When did it get this bad?

Bad? Google just proved that they can get you to stay on their search page (or come back to get a different answer) for way longer than you need… this is a WIN for them.

The enshittification of the internet + the greed inherent in these mega corps have caused websites to be designed to grab steal your attention for as long as possible. The longer they can keep you on their site, the more money/data/attention/time they can get out of you.

If search was designed to benefit the user, a typical visit would result in maybe 5-10 seconds of someone’s time to enter a search and click on the relevant result. You proved that when you compared it to DDG 😀

YtTags is another useful tool

You should ask it for medical advise

View source worked for me, but there’s a couple of tricks to it I think…maybe.

First I made sure I was on the channel’s main page and not one of the channel’s videos. Then I did right-click “view source”. The source is all smashed together (unformatted) of course. It’s annoying to search and read like that, so I copy-pasted the source into my favorite text editor and was able to find “channelid” it that way.

I had to go hunting for channel IDs when I ditched the yt frontend for RSS. There is still proper working RSS for each channel, even though for some reason they removed the actual RSS button probably a decade ago.

So I had to go to the channel page, inspect element, search for “rss”, and somewhere in the page source there would be the link (or I might have to refresh sometimes because it’s missing for whatever reason). One only needs the ID, as the rest of the link is the same, of course.

As we both found out, it’s not as trivial as it once may have been, before @s.

It got bad several years ago, which is when I permanently jumped ship to DDG. It’s nowhere near as good as Google used to be, but on the other hand, it’s also nowhere near as bad as Google is now.

The AI overview thing is completely full of shit 99% of the time, too.

It’s given me fake URLs, made up information about Google’s own services/support methods, fabricated tutorials for video games, and other insane shit.

Like when I asked if Tsushima was a real place, it just gave a paragraph about the game (Ghost of Tsushima) and said that the game featured real, modern restraunts from Japan such as Narisawa and fast food places like McDonald’s. The game takes place in or close to the feudal period.

Yeah i started to notice this as well. Also a ton of nsfw stuff nowadays seems to not show up anymore. Duckduckgo is even worse through. For what ever reason Yandex gets better results then google and duckduckgo. Not a fan of yandex in general though.

About the same time google started personalising search results.

Then ads in place of search results

Then Seo spam to get top results of those keyword searches.

I’m with you but I wouldn’t trust search results that point me to a 3rd party tool to do whatever I need to do. Unless the link in question is actually well known and I’ve just been living under a rock, then don’t mind me

I think it’s most evident when you do something like search “(venue name) Events”

Where you would normally get the venues events page as a top hit, Google tries to get you to get that info without ever visiting their page via a card.

I don’t know how much of it is specifically Google making their search engine worse vs the web being flooded with AI generated SEO trash that’s intended to keep you on the page for a few minutes when all you need is a simple one word or one sentence answer.

It’s definitely some mix of both though because I found getting concrete answers a lot simpler a decade or two ago just by using quotes around key phrases in conjunction with what seemed to be actual operator keywords like “OR”. I personally don’t think any of that behaves the same way these days, but I have no concrete proof of this so maybe I’m just imagining things.

Either way, I’m slowly coming to terms with the web portion of the internet being a lost cause as AI, bots, and bad actors infiltrate and abuse more and more of it.

I had to go hunting for channel IDs when I ditched the yt frontend for RSS. There is still proper working RSS for each channel, even though for some reason they removed the actual RSS button probably a decade ago.

So I had to go to the channel page, inspect element, search for “rss”, and somewhere in the page source there would be the link (or I might have to refresh sometimes because it’s missing for whatever reason). One only needs the ID, as the rest of the link is the same, of course.

As we both found out, it’s not as trivial as it once may have been, before @s.

My issue is that, every time I try to use DDG or something else, I can’t find the answers I’m looking for almost without exception, so I end up going back to a google search, where I usually do find what I’m seeking. Are there ANY viable alternatives?

Wait until they put ads into the AI search results.