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Let's talk about leaving Google Search behind, in the short and long term. Google has gotten worse. TO study He confirmed this earlier this year regarding product reviews, where low-quality search engine optimized (SEO) spam dominates search rankings. As a consumer, I've noticed how Google's engine has become a bit annoying, but I wasn't prepared for how poorly it handled questions about my kids' teeth.
My three year old son sucks his thumb. From his last visit to the doctor I remembered that this was fine at his age, but could become a problem if he continued long enough. I couldn't remember some details, so I checked with free search option number one. As an experiment, I decided to ask the very short and somewhat vague question: Is thumb sucking bad for your teeth?
I could have typed “American Association of Orthodontists” or “Mayo Clinic,” but I didn't because I wanted to see how Google would respond. And it came back with an avalanche of SEO-optimized pages from small dentists and dental groups. This is not “low-quality” spam, like when a website that has never used a product posts reviews in exchange for affiliate money. This advice was written by licensed medical professionals (or your office manager, or a tech-savvy niece, but you know, dentist-approved). But it's still spam. And while a dental group in Lawrenceville, GA might agree with the AAO, a link to their site is not a better answer to my query. Even the results that weren't ads still looked like ads.
Everyone's algorithm is different and YMMV. In my search, the American Association of Orthodontists ranked seventh overall, below a dentist with some pretty harsh advice about thumb sucking that the AAO contradicts. As a parent, this is simply not what I was looking for. As a writer and editor, for a couple of months I have realized that searching and researching is taking up more of my time. I think it's time to face the facts: Google Search sucks. I'm moving on.
(As I say this, I know it's going to be like when I left Spotify. Most of my listening happens on the TIDAL hi-fi, but I crawl back to the big green circle to listen to podcasts and the occasional playlist. Google Images , for example, are still better than the competition and I'm not close to giving up other Google features like Gmail or Drive).
In the search engine area, I've been testing Bing and also veered toward DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused setup loved by people like Joe Rogan. Most of the time, the searches are not noticeably different and if I listed the links in order, you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. And then, from time to time, Google just shits the bed, and that shit is made of poorly digested, SEO-optimized spam.
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