What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
Don’t even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect my search queries.
Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.
Yep, Google decided it was too complicated and removed it all. Dont know how it was too complicated, people just wouldn’t use it if they didn’t know about it. They felt “natural language” would be more useful. Bullshit, I search for “foo and bar” it’ll return me results for foo and ignore the rest
That’s not why they ignore them. They ignore them because it is profitable.
So google has reverted to late 90s search behavior
WDYM? Quotes work for me. Can you give an example that is broken?
This still works if you use double quotes!
Yeah I really miss those days of logical operands. Back in the Alta Vista days I could do Boolean searches, but yeah that’s been replaced with speech recognition which doesn’t work as well. To this day I still like the Boolean search better. Newer does not always mean better. Most of the time it only means dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
Operands still work. You may be confused because the se will offer you results without them if your operands produced nothing.
I don’t know what is the best but the clearest thing to me is that each day Google is getting worse…
Definitely. So many searches lately will return results that only partially match the search terms. What’s even the point of searching if you’re just going to show a bunch of unrelated results?
Even exact matches with quotes don’t seem to be as useful these days. Google tries to be helpful by matching on what it thinks I want instead of what I actually want. That plus the ads and all the other junk
Plus, I used to set my new tab page to Google, but God, it’s so bad. There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something (not that I’m against any of that) I just want to get some work done and not be distracted by Google desperately clinging to power.
But Drive is nice, I like that.
There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something
You owe me a new shirt for the coffee stains I just spat all over mine
Sure, what shirt do you want?
I’m using Chrome and added an extension called Empty New Tab Page that makes Chrome open to a blank page. I had to do that because the Google home page got to be so annoying. Also removing the need to fetch content makes the browser and new tabs open faster.
Yes, I have done this on one of my computers and it’s working great. I need to bring the rest up to speed.
Actually, what I really need is to find a new browser for web dev. Chrome’s dark theme sucks ass.
But theyre an icon in the librarian community!
They’re not trying to be helpful, they’re trying to guide you towards a product or towards content they control that they think you will be more engaged with. They also give results that will lead to more searches, and therefore more ad exposure for their business.
I hate that so much
Sorry, looks like you searched for stuff that isn’t really popular. How about these unrelated Facebook and Pintrest links instead?
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of your doing your search: they got paid for the results that they delivered, and for the ad traffic of you having received it! Don’t you see why this is best for
themyou? /s
I actually prefer Google for shopping. Just turn off your adblocker, search for a particular item you want to buy and bam your first 3 to 4 pages are retailers pushing the product with their prices listed (with a touch of scam websites that I presume pay for advertising). Anything else I add ‘Reddit’ or just watch a few YouTube videos depending on what kind of answers I’m looking for
For my job and work. I use Kagi. Its not free, but the search returns are very good, you can filter domains out from your returns, it supports custom “bangs” ala duck duck go and theres no tracking of queries. There are also specific filters for things like programming, or recipes for cooking etc. Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer. They are trying to establish a sustainable model to run on that allows for privacy.
I find it quite refreshing. It isnt free and I generally hate subscription stuff, but this is easily one I dont mind as it pays dividends often when searching for work.
Wow. I don’t mind paying for stuff if it’s good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.
I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.
For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!
It’s really just too expensive.
At $10 it’s 1000 unique searches. I search a ton and have it on my phone etc. haven’t exceeded the limit. I am at 600 searches right now, with a renewal due on the 24th.
They are writing a search engine from scratch. They don’t just randomize bing or google searches. So I think you may be underestimating the operating and especially development costs, probably hosting costs too.
But to each his own. Also those streaming services you mention. They don’t really turn a profit, and definitely don’t on subscriptions.
1000 is more reasonable but it’s still only 33 per day. I’ve done 52 searches today. $10 is still way too much.
How much better would a search engine have to be to make it worth the cost of a streaming service? For me, quite a lot…
But yeah I don’t mean to say your choice to pay for it isn’t valid. As you say, to each their own.
But the problem is that this is what it costs for a search that doesn’t sell your data or advertise to you. Search is expensive.
Fortunately you do get into the habit of just searching sites directly, like wikipedia, MDN, archwiki, etc., rather than using up your general purpose searches.
It’s this, or sell your data to Google for free searches.
And maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just not sustainable for searched to be paid, but Kagi is really transparent about their pricing. It’s just expensive unless it’s subsidized by ads or data collection.
Pay for a search engine so you can get in the habit of not using it? They’ve really got you lol
I pay them to not get ads and not sell my data (and for higher quality searches than DDG) – you know how they say if you’re not paying, you’re the product?
Given that search actually costs X, once you’re cogniziant of it, you have to decide whether or not you want to pay X for a search, or find alternatives.
I will personally always be against any paywalls on information but to each their own I guess.
It’s not a paywall on information. What you’re paying for is a better search engine and better privacy. People have to be paid to provide you with that and, if you don’t want to pay them with cash, you can go and pay another search engine with your time and data.
Not sure where you are, but there’s practically no place in the US you get a lunch for that. In flat terms it’s quite cheep. It’s only expensive relative to free.
And when you think about it, your search service really is your internet. It shapes your whole internet experience. If that’s not worth $5/month to make sure it’s good and not polluted with ads, I don’t know what to tell you.
$5 is fine. 300 seems low. I wonder how many searches I actually do in a month.
I wasn’t sure ethor. My first month (last month), I used just over 180. This month might break 200, I have 5 days left. So I’m good.
I felt similarly about this, but upon reflecting, if the searches actually worked and didn’t ‘come in groups of 5’ due to SEO trash, it probably works out?
Haven’t tried it myself yet, but I have been finding myself in increasing frustration with Google and degenerate article sausage factories…
Problem is, 300 searches is 10 per day. I’ve done 52 today. To cover that I’d be paying $25 per month.
I you could have Spotify and Netflix for that.
If I’d paid their $5 rate and done 52 searches every day they’d have billed me $63 in overage charges.
Their pricing model seems insane to me.
Having to pay for a limited number of searches really takes away a lot of freedom. I would really have to think about my search query and be upset if it didn’t give me the results I was looking for. I would need unlimited searches just for my peace of mind. And I’m definitely not paying more then a couple of dollars for it. Might sound cheap but I really really hate subscription services.
They have quota controls as well. A soft limit that will send you alerts when you hit them and you pay 1.5 cents per search and a hard limit that will stop searches from being run.
Personally I went to a tier that I dont exceed (10/month). I ahve considered going to the annual subscription which is also unlimited but the same as the 25/month, just discounted a bit. I could probably write that one off for work too, definately could with taxes.
I like the idea of paying for internet services, but $5 a month is way too expensive for me.
I wouldn’t mind $5 if that tier didn’t also cap the number of searches to 250. I’d burn through that super quick, and $25 for unlimited is way too much IMO.
The tiers have changed over time. Originally $10 was 700, not its 1000.
I use search A LOT for work. I also have it on my phones etc because I dont feel like swapping engines all that often.
I find it giving me more acurate results quicker, without ads.
The only other subscription services I use are mostly Netflix for kids and family. I avoid them at most costs. But this one allows me to do my job a bit more efficiently and its privacy focused.
Its up with a get what you pay for thing.
Where do you think is a reasonable price? Search is something most folks use daily, multiple times per day. If the quality of results is good, that seems like a small price to pay. Netflix is pushing 20 a month, and many other streaming services are in the 10—15 range.
I think a dollar would be ok.
Seconding Kagi. I like the ability to pin/raise/lower domains as well as just block them. I tend to surface websites like the NHS.
My God, 5$ for unlimited searches would have been expensive, but you only get 300! This thing would have to literally read my mind, and even then I don’t think it would be worth it
Hey, thanks for the recommendation. I had no idea a service like this existed. I’ve been frustrated with all of the search engines for years now. I just signed up. Hopefully it turns out to be rad.
I’m also a kagi user and share the same feelings about it. Definitely worth it. Specially since I know my search data is not used to bias search results or sell ads on the search results.
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
Over all bing search it self isn’t bad.
Dunno why you’re getting down voted. It’s literally a search engine that can read all the bullshit faster than you, so that you don’t have to.
If it isn’t open / free / private there is a % of the community that will not even try it.
Just like on Reddit lots of negative energy in some subs.
Hardly saying bing is amazing only that lately I have been drawn to trying it more since the chat based search that allows follow ups in natural language.
Google bards equivalent is only available in the US and just this last week the UK so I can’t try it out.
However over all I agree that more and more google search results have more adds and the good results pushed further and further down.
I don’t like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
Same here. It’s like going to the library and just asking a question of the librarian.
Have it compile a list of sources it’s already sourced from, and keep searching for any new sources it can add. Have it list its expectations for what an expert should know about a particular subject, then have it learn about each of those points, and finally present as if it is an expert there to assist you.
I downvoted because I have literally no idea what that guy is talking about.
Bing has never been a good search engine. The results are always so terrible, plus you have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baity crap they put everywhere.
I do like Bing for porn tho…
the clickbait alone is enough to turn me away from Bing and Edge
cool that people don’t mind it but it shouldn’t be controversial to dislike Bing for bad UX
Have you tried using the Chat feature (GPT-4) to do searching? I just tried it, and it surprisingly works really well for some inquiries.
Like, use their chat AI, but as a natural language search engine. It’s integrated to Bing’s index so it can peruse it itself, so you don’t have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baits crap they put everywhere.
You can’t use it on mobile without downloading the app and granting it god knows what permissions. Hell nah…
Notice that they said chat. It this new thing where a language model (GPT) formulates the search queries and summarizes them to provide an answer.
I recently switched to Bing after years of disappointment from Google and months of disappointment from DDG. Bing is pretty disappointing too, but less so, so far. I tried to use the chat feature a couple of days ago, but it said I have to download the app. Nah… fuck these tech companies and their apps.
The “preview” for the chat feature requires the app or edge on desktop currently but I do find myself turning to it every time I get frustrated with a google search these days.
Less disappointing is probably the best discrimination as you said.
I use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.
duckduckgo.com only had 2 ads that were clearly identified when I just tried it. no idea how manipulated the rest of it is.
Duck Duck Go search results are a little lacking, though, like it’s completely missing some possibilities. Looking up tech stuff for a Linux issue I’m having, Duck will miss a site that Google finds - and even if I enter the exact text of the site, it’s completely absent from Duck.
I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I’m a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.
i gotta use duck duck go on my work laptop. no sugarcoat its dogshit google is still better even tho google is getting worse
Use a decentralized SearXNG instance and have it query every search engine that exists on the internet, or host your own of you’re really actually worried about privacy, and never look back.
I just tried two of the instances listed with a search for “how to filter mineral spirits”, and they both gave me errors. Both Google and DDG gave me an answer. Is there some trick I’m missing here?
The instances get overloaded quickly and the IPs blocked by google/Microsoft/etc… Better off self-hosting.
+1 for SearXNG. I’ve personally found mostly better results, for my use cases, than Google or duckduckgo, although I keep DDG as a backup.
SearXNG is great.
I think the features I’m missing are easily adding more engines (haven’t looked much into it), and automatically blacklisting domains from coming up in searches.
+1 for SearXNG… I run my own instance in docker, and host it through a cloud flare tunnel. I set all my “web browser bars” on all my devices to auto use its address, so I don’t even have to think about it, and all my searches are auto routed through my instance. It’s Great!
Topics like this remind me of the pre-Google era. If Google can’t see the damage they’ve done, they deserve to vanish like the ones they’ve vanished in the early years.
I’m using Kagi, which aggregates search results from several search engines (including their own), but without the ads, with less crap and with features like searching for literal strings and promoting/demoting certain websites. It’s a paid service, though, but I like it enough that I’m ok with that.
I’ve been using https://www.ecosia.org/ because they plow some of their profits into planting trees. They use bing results and I generally find what I need quickly.
Here’s my experience with some search engines:
A Tier – Gives me the closest results.
- Google: A classic and oftentimes, it gets what I want. A lot of the links are redirects which is annoying.
- Kagi: It’s paid but it has a lot of features like “lenses” and “quick answer”. The results are pretty good. It gives me good articles and PDFs instead of a blogspot post.
- You.com: The WORST UI EVER but the results are surprisingly decent. It’s pretty close to Kagi. It might actually be the same thing. It also has an AI chatbot but I don’t think it’s as good as Bing’s or OpenAI’s.
B Tier – Gives me decent results.
- Startpage:
It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google.EDIT: Search results are still closer to Google but they “incorporate Microsoft Bing results”. From my experience, it filters out some of Google results that were very useful for me. Their widgets (particularly the Wikipedia one) sometimes displays irrelavant information. - DuckDuckGo: Results are worse than Google. One time a referral link came up in one of my searches.
- Bing: There’s no dark mode. The AI chat tool is pretty nice and is comparable to the OpenAI one (significantly better than Google’s Bard). Search results are worse than Google.
- Yandex: Search results are similar to DuckDuckGo.
- Ecosia: Search results are similar to the ones above.
C Tier – Gives me poor results.
- Brave: Search results feel so inconsistent and out of place. Maybe worse than the ones above.
- Mojeek: Independent search engine. Results aren’t very good.
Open Source Front Ends - Results quality varies.
- SearXNG: It depends on which instance you’re using. Sometimes search results error out due to rate limiting but you still get results anyway. It has a lot of options and configs so it fits to your liking so you can choose which search engines you want to include.
- LibreX: Actually one of my favorites since I’ve never encountered errors due to rate limiting but using it to search for images is terribly slow. It has a cool feature where you can add front ends like Libreddit and Wikiless. It also has a built-in torrent search engine.
- Whoogle: The UI isn’t very good and it performs poorly on most public instances. A smaller or private instance might be worth looking into. It uses Google search results.
F Tier – It sucks.
- Qwant: Not available in my country.
If anyone knows of any other search engine not in this list, let me know so I can try it out.
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Ggddg
I use Swisscows and Metager, and usually find what I need, if I don’t I retry the query with Startpage.
For a brief moment in time search engines were perfected. Then they veered off course. All of them did. Why though.
Remember when you could list vaguely some words related an obscure movie to Google. Then it would tell you the movie you’re thinking of. That’s been nerfed.
Tangentially related. What’s the deal with search engines of online stores. It’s like they aren’t even search engines at all. They’re doing nothing more than showing me products/sellers they want me to buy from. Digikey lets you drill down to precise specification filters. I wish all search engines could be like that.
Actually the vague movie description thing was due to imdb’s movie tags that users had set on the movie and search engine was doing the simples things it could i.e. “all this one word links point to this movie, perhaps it is this?”
Why’d they stop?
I am not sure whether DDG or SearX results are optimised by someone, but it is different from what I would see on Google for a given topic.
DDG seems to get most of their results from Bing, but they do tweak it a bit themselves. From the link:
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Duckduckgo uses search results from Bing, combined with other search engines and their own bot if Wikipedia is to be believed.
No Google search results are used.
This explains why their results are so much worse than Google’s.
5 years ago sure. Not sure I really agree nowadays.
Granted, that has as much to do with Google getting much worse as it does DDG getting better.Palpable 2015 energy in this take right here.
