this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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The last part of your comment sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?
I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.
I haven’t seen any obvious astroturfing yet, but your last paragraph really did have the vibe of a smoothly transitioned paid promotion. Not saying it was, but even the comments that you haven’t fully bought into it made it feel even more like one of the more honest paid promotions.
I read this same sentiment two days ago; Google doesn’t work for me.
Not sure what they are on about. I can find things I‘m looking for on Google in under a Minute 9 out of 10 times and I tend to use it quite heavily tbh…
if you're searching for something general, like, i dunno "dishwasher cleaner" or something, it spits out usable results.
but as soon as a query becomes technical in nature, like troubleshooting IT problems, it's a straight up nightmare.
the reason it's so bad at searching for anything very specific is their attempt to "figure out what you really mean":
and google does that by... ignoring what you typed and changing your search prompt behind the scenes without telling you and without any options to change it.
and putting it in quotes rarely improves searches anymore, only spits out more garbage.
point is: google is basically dead for any specific searches and only really works for searches that amount to "i want to buy thing. show me thing."
I had this weird hardware issue with my desktop and I could not find results for it on Google about a year ago, and I had searched for it a bunch of times previously as well and couldn't find anything relevant. My boyfriend searched for it on Google on his computer and found a result with the information we needed and i immediately fixed it.
Guessing my "custom" results were poisoned by something at some time, but it prevented me from finding the answer I needed, and I didn't think to log out at the time.
Super done with Google tbh
I signed up for Kagi after the trial. I'm very subscription adverse, but this one was something I don't mind paying for.
It's great that DDG doesn't track a users searches. It really is.
But at the end of the day, it's still just another ad platform profiting off of companies trying to sell you things.
And here you are complaining it seems like an ad, when someone's explaining an alternative ad-free search.
Just think about that for a moment.
Also, if we're being frank, DDG's results are damn near useless half the time.
It's like the opposite end of the SEO spectrum. Whereas Google just anchors onto certain keywords to regurgitate the same 4 listacles, DDG just sees your input for "my lawnmower won't start" and responds with "lawnmower huh? I dunno here's the history of John Deere or some shit, fuck off".
I tried using DDG but had even worse results than Google is having right now. I wish it was good, but my multi month trial of it was not impressive.
It was especially bad for programming. At least Google still finds what I need for that
Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.
I've had the same experience as you. The vast majority of the time, I can get the results that I want.
It also doesn't allow you to actually exclude keywords. Which can be utterly infuriating if you're looking for a specific entry in a franchise or a lesser used definition of something.
It's just handing your search off to Bing, and Microsoft just does what it does.
DDG pays Bing to use their API. DDG makes money by placing ads in the results. They do it kind of circularly using Microsoft's ad system, but they are separate.