Did you notice that the world's most popular search engine has been almost entirely a facade for over 5 years now?
Not just a 'left leaning' or 'ivermectin censoring' engine, but an engine that is almost entirely an illusion.
The publicly accessible version of Google Search now has less than one-hundred-thousandth of the web searching ability it had in 2005.
Did you even notice?
Did you notice that nearly every other search engine (DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo... even Russia's Yandex) is a similarly fake search engine?
Want more details?
Here's a post and a video from a couple of noticers.
I call BS on this. I regularly use Yandex to search for content on this board and I am never disappointed. It works better than the search bar on this site.
And I know the content here is generated by real people and new content is added everyday, and new content keeps showing up.
So whats the problem with the "dead internet theory"? Its like flat earth theory. Takes a legitimate real problem, in this case search engines censoring pages + reduced quality over last few years as the "CIA servers" started getting pulled out, and use unrelated superficial issue (Search engines showing hugely large number of results when the actual results are much smaller) and put together to make us believe something that can be disproven just by observation.
And the most spectacular (but superficial) part of this theory? The fact that Google (and I assume other search engines) display millions of pages as being available, but once you start clicking it much smaller number of pages.
Infact Google fixed this problem, Bing still has it, but when you search something like "Trump" you can go up to 600 pages. It might not be literally every single page on the earth, but definitely the pages worth indexing (of course after eliminating everything they censor, which they do - but is not the point of this theory).
So, sorry. to burst your bubble, but dead internet theory is not real.
Yandex produces about 250 results for the same test query (climate change) and nearly all from the officially sanctioned "trusted" sources, and sources that don't question the official climate change narrative.
With a real search engine, there would be millions (if not billions) of results for 'climate change'.
Yandex also hit me with a Captcha for the 'suspicious activity' of viewing results beyond the first 100 😄
Seems like that is more about censoring than searching ability. I can find nearly anything with google, just have to be very specific with search terms and use key words specific to what a person is trying to find. If google is being a real censoring snot I will try other search engines. Brave works most of the time in those situations.
OP's five orders of magnitude seems about right. Archie and Veronica (search tools) were supposed to provide everything everywhere, and Google started with that approach and over time realized that its algorithmic results were not hurt by indexing everything and selecting from the index (total resources are indeed a limit but not that much of one), and over more time all its woke filters got worked into that algorithm. Getting 100-300 max results on any item is insanely wrong and not search. One would think the market would intervene ....
Pretty much, yea. If no prior knowledge then start with a generic result and start reading, pick out words or phrases that go in the direction you want and keep refining from there. It takes time. But yea, we shouldn't have to do it that way.
Actually, it's worse than that.
You can know that the page exists and have the exact text on the page in your query and Yandex can (and frequently will) still disallow it from showing up in your search results.
And it's not a minor censorship thing; all of these these engines that we're led to believe are competing against each other to be the most capable and most popular are simultaneously blocking off the vast majority of the Internet.
Your searches are being performed on a tiny pocket of the Internet that someone has deemed permissible.
That's not what worries me most though.
What worries me most is that they predicted that the vast majority of the public wouldn't even notice, and they were apparently right.
I've been using Yandex exclusively for years and there's a world of difference between it and DDG or what GOOG was about the last time I used it which was probably around 6 years ago.
But it very rapid is becoming real though.
Between new legislation and governmental bodies controlling Big Tech (See OFCOM and UK's OSA as an example, Brazil's attempts against X too.), ISPs and service providers colluding to block independent content (See Kiwifarms' very long history of fighting to stay alive, especially during #DropKiwiFarms), and the ever increasing bot and shill activity online to manufacture consensus on literaly anything, it's not a fallacious argument to argue D.I.T is at least happening right now.
I would have agreed in 2020, but if we are looking at the momentum of things, if anyting Internet is becoming more alive by the day.
Yeah, people who think the internet is dead just don't have access to data brokers and private p2p forums. For all the low effort peeps who want an easy fix just try Luxxle.com. It is much better than most of the other ones except for maybe yandex.com But it is better than almost every other general search engine for political stuff and medical/health research. Try https://luxxle.com/luxsearch?q=climate%20change
Try all your favorite topics. It doesn't disappoint.
Now what about all the people who want to actually be high effort? They should start with the public facing dark web. Want to go deeper? Start actually spending money/proving yourself to get access. All the best stuff has been scrubbed from the free archive sites.
For all the super techies/programmers hers is a reminder: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+search+appliance&_sacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1311&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw=google+appliance&_osacat=0
You guys know what to do now
I am glad this still exists even with all the efforts to centralize all forum sites. Some of them probably disallow SE indexing for a reason.
Yandex is good.