I’d recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I’d recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn’t hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.
Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.
FWIW DuckDuckGo sources the traditional links / results from Bing. Their Instant Answers info does come directly from other sources, e.g. Wikipedia.
Source: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
Good to know, thanks. I’d heard that DDG sources its results from other engines, though I thought they were ramping up their own index. Honestly, I haven’t paid close enough attention to it all. Nor have I tried Bing given that DDG has generally been good enough for me to not bother looking elsewhere.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
You’re fooling yourself if you think Bing is any different, or that ChatGPT won’t become the same thing. It’s destiny is to be a smarter version of Alexa, only users will falsely assume neutrality it doesn’t possess.
The only thing the others have over Google is they’re not the primary focus of SEO, but that will change. SEO has devoured the corpse of Google search and waiting to determine what prey it should focus on next.
One thing with an AI-based search engines is that they might have better luck not getting influenced by SEO techniques. Like I can pretty reliably look at a website and determine if it’s useful or just got to the top by gaming the search engine. It just takes time, and I’m sure some tools could help even more with that
100% Google has been the best place to put effort it. If they slide down the popularity ladder then the next will become the zone of battle. I’m firmly of the belief that all options are temporary and on an eventual course of becoming bad, some faster than others. It’s a case of being able to just adapt and move on. Be it google, reddit, netflix, whatever.
Time for a federated search engine?
Stop. Don’t make federated the next crypto/blockchain
It was mostly in jest. But some sort of community run search engine could be interesting.
Startpage or searxng are better
Good for privacy, but there’s definitely features (and processing power) that don’t exist there.
I’ve been using Startpage for a few weeks now and honestly it doesn’t bug me waiting an extra 3-5 seconds for my results page when it’s not ad-fueled garbage.
Going to do a run with duckduckgo in my browser. Probably about time I move stuff away from Google anyways.
Something to keep in mind, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, and want to give Google a try after DDG: you add “!g” to the search and DDG wil redirect you to a Google results page.
Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.
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I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service.
It’s gotten a lot better recently, though sometimes I do still have to switch to Google to find stuff. I don’t care that much about my search engine privacy, so I mainly use this because Microsoft Rewards nets me giftcards and such just from searching.
But privacy-conscious people should stay the hell away.
Ive had some success using phind but I’m pretty sure this is just another way of using chat GPT without an account.
Either way, before the migration I found Google useless for anything but searching for stuff on Reddit, or answering questions about video games.
Good luck going to Google these days without already knowing the answer to your question.
DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
- https://www.ecosia.org/ - search with praxis, kind of mixed results but non tracking and they do good things
- https://www.perplexity.ai/ - longform answers by ai with citations plus search
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ - anti corpo search
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/ - STEM
- https://www.phind.com/ - programming
- https://knaben.eu/ - torrents
- https://annas-archive.org/ - books
ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269
Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to sift through the SEO hellscape
Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.
Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.
Fuck.
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As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.
It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.
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https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png
I honestly couldn’t be assed to Photoshop. This only happens when I’m logged into my Google account. Incognito mode has regular results.
Are the first two after the Reddit link unmarked sponsored results?
Yup, it’s all unmarked.
“it works on my machine”
Maybe OP’s “search results” were the ads at the top of the google results
It also works on mine.
I just tried searching the same thing and it works for me
Same here - only Reddit results.
I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my “keyword picking ability”… now going back to Google feels unreal
Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do
!mcwiki diamondto search the minecraft wiki for “diamonds”I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse
My problem with ddg is that I can’t refine my search by excluding keywords, only by adding more. For example, it’s frustrating if I’m looking to buy a product locally and half the page is Amazon results.
If I add
-amazonto the query on ddg I don’t get any Amazon results. Is this not the case for you?It is not. It works fine for google, but not for DDG.
That is weird. I wonder why we are seeing so different behavior from ddg.
You can do that on ddg. See this link: http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax
When using Google to search the internet, one needs to select
tools>verbatimfor the search operators to work as expected. Even for simple things like double quotes.Doesn’t work but it does change the results??? https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png
Just tried it and it still works perfectly fine.
Me too. I got all reddit links when I did the same search. Not sure what’s happening for OP. I also did it in the Google app om android.
I can’t reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode
Can’t reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)
For me it is still working. But ig it will go all downhill rather quickly.
That’s not that bad… Way worse is that Google will push your site to the 10th-or-so page abyss for minor problems yet they keep on showing more and more spammy sites (the ones which contain random sentences with your search term mysteriously embedded in the middle of them, without any kind of relevance, and with painfully obviously randomly generated domains… I still don’t understand how do they manage to put the term you’re searching right now into the search results.)
That is fake
It’s not fake. You can look at my other screenshots. It’s just not happening to you.
I always have used inurl: instead to great effect. For instance if I wanted just the technology subreddit it would be inurl:reddit.com/r/technology
Bug or most likely faked. I’m selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.
Tech hate, so hot right now.
What do I need to do to prove it’s not fake? Record the screen from another phone?
For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.
I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.
Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.
