Back in the day I used to do Mechanical Turk like work assessing search engine quality. There were very detailed guidelines about what made a search engine good, compiled into a like 250 page document Google had been curating and updating over the course of years.
One of the key concepts was the idea of a "vital" result for a user request. If a user had a specific request, the search engine had to deliver that content first. For example, simpson.com at the time was a malicious website. With this in mind, if the user searched for "simpson.com", the first result had to be simpson.com, even if the search engine is returning a malicious page. It's specifically what the user requested. We aren't supposed to question what the user wants. The results that followed after could provide suggestions of what else the user may be looking for, like the official Simpsons website.
I would love to see whatever shreds of this document is left at this point, and I'd love to know at what point the entire thing was thrown into the trash and rewritten. I assume somewhere around the year 2016 or 2020. I know this is nothing shocking to a lot of people, but it really does amaze me just how bad things have gotten. I've stuck to the major search engines because despite peoples bitching, for a long time they consistently outperformed the smaller competitors, but they are genuinely without hyperbole almost unusable now.
Example: I wanted to find the recent Tucker Carlson - Vladimir Putin interview. It's a newsworthy interview with a world leader and a current event. There is a very specific video I'm looking for, the published, official video of sitting down and asking questions.
Here is what google returns in a private window:
The very first piece of content - the "vital result" - is clickbait youtube cute twinkry from Time What are the keeraZIEST moments from the interview?!?
The rest of the results are a cascade of editorialized garbage, opinionated news articles reporting on the requested content. God forbid a careless user actually be exposed to a primary source.
The closest result to what I'm looking for is about over 10 pieces of content deep - the transcript of the interview from Russia's state website. Likely this is an oversight.
Here is Bing:
There's been some meme going around that "no really guys, Bing is actually kinda good now believe it or not".
This is even more nonsense than Google. The most prominently featured content is, of course, more editorialized bullshit with the interview itself nowhere to be found. But also half of the content is just completely irrelevant crap I didn't ask for. Why is the entire right half of the page a massive infobox about Tucker and his books and quotes? Why am I seeing something about Game of Thrones?
Brave:
You get the point. More useless crap. It gets half a point for its AI accidentally revealing that tuckercarlson.com is where the interview is located, but this doesn't count. The actual search results are all garbage. Thanks Brave for showing me all the latest reddit discussions
Yandex:
Was that really so fricking hard? Result #1 - the interview from Tucker Carlson. Past the interview are news articles and images - things of waning utility that other users may be interested in. But the vital result is at the top of the page. That's fricking it. This would have been the required order for the page on Google ten years ago.
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FRICK Pinterest
!codecels express your rage for the worst website ever to exist
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The fact that Google never blacklisted pinterest speaks to the deepest corruption imaginable happening in silicone Valley.
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They had an official extension that blocked google results and the photos all showed pintrest being blocked lmao.
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You can add
-site:Pinterest.com
to every search but that's a pain
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pintrest is the fricking bomb all my homies love pintrest
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Pinterest is great for letting you know that something existed at some point and that you might find it with a different query
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Subscribe to right-click
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Say what you want, but Pinterest makes a shit ton of money per user, more than Facebook.
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i feel like b-word please, and worst website would probably the darkweb recruitment site for al qaeda
@Nyasia love sucking peepees and its EVERYTHING
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None of the Al-Qaeda recruitment sites I use have Javascript, so they can't be the worst in the world.
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pinterest is like omega isis
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Pinterest and Quora are tumors on the entire web.
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i want to throttle quora with my bare hands
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Unpopular but I LOVE pinterest. They're so hyped on getting every click they can they opening host tons of homemade gun and drug stuff and don't even down rank it in search
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You wouldnt have a nad time if you had an account and used the app.
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Pinterestmisia is just thinly veiled misogyny
@JoyceCarolOates come educate these nerds
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I fricking hate Pinterest so much. I've been learning to draw lately and Pinterest has ruined searching for reference images.
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