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.
There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you’d see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they’re still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)
It’d be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the “top” results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).
Ypu might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
I JUST started using SearXNG and have been also googling the same terms to see how they compare.
So far (less than a week), SearXNG has had what i was looking for in the first 5 links every time. Googled result was either below the scroll or I gave up. Maybe only a couple dozen tests, but it wasn’t even close.
I think Hotbot did that back in the 90’s, and it’s relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com
Huh, I might need to restore my bookmarks backup from IE5.
What up, Lycos?
Magellan, looking good.
What about Jeeves? Did anyone ask Jeeves?
I’ll Infoseek an answer on that.
You dare question the majesty of AltaVista?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re right. I think before that was metasearch.com. It was basically a top frame that you entered the search in with a row of icons, and the bottom frame would render the search results from whichever sites you chose. I’m pretty sure it removed all the extra elements, too, so it was actually pretty decent.
Wow, I miss Dogpile! It was my go-to search engine in grad school (along with Altavista and Ask)
Dogpile is still around, and it’s still a meta search engine.
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.
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.
I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
For what it’s worth, Bing is similarly full of ads, but with a more cluttered page design and a lot of video previews. Often times I find its suggestions for related searches get in the way of actually reading the search results for the current search…
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.
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.
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.
Brave Search is basically DuckDuckGo but with an independent index. unfortunately it doesn’t support images yet so it redirects you when you click on “images”
I love brave search. I think it’s way better than DDG. and that’s not even considering their summarizer feature. it’s basically autotldr for your search
Same, I love it too. The UI is great, it’s fast, and the discussions tab is nice. I get pretty high quality results too.
I can’t believe I forgot the discussions tab! that is a super awesome feature. especially now since it works on all sorts of forum sites, not just reddit, since that’s gone to shit
Thanks. Never heard of that before. This is awesome.
Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.
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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
Wow! This is the first time I’ve heard about Knaben Database, but it looks handy. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.
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.
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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“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 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.
You can do that on ddg. See this link: http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax
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.
I just tried searching the same thing and it works for me
Same here - only Reddit results.
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.
You can still.
Under the Tools dropdown you can change it from “All Results” to “Verbatim”.
Try this: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=tacos site:reddit.com
So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff
Wow, that’s really strange. They aren’t marked as ads either…
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
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.)
@rosenjcb I gave up on Google search a few months ago. It got to a point where it would consistently show me nonsense that was written to farm ad revenue. DuckDuckGo has been better for me (once you disable the ability to show ads in the search results), but I still get occurrences of it showing me nonsense. Like, I tried looking up information on the Super Smash Bros Brawl mod Project+, and it kept showing me information on some certification.
Still works fine for me.
Works fine for me too. Used an iPhone/safari
Weird. I wonder if it’s device specific.
do you have a nonstandard keyboard/language setup? i wonder if that’s not the basic latin colon character (unicode 003A) or something like that. try copy/pasting this directly: site:reddit.com
Not a keyboard issue. But if I look up
beans site:reddit.comI get only reddit results. I wonder why 🤔😂
Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷♂️
Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic – what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?
I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.
That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.
Would you say that duckduckgo’s search algorithm has gotten better, or that you have gotten better at using it?
Google’s algorithm works better at finding really weird things deep in the bowels of the web (for example: obscure programming questions around GPU shaders in a specific framework or graphics pipeline) and when searching for local things if outside the US (because Google has the notion of Region when returning search results, so for example here in Portugal if I search in portuguese for a store to buy something I don’t get results from Brasil) whilst duckduckgo works better for everything else.
Personally I default to duckduckgo and only use Google when duckduckgo isn’t returning good enough results, which is surprisingly unusual.
Startpage, Qwant, Swisscow, SearX
If these don’t work for you, try duckduckgo but I don’t recommend it as its made and based in the US.
Any app thats developed and hoated in US is a serious threat. Use any app which are developed and hosted in the EU .
brave, it is a separate database then Google and they have a discussion sub search. Qwant is a French based search that does not track you. also good results and based in the eu. metagear is a meta seaech engine that pulls results from yahoo Bing and goggle.
I hope you are asking that rhetorically.
But if the question is serious, is because very many people grew up with google and got take good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.
I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it’s really difficult to complete jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.
If anything is at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.
I don’t use anything that’s made or based on the US. Serious redflag!
Eh. I guess I understand some suspicion, but for better or worse a very large portion of the internet is US-centric. It’s pretty difficult to use any major internet content and avoid US based stuff entirely.
Also from what I’ve seen, while these companies may be US-based they 100% have their own profits prioritized over any national interests. I’d be surprised to learn of any kind of overt nationalism biased towards the US from Google, for instance.
“americabad”
It still returns better results for many queries than the alternatives. My ability to weigh usefulness against ideological concerns is pretty limited at times, so I’ll use which search engine gives me the best results.
I stopped using google as my main search engine about 4 months ago. Duckduckgo.com is comparable in most ways, except things like maps are a bit less visually enjoyable to use.
why did they even start
