DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269
As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.
It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.
I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my "keyword picking ability"... now going back to Google feels unreal
Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do !mcwiki diamond to search the minecraft wiki for "diamonds"
I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse
I'd recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I've heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I'd recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it's fucking awful for delivering useful links.
There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you'd see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they're still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)
It'd be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the "top" results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).
You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Edit: spelling
I JUST started using SearXNG and have been also googling the same terms to see how they compare.
So far (less than a week), SearXNG has had what i was looking for in the first 5 links every time. Googled result was either below the scroll or I gave up. Maybe only a couple dozen tests, but it wasn't even close.
Wow, I miss Dogpile! It was my go-to search engine in grad school (along with Altavista and Ask)
DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn't hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.
Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.
I just tried searching the same thing and it works for me
Same here - only Reddit results.
When using Google to search the internet, one needs to select tools > verbatim for the search operators to work as expected. Even for simple things like double quotes.
Doesn't work but it does change the results??? https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png
Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it's extremely frustrating when you're trying to sift through the SEO hellscape
Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.
Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.
Fuck.
Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷♂️
I hope you are asking that rhetorically.
But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.
I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it's really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.
If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.
Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?
I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.
That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.
Startpage, Qwant, Swisscow, SearX
If these don't work for you, try duckduckgo but I don't recommend it as its made and based in the US.
Any app thats developed and hoated in US is a serious threat. Use any app which are developed and hosted in the EU .
It still returns better results for many queries than the alternatives. My ability to weigh usefulness against ideological concerns is pretty limited at times, so I'll use which search engine gives me the best results.
Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.
That seems rather risky, considering that they don't really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.
ChatGPT is not a search engine, it's a language model. It does not provide correct answers, it imitates what correct answers sound like.
The issue with LLMs that I have is that while they are great at certain tasks, they are bad at anything, let's call it factual, due to their nature.
I can for example use it to quickly draft up a email or a piece of python code, and I can immediately see whether or not the response it generated is actually what I want.
If I go ask it what the hottest day in a given country was or ask it to explain something, I have absolutely no idea whether it's bullshit or not and I will have to double check it anways.
I think the learning curve with LLMs as a tool is to be able to know when to use it and when to rely on other sources instead.
That's not that bad... Way worse is that Google will push your site to the 10th-or-so page abyss for minor problems yet they keep on showing more and more spammy sites (the ones which contain random sentences with your search term mysteriously embedded in the middle of them, without any kind of relevance, and with painfully obviously randomly generated domains... I still don't understand how do they manage to put the term you're searching right now into the search results.)
Bug or most likely faked. I'm selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.
Tech hate, so hot right now.
That is fake
I can't reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode
Can't reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)
"it works on my machine"
You can still.
Under the Tools dropdown you can change it from "All Results" to "Verbatim".
Try this: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=tacos%20site:reddit.com
So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff
Wow, that’s really strange. They aren’t marked as ads either…
I always have used inurl: instead to great effect. For instance if I wanted just the technology subreddit it would be inurl:reddit.com/r/technology
I recently switched my default search from Google to DuckDuckGo: Google has begun refusing to find anything while exact same search on DuckDuckGo just works. Google is slower because I have to think+ignore first half of the page due to Ads/SEO crud.
Just tried it and it still works perfectly fine.
maybe try the inurl operator
Wrong. I regularly use "site:" all the time.
@rosenjcb I gave up on Google search a few months ago. It got to a point where it would consistently show me nonsense that was written to farm ad revenue. DuckDuckGo has been better for me (once you disable the ability to show ads in the search results), but I still get occurrences of it showing me nonsense. Like, I tried looking up information on the Super Smash Bros Brawl mod Project+, and it kept showing me information on some certification.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
