[photochemsyn]

I find that Google search results are still the best of any search engine for specific computer science and other specific tech-related topics, as long as you construct a fairly complex search string. However, for general information on things like world events, local news, national politics, etc. it's become little more than a mirror for corporate and state propaganda outlets. This is likely due to those very ML pipelines mentioned above:

Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality)...

This represents a pretty severe narrowing of results on information and opinions - possibly the worst results are on Youtube searches for newsworthy events. It'd be very interesting to see what kind of content a pure PageRank algorithm-based search engine would generate today, and I'd be very interested in using such a search engine. Now, would it be overrun by SEO? I don't know, but it'd be worth finding out.

I kind of wonder if Google Scholar is purely PageRank or citation-count based, it still gives very useful results with relatively simple query strings.

[peoplefromibiza]

> I find that Google search results are still the best of any search engine for specific computer science and other specific tech-related topics

even without Google account?

This is my Google experience from my temporary workplace in Barcelona

https://i.imgur.com/X2Avw2v.png

Then I click on "I agree" and whatever thing I search I receive Spanish results because I am in Spain.

Not my idea of "the best of any search engine", but ok...

[photochemsyn]

I never log in, I find the key to better results is to keep adding terms to the query, and force the 'verbatim' option under tools. Restriction to specific domains (.edu etc.) with site: helps a lot, and the not option is sometimes helpful (-this -that).

Youtube search is awful. I once went through news queries on Google searches of Youtube (site:youtube.com) looking for popular independent media outlets (BreakingPoints for example) by -MSNBC, -FOX, -CNBC etc., and ended up with a string about 25 queries long, and those shows are just banned. They were feeding me unpopular corporate media shows with hardly any views or subscribers at that point, but zero access to independent media. Full-on propaganda manipulation.