this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology

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What's your opinion? Does google really "not work" anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it's own way i feel...

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

You know, I didn't expect dead internet to hit search engines first. In hindsight it makes sense, what with the amount of computing they can budget for each result, but it seemed like such a successful, established thing. Man, normalcy bias is a bitch these days.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I've used ecosia for the last few years I rate it pretty good.

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

I have been having better luck with goddamn BING, ffs. Do you realize how embarrassing that is, Google?

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

I append "site:Reddit.com" (I know, I know) to basically every search I perform. It's the only reliable way at this point to see things written genuinely by real people.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That used to work until reddit started a war against it's own moderators and made a lot of people leave to Lemmy.

Reddit is in a slow death spiral I believe.

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

It works but it’s way shittier. I ended up paying for Kagi.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Mojeek has been an interesting alternative. I do find myself using google as a backup when I’m not getting what I need, but Mojeek does tend to present very different results.

I don’t think any other search engine, including DuckDuckGo, has its own web crawler like mojeek does. DuckDuckGo is security based, but still google in the end (similar to how most browsers are actually chromium). It apparently also uses a different term algorithm so you have to readjust how you search because it doesn’t do anything predictive or “smart” in its searching for results.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I've honestly been on DDG for years; I very rarely hit Google anymore, unless I need to map something because DDG maps suck.

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

Nah google definitely still works, it just doesn’t work well or as consistently anymore.

All these companies paying for SEO bumps to remove or highlight their content fuck with results, just like the Reddit protests did. It’s a real mess because google is more of an ad company than an SE company

For me depending on what I’m searching for, I’ll use chat gpt or similar AI with internet access/training or may use google or other SE and use site modifiers to keep results to a somewhat related domain.

I’m really interested to see what people like when it comes to search engines. Duck duck go, Brave, yandex, bing, google, they’re all different states of shit tbh

Even if they give good results they’re scraping your data to sell or use chromium and is therefore antiAdblock anti user, etc.

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

Has anyone created a firefox plugin that allows you to filter out search results based on snippet and URL rules? That would solve the problem on most search engines as the unwanted results are usually repetitive and obvious.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Not exactly what you're asking for but uBlacklist is a plugin that lets you blacklist websites from showing in your search results. I've only been playing with it for a few days but it seems to work great for Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing. Qwant is a little wonky.

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

It works but it definitely censors a lot pf stuff I feel so I use Yandex sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

... you're worried about censorship so you use the Chinese search engine?

Just use DuckDuckGo

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

Dockduckgo is just bing with diet privacy

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

Russian, but yeah

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