Via @rodhilton@mastodon.social
Right now if you search for “country in Africa that starts with the letter K”:
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DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.
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Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.
This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:
“There are no countries in Africa that start with K.” “What about Kenya?” “Kenya suck deez nuts?”
I’ve been using DDG for a year and like the search results but what bothers me is that you can’t exclude a word from your query with minus sign!
Quoting also doesn’t work on DDG, AFAIK.
I’ve noticed that, too. It wasn’t always that way though. A couple of years ago, minus worked no problem.
DDG is just bing and I think google too? I don’t know what’s happening but over the last 2 years or so every search engine has been getting worse and worse and worse. They’re all borderline un fucking usable.
Except kagi. Which you have to pay for. Which I am totally fucking okay with given the state of everything else.
Thanks for the suggestion
Try search.brave.com, it can do that.
They have their own index unlike ddg which is just a proxy for bing. Bing removed the minus feature at some point.
I use DDG, but !g is imprinted on my muscle memory for life.