I would to present an example of just how unusable and unuseful search engines have become.

I have used duckduckgo for "big web" searching for close to a decade at this point. Until recently, it has served me well, especially for technical topics and the !bang syntax is something I still find extremely usefull and convenient. unfortunately, the "advanced" syntax has always been close to useless but it's historically been easy to go without those more powerful faculties for most of my actiities.

However...

Over the past 1-2 years the ddg search engine ha slowly become increasingly useless and frustratingly unhelpful. the ddg engine is constantly trying to guess what it is I am trying to find, rather than simply using the query that I provided. I'm not a moron or somebody's tech-averse grandma, I've been using the www and mastering search engine eccentricities to find stuff online for almost 3 decades; I do not need the assistance of a poorly engineered mechanical "helper" to navigate the internet.

I recently decided to preserve some burdock (look it up) before the frost kills it all til spring. The most common part of burdock for eating is the root, but the soil around here is hard clay and large rocks and old bricks so I generally only use the above-ground bits (stems and stalks and young leaves).

So, I searched "pickled burdock stems" on ddg, which helpfully (note the sarcasm) includes results for "burdock root recipe". this makes the results useless since root recipes are much more common.

When we use the suggested advanced syntax we get "'pickled' burdock 'stems'" (note the nested single-quotes) it makes the search results even less relevant since every instance of the words "pickled" and "stems" in any blog or article about burdock, regardless of context, is indexed. the linguistic context is completely discarded and you end up with a list of unrelated tokens being used as the search query. you get texts that are about burdock and includes the words "pickled" and "stems", rather than -- adjective (pickled) subject (burdock stems) --

i am not expecting a super advanced language parser here, the mechanism doesn't need to "understand" any of this, but the structural form of the querying terms conveys, in a mechanistic way, the things to be searched for. This was previously available across all the search engines until relatively recently.

i believe that this is a deliberate change, to make it more likely for a user to end up at a particular destination that has been selected for. Not a singular, specific website, but a general category of websites that have been engineered to capture as many "visitations" as possible from as many different queries as possible.

that is to say, "how can we ensure that our cntent shows up in as many different searches as possible,without regard for how relevant the content actually is to the current query?".

Yes, even DDG, nominal champions of user privacy, are involved in this scheme. If we are charitable and say they aren't knowingly involved, they use an outside, commercial search engine to gather their results (I believe it's currently Bing) and the outside engine is without a doubt participating in the seo bait-and-switch.

From Nowhere, With Love

sourdog