this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Yeah, Google search is useless now. I've switched to ddg , and it's much better. Just not having all those sponsored links helps a lot .
Maybe a searx instance would be even better, but I haven't found one that works consistently for me.
Since you say DDG is better, what's your take on the link we're discussing here, then? After all, the paper they talk about shows that DDG (and Bing, which is the vast majority of DDG's input) is signficantly worse than Google.
Or, to quote from the page instead of having to go into the paper:
If I'm reading correctly, they're saying that google is much better that filtering out SEO spam. I'm no expert, but maybe some of the supposed "spam" may have some actual relevant content, and that they are just good at gaming SEO. However, this doesn't excuse google from blatantly placing advertised links as top search results, even if they aren't relevant at all.
I'm okay with ads, but I find it misleading when they appear as the top search results. I'd be okay with them if they were placed after the top 3 actual relevant results. Even better if ads were on a side bar area.
So far, for most of the random things I search, ddg has given me more relevant and useful results than google (just casual testing over a month), even if they are better at filtering out SEO spam. I may check out google again for some searches, but so far, ddg has been working well for me.
DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I'm much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of "does a DDG search return good results", it's largely the same as Bing.
dang, I didn't know that. But like someone in the above comments has said, maybe the use a different index?