this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Google's search engine has gotten lazy, with the first dozen or more hits being YouTube and Reddit results.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.
It used to be, I'd start at DDG andwhen I didn't find my results, I'd switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they're often better than Google.
However, very recently I've been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren't helpful.
Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.
not sure about other languages, but with Polish Google is still the most useful one, Bing and DDG don't even hold a candle to it, that said i still think Google went to shit hard
Yeah, If the search is about something relatively obscure then 50% of the links are random letters and numbers or worse, believable looking links that are riddled with viruses.
YALL NEED KAGI.COM
Also:
- Classic web search: https://wiby.me
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/
- Pirates only: https://knaben.eu
- Non commercial search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Esp good for tech Qs: https://www.phind.com/search?home=true
- https://www.perplexity.ai/
Decentralise and build a toolbox, it's better for your brain.
Google Scholar is still quite good for the moment
Archive.org scholar is great too! This academic search is a bit different because it does webpages and not just publications.
Here is an example for searching for "cats" with academic turned on. It's not just .edus but it's definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
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Nowadays i find myself leaning the old ways: browser bookmarks. Not long ago, search was so good that i stopped using them.
Tor Browser is planning to remove Google from the search engine options a user can choose: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41835
There some say brave onion + no JS is good: https://search.brave4u7jddbv7cyviptqjc7jusxh72uik7zt6adtckl5f4nwy2v72qd.onion/
Mullvad team seems to be considering 4 possible options:
- Startpage: https://www.startpage.com/
- Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
- Brave Search: https://search.brave.com/
- Metager: https://metager.org/
PS: Not disgussing ddg / ddg onion too much, basically because ddg is the long-time default search engine of TB. Most TB users assume ddg is a decent, standard, generic option, esp. its non-JS version.
duckduckgo has been fine for me
My main problem with DDG is that it doesn't show the dates of results. A lot of the time, I need to know that to get the information I need. I used it for a couple of years, but I was constantly forced to go back to Google or Bing to get the information I needed.
I found Kagi earlier this year and tried it out, and it's as close to perfect as you can get, IMO. I really can't recommend it enough. It's like being back to "the before times" when Google was king, with the addition of many other features. It's a paid service, and I'm more than happy to do so for something like this. No tracking, a ton of features, very well designed, and results that never fail. I've shared my account with family and friends, and everyone has mentioned how good it is after trying it.
Sorry if it feels like I'm a shill for it, I'm just super happy with it and really feel like everyone deserves to know about it.
Duckduckgo is not only privacy centric but now it has better results than Google. Google is floundering in every area of their business lately. Pixel phones still have a very small niche share of the market, their search is garbage, chat gpt is a better AI than bard by miles, and their productivity suite is just as readily replaced by libreoffice or office 365.
The only thing Google has anymore is YouTube.
Duckduckgo is a frontend for Bing.
Just wanted to chime in and say that I am super happy with my Pixel 7 so far. Easily one of the best phones out there, especially considering the price.
Android is, on the whole, an incredible OS/ecosystem Google has spun up, but at the end of the day, they still need people to use their web services to remain profitable... and primarily, that's Search.
This post but replace google search with the general internet.
Nearly every place that feels like the old internet is not as popular.
I used to think that was a bad thing, I'm starting to think maybe I've just been pushing aside the reality that when the internet was good, it wasn't as popular.
Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.
I don't need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something. I also don't want to he directed to Pintrest and be required to have an account. Honestly, I've started using Bing more often.
I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/
Try Brave Search, Duckduckgo, Startpage, or Searxng. For more detail on these recommendation (that I definitely did not just steal), check out the Privacy Guides page, or The New Oil for a different, albeit overlapping, set of recommendations and take on search engines.
You mention brave but no mention of kagi? Kagi is way better than DDG too.
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Which is why I stopped going since about 4 years ago now. One day I just went to a different mall, and never looked back
And that mall is
tons of alternatives.
search engines with independent indexes(i.e., not beholden to any big search engine):
- mojeek
- brave search(semi independent)
- kagi(semi independent)
meta-search engines(gets results from other search engines):
- startpage(google)
- duckduckgo(bing)
- qwant(bing)
- swisscows(bing)
- metager(multiple sources)
- searx(ng)(multiple sources, configurable by user)
I'm still missing a ton but this should give you an idea.
for more, see this interactive graph, or this Wikipedia list which includes other niche types of search engines as well.
I personally use mojeek(because of their independent index) with duckduckgo as a fallback.
Any discussion on search on Lemmy will bring up Kagi as it has been here already. I will just mention that. A. You can cheat and just keep using a bunch of email accounts to get free trials from them B. If you do that long enough you'll realize their 300 search plan is pretty fair and having saved preferences is worth a membership and they have an option where you can use crypto to pay your fees and remain anonymous (this is very important to me as the only thing more evil than Google would be to have all your search data, your full name and your credit card info - I strongly recommend the crypto pay option and create a dedicated email address. For Kagi membership).
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