this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

If google results didn't become total garbage, people wouldn't need to append reddit to searches, I hope google knows that as well.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The situation with high quality search results becoming inaccessible reminds me of what happened with expertsexchange back in the day. EE adopted a pay wall and in doing so sequestered a bunch of useful technical answers. Their greed turned against them and opened the way for StackOverflow to really take off and gain dominance.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I want one of those. 😔🏳️‍⚧️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Now I can't unsee it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

you win the internet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hilariously, for a short while, their original website address was "expertsexchange.com" until they realized what that looks like and added a hyphen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's how I read it too lol.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I remember that, lol for a LONG time you could just use Google cache and bypass the paywall lmfao.

Don't know when it changed but it doesn't work anymore :(

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had over the years posted thousands of answers to question to Python, C#, AngularJS, Angular and React questions. I wiped all of them with shreddit the last couple of days. To give you an idea I have been running it for 2 days over seperate accounts and its still not done.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit respawns deleted posts. Go and sue them!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been slowly amending my most like comments (leaving the most downvoted). Yet to see any come back, maybe Reddit didn't value my top notch sarcasm Vs helping people with actually problems.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Reddit hasn't restored any of my comments, either. Not sure if I should feel insulted or not.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Whenever I have a tech problem, I add reddit to google search. That's the only way to get good answers from google. This worked great until their API scam.

After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google. But with what?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I switched to Duckduckgo recently. So far it works good and gives me helpful results. Can’t give long time Test results, using it since a week. But I think it gets the job done.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was very happy am that Apple added it as a default option in iOS. I had been using it off and on for years but now it’s been my default in various browsers for I guess about 3-4 years. Generally I find what I want with no problem, but still need to append !g and get the results from Google for some searches. Maybe about 10%, and more often on image searches.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is really good to hear! I also added it as default search engine in safari and brave since I switched. Thought I have to go full in in order to give it a chance. Where exactly do you add the „!g“?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The "!g" is part of something called "bangs" on DuckDuckGo. Bangs are prefixes to redirect your query to another search engine. For example "!g How to pet a cat" will redirect you to Google, searching for "How to pet a cat"

Other useful bangs are "!m" for maps, "!gi" for Google images, "!so" for stack overflow.

You can find more about it at the bangs page: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same, I've never found it to be significantly worse than google except in AI-aided features like Reverse Image Search.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm thinking of giving Ecosia another go, since I really appreciate their whole "use the whole net income to plant trees" thing. Just gotta check out how well their algorithm does at this point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google.

Not necessarily. One step to a better internet at a time. Sometimes people get overwhelmed by free software solutions because they try to do everything at once.

But with what?

I've tried a lot but replacing google search is not easy. You can of course use a meta search engine like searx which is great but then you hand your search traffic directly to some random instance owner. You could also use startpage which is basically a firewall for google search. duckduckgo does work and I use it sometimes but the search results are definitely worse than google's. The bangs are a nice feature though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I was using ddg for a while but got fed up with the kinda shit results.. swapped over to brave search and it seems much better, but not 100% sure if it's got the privacy behind it like ddg does.. have you got any experience with brave search?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think DuckDuckGo has gotten way better, and Google has gotten way worse. I tend to use DG for most search needs and then append !g to go to Google if the search doesn’t meet my needs.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Ah yes the “search term” + “reddit” trick, works every time. At least it used to…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So adding the word Reddit to a search query counts as a hack?

Guess I‘m somewhat of a hacker myself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Depends on your definition of what a hacker is, Hollywood version or techie version

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The best hacker is of course the one who can guess the password the fastest (all-lowercase, dictionary word).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh I had no idea it would star out your password. Let me try mine too!

hunter1

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Two hackers, one keyboard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

holy shit, that was the worst thing I've ever seen on TV. I feel like the writers have a competition to make the WORST tech faux pas in TV History

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

so much for finding an answer to a question only 5 people have ever thought to ask

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there already an alternative to search lemmy/fediverse via google like we all used to do with reddit? e.g. site:

Do we even need this? Or could a search engine be a part of the fediverse, that we use instead of google?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That's definitely doable, probably more doable than the regular web

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Uh, it's not a "reddit hack", it's a documented feature of Google Search -- limiting results to ones from a certain domain. You can use site:<domain.tld> for anything Google indexes.

It's particularly useful for finding immediate links to obscure parts of government websites or, say, looking through old press statements.

You can also use inurl: to find results whose URL contains the string that follows. There's all sorts of interesting things you can do to narrow results from Google, most of it is surprisingly intuitive. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?sjid=15038670024975993899-NA

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It also demonstrates just how useless Google's search has become that it's widely known to use Reddit to cut through all the SEO spam.

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