at the scale of The Google. We don't need to speculate how non-malevolent individuals cause harmful side effects. It doesn't even matter what The Google "thinks". The system is what it does, and what it does is consistently operate in ways that are not for the mere benefit of users of the Web. The conceptual model that The Google hates (or is callously indifferent to) us makes far better predictions than a model presuming thousands of people make mistakes while trying to make the Web more accessible. It doesn't matter if the former model isn't a technically perfect reflection of reality. We are less likely to be victim to The Google when we act as if it is a hostile force. Diffusing the results of its actions across thousands of nameless humans increases the risk that one finds themself posting on HN or X about how The Google spontaneously locked them out of their entire life.

Someone at Google are ultimately responsible for the overall direction. Saying that a company is made up by thousands of people and they should be judge, perhaps not individually, but at least not as one gigant whole, is asking the employees to absorb moral responsibility, while the corporate is excused of any wrong doing.

Is this irony? Cause there’s no way anyone believes these “we want to make the world a better place” cliches anymore lol

> over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less

Right, that's why they pushed AMP and upranked AMP pages in their results. That's also why they decided to severely neuter/remove as blocking extensions for Chrome. That's also probably why google search results are getting worse by the month with more and more ads and spam being upranked to the top.

It's because google has a mission of making the web more accessible. Okay bud.

It's laughable to assume good intentions at this point, this predatory monopolist makes every decision against a free and open internet and in favor of monetization, authoritarianism, and enshittification.

The over arching mission is to make profit.

And accessibility was meant for Google so they can collect all the data to make even more profit.

sweet summer child,

> thousands of people who are all working on different things

those thousands of people aren't making the overall decisions

> with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible

google's mission has for a long time now been to deliver value to its shareholders; making the web more accessible is secondary, nice if aligned with increasing revenue

lol.

Users take part and improve wikis, it's the whole model. If they don't take the adverts, they still can contribute. Googlebot isn't making edits, not even giving signal to the site about what is useful allowing the owners to hone the site.

Two ways in which issues who have adblock are better than bots.

Users will promote organically, which can win more credence than even a higher listing in SERPs. Depends if your wiki is part of building a community.

What bizarre and absurd line of reasoning. Users who care about their privacy and opt out of downloading ads and malware are 'denying creators revenue'?

Are you denying creators revenue by not reading reading/observing every ad that comes your way and making purchases based on them? Maybe you should read/comment on HN less and focus on consuming more ads instead?

What at an incredibly stupid thing to say.

Users, ad-block users, and scrapers all consume the publicly-available content whether you like it or not.

I expect the difference is that the scrapers are the most likely to regurgitate the content one way or the other.

The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads.

Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.

If there is any model on the internet that has proven you don't need to monetize through ads for a working business model, it's Wikipedia.

> So same thing ad-block users have been doing for 20 years now?

Ad-block users didn't mine Pokémon Central for content, then remove them from search listings. Changing the specific criticism made to the generic "denying creators revenue" is a distortion, because they screwed over all people who wanted visitors, not just the people who wanted visitors to milk them for cash.

If I made a forum about trains because I wanted people to come to the forum to talk about trains, Google milked the forum for all of the accumulated information about trains, then made it impossible to attract new users to talk about trains.

well I didn't downvote but there is an obvious difference in thousands of uncoordinated people doing something whenever it benefits vs. a large organization with automated resources doing things at the kinds of speeds and volumes that automation allows.

You can run unblockable ads on your site.

You just have to not use third party integrations that run untrusted code on your visitors computers.

The edits are likely why you’re getting downvoted so much tbh.

Public corporations have historically been multi-cellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. They're probably most analogous to bee hives.

Each cell receives nourishment from the corporation in the form of monetary compensation (and other benefits). Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism than others, depending on their logical position within the corporation.

The corporations aren't sentient in the collective, though it can be argued many of their constituent cells are. The corporations are able to influence their environment using individual constituent cells to communicate with similar cells in other organisms.

Ultimately, the corporation itself has the goal of producing value for its owners, since its owners provide the working capital necessary for the corporation to function.

The methods corporations use to achieve their goal of returning value can be opaque to the owners and potentially inscrutable to the individual constituent cells. Their "reasoning" is a manifest property coming from the interaction of the cells with the environment, the cells interacting with each other (both within and outside the corporation), and other organisms.

(There's the neat rub that individual cells can be constituents of multiple organisms simultaneously, too!)

If the owners stop receiving value and withdraw their working capital the corporation becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies.

Recently these organisms have become biological / technological hybrids, incorporating unconscious computational models in their reasoning process. This change increases the inscrutability and opacity of the reasoning process. It's likely the unconscious computational models will eventually be tasked with communicating with similar models in other organisms, at which point the inscrutability will probably increase by an even greater amount.

It's going to be interesting when the corporations, talking with other corporations, manifestly decide that they don't need human components anymore. All of that can happen without the pesky need for consciousness, too.

Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).

Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Google, as a wise man once said.

All large companies are sociopaths, but few tech companies treat their paying customers with the level of contempt that Google does.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...

> Things we believe you shouldn't focus on: As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time.

> Subdomains versus subdirectories: From a business point of view, do whatever makes sense for your business. For example, it might be easier to manage the site if it's segmented by subdirectories, but other times it might make sense to partition topics into subdomains, depending on your site's topic or industry.

Doesn't quite explicitly say it treats them the same, but it kinda implies it.

This might be useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/toxcancel (Redirects to xcancel.com (a mirror of x) when the browser is about to load an x.com page).

Thanks for the clarification, the title is still a whiney clickbait.

I really hope eu can extinguish Google before they extinguish all websites. Will be an exponential death of website very soon once they lose traffic.

Why is it a lot of work? Could you specify some off the more difficult effort? Wouldn’t LLMs help speed this up? This is the one area where I’d think Llms could really take Google down by empowering in house ad platforms.

We would like the wiki to be free of ads, but hosting costs at our scale are real. Since we don’t like ads either, we compromise like this: users can register for free and never see an ad (they are only served to anonymous visitors); they can also use an ad blocker and we won’t bug them about it.

I spend a lot of time wondering about the true role of search in people's lives in 2026. When I watch people use the Internet, it seems like most of them perform searches simply as fuzzy-matching navigation to the websites they use. Like the way many people use Spotlight to launch desktop apps.

I think this is because

(A) bookmarks lists are inconvenient - scrolling to find a bookmark is slower than typing "youtube" or (cringe) "bank of america" in the URL bar

(B) typing URLs directly requires precision of memory with TLDs being numerous and even things that were once predictable are now mere suggestions (e.g. is your city or town at cityofwhatever.com? city.org? city.gov? Could be anything!)

(C) related to (B) if you screw up a full URL you may well end up at a phishing site that looks like the site you wanted.

I really believe that 90% of Google and Bing searches today are probably for the names (or misspelled or partial names) of the top 100 websites.

If the dominant browsers weren't Google Chrome and Mobile Safari (who gets paid by Google for every search) browsers would build bookmarks for you of your frequently-used sites, and ordered by frequency of visits, present those for direct navigation when you type a word in the search bar, and not send any query to a search engine if you chose one of those. But all incentives point very strongly against doing that and toward sending you to a SERP with 13 ads and an "AI Overview" above the organic results.