this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Is there any good search engines? I mean I've tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it's disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can't find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
Maybe AkJeeves!?
Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.
There’s also SearX which you could self host.
I second Kagi with the additional mention of their "lens" feature that allows results to be restricted to scholarly sources which is very relevant to the meme's search needs.
& that pdf search after.
Plus forum search so you never have to add "reddit" or "lemmy" to your search phrase again.
For a scholar lens, you can use Google scholar
https://scholar.google.com/ hasn't been quite as enshittified
For now: https://www.404media.co/google-books-is-indexing-ai-generated-garbage/
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !
My understanding is that duckduckgo is just Bing without tracking, I also have used it for a few years to decent success but figure it's worth noting
I've been using bing at work and it's surprisingly good. It's got tracking and ads and crap but it's really more like Google was a few years ago than anything
Frankly I tend to agree. I started using it for the rewards, now that they nerfed that program I still use it since the search is better than Google, copilot intrusion aside
I use duck duck go but sometimes I just have to use google.
Use same search terms etc and can't get what I want.
You should try DDG's "bangs" then. They are shortcuts you can type to narrow your search or use another search engine from DDG's interface.
!gm Singapore will search for Singapore directly in Google Maps
!w Singapore will search for the word in Wikipedia
!g will search in Google, etc.
Ohh I love that, I always have to resort to google maps to search specific things now I will try that.
Thanks so much
Do you have history enabled on your browser?
Really curious what your last say 10 non-private searches were.
Asking as I’m constantly going back to Alphabet Adware Search (!g). If I just wanted the homepages of Fortune 500 companies I could use DDG exclusively, but I look for:
And much more I can’t think of right now. For all of the above, I end up banging out of DDG (by adding !g) for Google. At least until I get in the habit of using SearXNG.
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it's written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they'd present you with all that spam content, you wouldn't find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it's written by a human, they're going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.
There's also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse...
I get my best results with either Duckduckgo or with Searx. Neither run their own index but the independent index searches I've tried have been straight up ass. It seems right now the best thing you can do is simply escape the curated personalized results bubbles
Somehow I trained my bubble well entirely by accident, because for the most part google still gets me the results I look for with an ok success rate
Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn't heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I'm a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn't track you it doesn't personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn't have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don't quote me on that. It's also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.
kagi
search.brave.com
Basically Google.
Yes it's able to use Google to supplement searches but it can be disabled. I get more relevant results than with Google.