I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
What fight? Google is making money, and nearly everyone is playing Google’s game following their tune. Google is definitely not losing.
A lot of people dont remember pre-google these days.
Normal search engines worked, but Google was better results.
Now that every website is gaming SEO and the top half of search results is ads that pay to be first…
Google isn’t that much better. I went to DuckDuckGo recently. The only thing Google does better is local results. But that’s because Google always knows where I am and where I’ve been.
There’s no longer a reason to use Google as a search engine, except habit.
Pretty much same with chrome
The main thing that got me switching to Google back then wasn’t the better results, but their promise not to collect or use our data.
That all changed after 9/11, but by then Google had grown so huge it was hard to avoid them.
Even so, I still went back to Webcrawler and the others quite a lot and never really consistently used one search engine faithfully.
DDG uses Bing as the search API, and I don’t see any evidence that it doesn’t use SEO as well.
Just to be clear; “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is a technique marketers use to craft web pages in a way that tricks search engine crawlers into considering them more relevant. It is not something search engines themselves do, and in many cases they actively fight against it.
So, it’s not whether or not DuckDuckGo uses SEO, it’s whether or not they’re susceptible to it.
Coincidentally, I happen to have been reading into SEO more in depth this week. Specifically official SEO docs by google:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
To be clear, SEO isn’t about tricking search engines per se. First and foremost it’s about optimizing a given website so that the crawling and indexing of the website’s content is working well.
It’s just that various websites have tried various “tricks” over time to mislead the crawling, indexing and ultimately the search engine ranking, just so their website comes up higher and more often than it should based on its content’s quality and relevancy.
Tricks like:
- keyword stuffing
- hidden content just visible to crawlers
- …
Those docs linked above (that link is just part of much more docs) even mention many of those “tricks” and explicitely advise against them, as it will cause websites to be penalized in their ranking.
Well, at least that’s what the docs say. In the end it’s an “arms race” between search engines and trickery using websites.
To add to that, Google is the big one.
So everyone tries to get around googles SEO prevention measures.the little guys just have to do literally anything different
There’s no longer a reason to use Google as a search engine, except habit.
I need to rollback to Google from DDG because the latter seems to refuse to understand that I want to find specific words with “”
And DDG isn’t perfect either, I need to add Reddit as well more than I’d like to.
Google ignores “” too these days.
Really? I haven’t noticed that…
With the end result of enshittification, people will migrate if their experience is bad enough. Google wants to strike a balance between making as much money as humanly possible and making the search experience at least decent enough to retain the majority of their users.
I would venture a guess that most people aren’t even realizing that their results are crap. I can’t even see them realizing it until after, I don’t know, all of the products they found via Google search and purchased wound up being gimmicky crap like MyPillow? Even then, I would be really surprised if they figured out what was going on.
True, if you look at YouTube, it’s been getting worse and worse over time and yet people still go there, but that’s also due to there being not that many good alternatives that have a bunch of content. Google has a ton of other good alternatives to compete with, so they’re betting on the laziness factor and probably that people don’t know better.
There are literal careers dedicated to gaming search results. That’s bound to happen.
And careers dedicated to counter SEO. Fun huh.
My problem is replacing search terms with synonyms (which are often wrong for the context) and ignoring things like quotation marks or other search tools. It’s hard to exclude irrelevant results. Sometimes I’ll know an article’s exact title, search with and without quotes, and never find it.
I need a better programming specific search engine. DuckDuckGo seems like it’s gotten worse at code/project searches and will now just assume you misspelled some common word.
I tried Kagi last fall because everyone was raving about it.
Now I’m paying $5/month for search and couldn’t be happier 😅
What is Kati and is it actually good?
Edit:
Is it kagi?
Seems like something I’d be into but I’m also not a fan of my search results being logged against me.
First time I’ve heard of them. I like the concept but 5$ a month for only 300 search makes me think that you’d still need another search engine on the side, or pay for the more expensive plan.
The 300 searches goes pretty far because you usually get the correct result the first time.
Also you can just use hashbangs to search directly from a site like imdb, letterboxd, goodreads etc so those don’t count against the 300 either.
also not a fan of my search results being logged against me
What do you mean? That you have an account so your searches are “linked” to you?
Exactly
Well luckily for you, they don’t do that. It doesn’t maintain a search history at all which has its pros and cons. The only reason you have to login to use it is to check your payment level to determine your feature access. It is nice that login also allows you to use the same settings for multiple devices. One of those settings I really like is hiding results from certain websites (e.g. pinterest).
Sounds ideal, but there’s no way we can ever truly know, is there?
You can never truly know about almost any online service, you kinda just have to take their word for it, do some research, and pick the option that best matches both the performance and philosophy you’re looking for.
I think they mean the fact they count each search you do, and depending on your pricing plan, can run out of searches in a month…
I’m not worried about Kagi’s privacy, the only thing you need to give them is an email address (which is kind of a no-brainer if they need to contact you).
You can pay with Bitcoin if you want more privacy.
And they don’t even allow you to store your own search history, because they don’t want to save it anywhere.
“Save My Search History Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.”
Do you find the limited number of searches enough? I’d do it if it were unlimited for $5, but not going to pay $10 for a search engine.
It’s either money or your data. I prefer to pay with money. If enough people do, the price might lower (hopeium) or the competition might increase for the same service, creating better or cheaper services in the same space.
Exactly. If you’re not paying, you’re most likely the product being sold.
People always keep forgetting that Google (or Alphabet) is an ad company, that does tech stuff with its 20% time. Everything they do is geared towards delivering more ads more efficiently.
This is why I’ve paid for email for years to Fastmail referral link
Similarly I started paying Kagi for searches, mostly because their results are better than DDG, which I used for years.
And, like the people I know from infosec, my phone is from Apple. They’re the only company who makes you pay through the nose for the hardware and because of that specifically do everything they can not to know anything about you. (One of the reasons why Siri sucks so bad btw)
I do 20-30 searches a day at work, so I definitely need to upgrade (annually it’s around 100$ so not bad at all).
Their Universal Summarizer is awesome too
The summariser works on Youtube videos too btw…
You can just do
!sumand get a summary of what they’re saying in seconds. Changed my life.I thought the bang is only for the highest tier
Works fine for me on the starter tier, it used to behind the early access tier (Ultimate?)
Oh yeah, nice!
I thought I’d burn through them but I haven’t had an issue. I use DDG for low hanging fruit but I’m going to stop bothering.
I’m at 243 searches now and it resets in 8 days. Seems to be enough for me.
I do use bangs quite a bit, so if I need to find a movie I go
!imdb the matrixand if I’m looking for a book I can go!gr rando splicerwhich saves on search credits.Why do you call “!” a hashbang?
“#” is a hash
“!” is a bang
“#!” is a hashbang
Not enough coffee, edited =)
Where do you see that number? I’m trying to find mine
settings -> billing
I have made 1,617 searches since October
Depends. I use search engines a lot as a programmer. I have over 600 so far. But the results have been good. I’m willing to pay for that.
You may have changed my life with kagi. It is amazing so far at giving the results I want, and categorizing stuff like discussions so you don’t have to add “Reddit” at the end of every search to get decent results.
And you can easily block or boost sites in the search results: I’ve got all pinterest domains blocked, along with a bunch of “news” outlets that don’t actually produce anything good in the world.
Similarly I have stuff like reddit, hackernews etc boosted in the results if they match.
I did the free trial for a while and only used Kagi for a while, still going strong with the $5 300 searches per month tier. I don’t really need to search that much because the results are usually correct the first time :)
Yep. I’m 100% sold on it. Thank you very much kind human. It’s crazy how used to Google I had become. Not thinking about features which would be helpful like simply raising/lowering a sites visibility. It even has done well for me when it comes to local searches! Truly a game changer.
Phind.com is pretty interesting
I’ve been using bing chat as my search engine for work stuff. Usually gives me the vendor kb or blog I need.
It’s time for Google to die. They are a truly awful company now so it’s time to take her down to the shed like ol’ blockbuster
Before we had Google, we had Altavista and before that we had indexes like Yahoo. Maybe we should consider going back. With the help of AI (I know…) it seems feasible to keep up with the ever growing content.
Maybe we should consider going back.
You can’t really go back. Those old engines worked on more naive algorithms against a significantly smaller pool of websites.
The more modern iteration of Altavista/AOL/Yahoo has been the aggregation sites like Reddit, where people still post and interact with the site to establish relevancy. Even that’s been enshittified, but its a far better source than some basic web crawler that just scans website text and metadata for the word “Horse” and returns a big listical of results based on a hash weighted by number of link-backs.
That system was gamed decades ago and is almost trivial to undermine in the modern moment. Nevermind how hard you’d need to work to recreate the original baseline hash tables that these old engines built up over their own decades of operation.
Google’s relevance of search has gone extremely downhill in the last few years even before the surge of AI articles, so it’s no surprise the keyword-injected articles are all that’s winning now.
But holy shit does it piss me off how many of these first page results have literally incorrect information now too. Want to learn how to do something in software? See a release date? Find accurate information? Good fucking luck.
For all people complain about the decline in ad revenue, there’s still clearly a strong incentive to get click-bait responses.
I honestly wonder if the solution isn’t to fight the SEO wars forever, but to just cut this shit off at the root and screen out sites that host ads, period. Obviously, Google can’t limit its search by screening out folks that use AdSense because… that’s half their business model. But perhaps a search engine that does bias itself against sites that monetize click-throughs could dramatically improve results.
Yeah it’s pretty wild how bad search results have been lately. The unfettered proliferation of AI bullshit on the internet is gonna have some really goddamn irritating impacts on just about everything I think.
Arent they trying to make their search worse so you have to search multiple times, showing you more ads?
I would think they’d make more money by sending you to sites that use Google ads.
The ads on Google’s own pages are often fairly benign as far as internet ads go. I’ve certainly never had them tell me I’m the millionth visitor and try to reward me with the gift of an epileptic fit.
I’ve been trying DuckDuckGo recently and already started seeing some better results. I’m not ready to change my default search engine yet, but if it keeps up I could see that happening sooner than later.
I recommend reading the actual paper this article is about. DDG is actually by far the worst by their measures. Google is 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. That’s a huge difference.
I would recommend trying a SearXNG instance if you haven’t before. You can combine results from multiple sources. I use Google as my main source while also having access to the DDG-style !bangs.
My family was looking for a specific manual and couldn’t find it on Google, the only search engine they know about. It was one of the first results on DDG.
I’m using DDG for a while now and I’m happy with it overall.
Been using DDG as my default for about 4 years now. It’s actually just gotten better as Google has gotten worse. I used to use the bangs a lot to check Google from DDG, but do that less and less.
Same on the default search changing, I’m very much used to Google Search and it’s gonna take me a while before I switch. Though I’ve already managed to switch from Gmail and it’s kinda refreshing, so this will be just another step.
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I went with Proton Mail, one of the paid plans.
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one of my least favorite tech innovations lately is that they expect you to want to type in a full ass sentence instead of just ‘macbook display dimensions’
I’ve been thinking of switching, because Google sucks nowadays, though I’m not sure I really want to switch to another big corporation if I’m taking the effort of switching.
I tried assembler for an AVR with ChatGPT, the result was not working at all.
I’m really enjoying perplexity.ai most of the time you just get the answer you’re looking for.
First I tried duckduckgo, now I’m checking out kagi.
I would expect its only going to get worse as they try to suppress wages across the board in tech
Google search has,become so bad I couldn’t even get the number of my insurance company yesterday. There was nothing but spam on the first page. I am in the market for something new.
I’m curious what query you used.
I need the best telephone number for my insurance company
It looks like you need a phone! Here are our top advertisers of mobile phone cases!
Same. Though according to the article, Google is still better than competition, so yeah, not that many alternatives.
and the study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year and is performing better than other search engines. More broadly, numerous third parties have measured search engine results for other types of queries and found Google to be of significantly higher quality than the rest.
I’ve been noticing this the past 6 months or so. It’s not much different than duckduckgo now. And now I’m thinking I need to find more search engines since google is no longer the end all be all when I’m looking for something.
Yea
