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How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

danluu.com · 19,977 words · saved by 1 readers

Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool to download video from YouTube. More generally, most tech folks I'm connected to seem to think that Google search results are significantly worse than they were ten years ago (Mastodon poll, Twitter poll, Threads poll). However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that search results are still great. E.g., a bluesky thought leader who gets high engagement says: i think the rending of garments about how even google search is terrible now is pretty overblown1 I suspect what's going on here is that some people have gotten so used working around bad software that they don't even know they're doing it, reflexively doing the modern equivalent of hitting ctrl+s all t

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT In The birth & death of search engine optimization , Xe suggests Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool to download video from YouTube. More generally, most tech folks I'm connected to seem to think that Google search results a

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