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.
Yeah honestly. The Google ad-based search system created a set of incentives that just destroyed the internet! I miss the days when people created their own fun little quirky websites like Ian's Shoelace Site. That used to be every site on the internet!
I would like a Firefox add-on that filters out sites where recipe ingredients are measured in cups and the recipes contain butter and sugar when they shouldn't, thanks very much
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.
I'm just starting to learn HTML and oh my fucking god do I LOVE chatGPT... Holy hell... I can't even begin to express just how amazing it is to be able to ask basic questions and not only get a reply, but provide example code, and it will elaborate or be as concise as you like... I LOVE IT! I'm especially happy to see they don't ask for your phone number and other absurdly intrusive unnecessary information anymore. That's what kept me away at first.
I do know it's not infallible and I probably won't use it as much as I move on to more complex programming.
No joke, Bing Chat is considerably better at finding answers than any search engine I've used in recent years. I don't even bother googling things anymore. Just ask the AI.
No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.
On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it's niche partially because it's made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I'm referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!
Is it much different from a pallet wrapper? A big platform you can set a pallet on loaded with stuff and it spins? And you hold what's like a yard wide rolling pin with plastic wrap on it to wrap the pallet as it spins?
That's not only a search engine problem in itself - websites also got worse in general to appeal to googles algorithm. Which means that other search engines would show similar crap, unfortunately.
I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista's search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.
I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn't work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.
And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I've been using Duck Duck Go. But you're right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)
Yep the whole Internet feels like a dying mall. There are still some places I go for specific needs, but I'd say my casual browsing of any kind just keeps getting smaller.
I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).
I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven't seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).
They're also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.
They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).
All in all I've been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they're exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn't hurt either.
As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I've reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.
I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It's just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
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.
I worked very briefly for a company that was hirable to push websites for SEO. It was basically all young underpaid contractors and interns even the HR team except for upper management who was all the same people from their previous big company running telemarketing bullshit.
So yeah just want to add the usual suspects definitely had a hand in the enshitification of the search engine as you might think.
A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.
I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.
Google anything related to 'laptop monitor turn off' and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search
I'm not even a sysadmin, just a power user and this infuriates me to no end. I gave up on a search just a couple days ago because I kept getting bottom tier answers. Like thanks but I already know how to use my computer, now tell me how to fix this problem.
C'mon now. "Laptop monitor turn off" has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I've always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.
You're a Systems Administrator, but Google Tier 2 issues, do you provide break fix support? I thought as a SA you would be working behind the scenes on systems (apps), servers, etc.
Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)
I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it's just because it's more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it's faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.
I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.
Honestly people keep saying this but I just don't find it to be true. Google is a vital daily resource for me, and usually the best way for me to find most things.
Is this because I don't use social networks? Are people somehow using Instagram or TikTok as search engines to find what they're looking for? It feels like people just use social networks these days and nothing else, so maybe that's it?
Let's say I want to find an aftermarket built-in air jack kit for a car. Nevermind why, but let's say it's what I want to find.
So I look up car air lift jack. Google spits back a grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, a stack of videos of floor air bag jacks by people trying to sell them, Another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, then finally a couple of the kind that go on a car, and godammnit another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, finally sponsored posts for floor jacks or the wrong kind, Amazon ads for the same thing, ads for brands of the floor jacks, and more, more, more, makers of the wrong thing, lowes, home depot, walmart...it's all wrong.
So the very next words out of your mouth are "Well, you used the wrong search term!" No, not really, but let's try getting rid of "bag", because that seems to be a big incorrect return on the search. So in goes "-bag" to the search term. What does that get us?
The exact same fucking thing. "-" is meaningless anymore.
So that's google now.
Want help with a tech problem?
Wade through a stack of a dozen shitty youtube videos 10 minutes long each (because google pays more for ad space, longer videos have more space, so those get pushed to the top, and a problem that would take a paragraph of text to solve now becomes a shitty video with blather, subscribe, previous videos, like, other videos, and 2 minutes of actual help), a bunch of sponsored links to tech makers that have shit to do with your problem, and SEO sites like solveyourtechproblem.com or wefixitgood.com or whatever BS name for sites that consist of boilerplate help like "did you turn it off and on again?" Maybe after all that you'll get an out of date reddit or github list of posts that don't have anything to do with your exact issue. So you put it in quotes, that should work, right?
"It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" says google.
Why? I dunno. Not enough returns on the search to cram ads, sponsored links, shit for sale in?
Google is shit. I've switched to DDG. It has it's own frustrations, but at least I don't have to put up with Google cramming every ad and sponsored link in front of me along with garbage SEO sites. Google's heyday has ended.
The troubleshooting you list here second is my primary use for a Google search and it is completely garbage. Just like you say, it's a bunch of trash SEO sites that don't really address the problem so most of the time I add reddit to the search to get legit answers. Because reddit has a garbage search engine, of course.
Though I have to admit I have given up on that and just use DDG to search for Reddit results. It used to be that I'd start on DDG and if it didn't have what I need I'd go to Google, but Google search has gotten so bad that I almost never bother anymore.
I've been doing a lot of searches lately about running, picking shoes, overpronation, training schedules, etc.
Straight google searches (ones that would have returned worthwhile results even ten years ago) are all trying to sell me something, or are AI generated content filler garbage.
I have to add "reddit" to every search in order to get real information from normal people.
YouTube is fantastic but it's a video platform, all you're going to find there are videos.
If I need to find a business or product page, I'm not going to look on YouTube. Same if I need to find a driver download, or a PDF manual, or the local weather, or information on a historical event, or....we'll, you get the idea. They just do videos.
Similarly Reddit has a lot but it's mainly centered around discussions of things. I use it as a very valuable resource, but similar to the above, it's not where I go when I'm not looking for the one thing they do very well - discussion.
It sounds as if the main thrust of this idea isn't that Google (or a search engine in general) is any less vital in daily web life, but rather that for some things you can go straight to the more centralised source and search there. E.g. if I want a video I'll search on YouTube, rather than searching Google for aggregated results from many video hosts.
In that sense Google is slightly less relevant sure I agree, but only a little bit, and only for very specific things.
i use google to search reddit and youtube. reddit's search still sucks and youtube brings up the same results as google generally and it's in my address bar aleady.
Oh goodie. If I want made up answers based on the middle of the road guess work of an auto complete that sounds like a fun idea but I'd really just like to find out if anyone is selling the used record I'm looking for.
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
Of course it has, and this effect was completely foreseeable, and indeed, was foreseen, from the very moment they decided to whore themselves out with that IPO. They took their role as custodian of the baby internet and became a pimp.
Stop calling it anything else. As a musician, I promise you, trying to promote yourself online feels like prostitution. If you've ever tried, then you know too. The only difference is if I were a prostitute I might actually make some money back.
I would say that there isn't currently a "best alternative" but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have "use cases" as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.
There's some focused more on "privacy" like DuckDuckGo and searX.
I've heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft's investment in OpenAI.
I've heard good things about Qwant for music searches.
Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by "emotion."
Presearch is decentralized, but I haven't looked "under the hood" of how its decentralization works.
Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn't getting your info when you search.
I mean, it seems like there's a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn't be surprised if what's left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.
I've had a lot of issues with Bing, although it may have improved since I was really using it. AI has a tendency to "hallucinate," which is a problem if you are interested in results that well... exist.
I've been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).
I've been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.
Kagi seems to be the real deal. I'd say anecdotally it cuts my searches in half (If I had to do 4-6 searches to find something previously, now it's 2-3 max). Sometimes I will find myself accidently on DDG and I'll think, "Wow, why are these results all over the place?" DDG still edges out Google and Bing (actually I think it uses Bing as a backend for certain tasks).
I tried Kagi briefly and the results were as good as google. Searches for stuff near me, programming questions, and travel related stuff were not helpful.
I live in Canada, so I wonder if there's some sort of regional prioritization.
I used to have my default engine set to ecosia. I loved it, but their recent change in their privacy policy about giving information to Google was a big no-no for me.
SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.
Kagi.com is one of the best services I pay for. I know paying for Internet search seems outrageous because we've been accustom to our data being the payment, but I think it's worth it. The search feature and added stuff really make it very functional plus the no adds or SEO type sites is bonus.
I do. Did you find better results on Google? I've used DDG, yandex, qwant, and brave search engine but I really like the add free results and I understand something has to pay for the servers.
Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they're trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.
I liked kagi for the first couple months I had it but then I noticed the results seems to be getting worse. Google tier. I cancelled because why pay for that?
I'm not sure if the results were better at first or whether I just noticed flaws more the longer I used it.
I'm often not even bothering to search for technical issues now. There's been a big mindset shift in me. If I can't figure it out on my own then pack it up and move on to the next thing. It's a 5050 shot at best whether you'll get help on a forum and search is a dumpster fire everywhere. I'm learning a lot more this way and retaining but fuck me running is it ever frustrating
It's not really the ads on Google Search itself that break it.
It's that almost every result is some automatically generated spam created entirely in response to Google's algorithms. And it's those pages that are covered in ads. Google broke the internet.
You can still get what you're looking for, but I home in on results that look like forums or other actual user generated content. Didn't even realise I was doing it tbh. I just mentally filter out most of the shit.
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.
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.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?
Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren't as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they're being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever "owns" the space.
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.
I like DDG, but I believe it uses the Bing API to get the search results. So even though it’s a privacy focused site, you’re still getting results from a giant corporation.
There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
Edit: Also the main poin't of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
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.
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.
This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.
I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?
Bit-warden for password manager, FOSS cross platform. FF should import all the bookmarks. I'd save all open tabs to a new bookmark folder before transfer then open that folder after.
Firefox doesn't need extensions to handle the password and bookmark imports, it can do those automatically. I saw someone suggest you create a folder in your bookmarks that is your open tabs, bookmark each tab as you close them, import passwords and bookmarks, and open that folder for a relatively painless migration.
Do not rely on the built-in password managers to keep your passwords safe. Use a purpose-built one like Bitwarden to generate unique ones, save and complete them, agnostic to the browser. Virtually every stealer out there can easily grab the built-in password db's content.
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.
I've used Startpage for a year or more on my main computer and it works okay.
But if anyone has any tips for a search engine that actually supports queries with boolean logic and such, I'd be all for it. Lately they all seem to just not do that anymore.
I vastly prefer a search engine in the EU, that respects the privacy laws here.
I use Google search when I want to buy something, for some reason, it gets good résultats when I want to buy from my country. but if you want reliable results for a product review, you have to look elsewhere.
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).
Fantastic. I left some other comments on here but I switched within days of doing the trial and I haven’t gone back at all. I think the total number of times I’ve used Google search since then is 3. Yes 3 total searches on Google in the past six months. None of those searches gave me what I wanted, but those were the times i couldn’t find what I needed with kagi. So 3 kagi failures in 6 months and Google wasn’t helpful either.
I've been using Kagi for a few months and it has been exponentially better than Google. I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for people talking about it on Lemmy, actually.
if you're willing to help at all we're always looking for feedback on specific results, and also have this page for testing staging algorithms, there's a big change on there currently. No bother if not.
Word. It's ridiculous how hard it is to get good hits these days. And while GPT makes shit up sometimes it's at least related to what I'm actually asking about. Google desperately wants to show the SEO optimized pages about something tangentially related instead of the page which actually has relevant information.
Getting a solid old forum hit for an obscure DNS issue takes a lot more work these days.
It's Googles fault, but it's not the algorithm getting worse, everyone is just too good at gaming it which fucks it up for everyone (the humanity special).
I’ve been pretty happy with DuckDuckGo. Some people have made the switch to using a search engine aggregate thing like SearXNG. And then there’s the one $12/month search engine I’ve heard people talk fondly of that I can’t remember the name of.
I use Google for maps and I'm still using their email for one account but I hate it. Duckduckgo's maps are way less useful. I know they're tracking my every move. I want to normalize leaving my cell phone at home at this point.
People aren't comparing it to alternatives, they're comparing it to Google 5-10 years ago.
Google used to be astoundingly good at figuring out what it was you wanted, and finding out for you. Now there's a lot more SEO garbage and meaningless fluff clogging every results page, and if your search could even remotely be related to buying something, it's only products and ads.