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Google spends $10 billion a year to ensure it's your go-to online search engine, DOJ says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I find myself using duckduckgo and kagi more and more. All search engines suck, honestly, but the not-Google choices maybe suck a little less. Google results have gotten horrible, it's so obvious it's just serving up sponsored ad links, not actual information. I mean, that's been the case for a long time but they've really dialed up the suck.
I miss the days when it was rare to need to goto the second page. Now you have to in order to get passed the all the shite. Even ignoring the sponsored shit Google wants to sell me the thing I'm trying to get a review of on the firs and second page
In my case it's trying to sell me the fucking thing i explicitly excluded from results with a boolean
I can imagine some mid-level idiot with an MBA coming up with that one in a staff meeting. "I know how we increase revenue, guys: the old reverse psychology!"
Bastard probably got a bonus for it.
Not even that smart. It's just shitty, shitty SEO
'Stick ads for x on anything that mentions x, xa, xy and related terms. Don't pay attention to exclusions'
I defaulted to DDG now. It has been working just fine. Every now and then I can't find something and I will append a "!g" at the end of the search in DDG to get Google results.
I will use Yandex when searching for more copyright infringing content which works very well too.
That has me 100% covered. If I were to lose Google I would still be 98% covered.
The bang commands are such a great feature of DDG
Agreed completely. I’m noticing that I need to use !g less and less. It used to be a daily or twice daily thing, but these days it is more of a weekly or monthly usage.
Google has plenty of cash to live for a long time and an ad machine that prints money, but their days of dominance are numbered, in my opinion.
I recently switched back to Google default because I found myself appending !g almost reflex. Searching for things in French always returns unrelated things in English. Imo some user tracking is useful for tailoring search results, but obv Google seeks way too much data for that.
The results from Google are not that bad, but they got played at their own seo game, and the web got way bigger in the last ten years too, so more noise to filter
Duck duck go has kept getting better and google has kept getting worse.
I find the results are pretty even now and often lean in DDG's favour (but not always, obviously).
Because of this, I've set my default everywhere to DDG and give Google a whirl sometimes if that doesn't work out for a specific search.
It’s that extra crap that kills it for me.
I have all the add-ins, extensions, etc so my experience is fine (and I also just use DuckDuckGo). But I tried searching for something on my parent’s computer with Google… it was like the early 00s with all the crap before the actual results.
I immediately switched their default, but I could not believe it. Like why would you do that to your own site?
What extensions will make my experience Better? I still Google but I don't wanna use it anymore
UBlock Origin is probably the main one.
honestly.... duckduckgo.com
you will still get most of the top results, but without all the nonsense.
Their browser is a bit shady and how it shares info with Microsoft / Bing but their search engine is solid.
Stupid name, good search results.
How do you justify Kagis pricing? I search so much everyday that that I would need the "Ultimate" plan which is just too expensive when other alternatives are just free.
My partner and I are on the duo plan with 1500 searches and haven't hit our limit. I've honestly been surprised how little we search?
You may be too, Kagi is very good. I haven't regretted paying for it at all.
I haven't paid for it yet, just been dabbling with it. If I do end up paying for it, I guess it's like anything else, is it worth it to me, personally? I don't have an answer yet, but the ads funded model got us to the shitshow we have today.
Tried ddg years ago, but I found Searx(NG) and I stick to it since. So awesome. The only downside is that some instances can be unstable for a bit (for example, certain search engine can stop working), but you can export and import settings really easily so I just use another instance I trust until my main one is back to normal.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out.
Sure, visit [email protected] and [email protected] to start exploring. Also, fuckcombustion.com is an awesome forum about this field.
And please, don't fall to these headship vapes, which are mostly crap.
Edit: Also, I gave a general recommendation to another user here so it might be useful to you too.
Isn’t DDG just Bing? I know when sites are banned on Bing, they don’t appear there either. Felt it was the same search…
Perhaps Bing with privacy?
I think so, yeah.