First of all google went to shit, but duckduckgo has been disappointing me too.
I moved to searx and it was decent but confused me a bit and not always reliable.
But the single biggest problem on the internet for me… The yt search bar. My god I fucking hate it with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
Its not usable. 90% of the time I’m getting random Indian videos with nothing to do woth my search, shorts (which I blocked in revanced so thats fine now) and people also watch or recommended videos from my user profile.
Used to be Reddit’s.
These days, it’s Google’s.
Honestly, at this point Reddit’s search doesn’t even really feel worse than the competition. Its terrible at fuzzy searches, yes, but the fact that it has functioning search operators that it consistantly respects is so useful. Being able to search “(add OR insert OR update) AND (rest OR restful) NOT sql” is so useful.
Of course, a good fuzzy search would also be great, but no one offers that anymore, so…
when i want to search for specific things on reddits search bar, it kinda “hallucinate searches” totally unrelated to what you want.
Try using the title:() operator. For example, title:(warrior OR knight). It can also be combined with others, like title:(sale) OR flair:(offering). I’m sure theres also options for content and metadata, but I don’t know them off the top of my head.
I haven’t used google in 3-4 years. Is it even worse now?
In the last two years it became extremely bad at actually searching what you typed, and not what ‘ai’ interpreted as what you actually want to see.
It’s been going pretty steadily downhill for about 10 years now, but with the addition of the AI bullshit on top of the other SEO issues, it’s basically useless now.
Ah. Even duckduckgo added ai.
Plus they dont use the best models which makes it even worse
There’s at least has an easily acceptable option to disable it
Yeah but only if you keep cookies enabled. The default Librewolf settings has the bullshit AI come back every time, so its still somewhat of a pain.
Iirc DDG had a feature that allowed you to save its settings without cookies as a url. So you might be able to bookmark it with ai disabled and then it should also work in Librewolf
It’s a stable target ar least, Ublock Origin and filter like:
www.google.com##.hdzaWe
Reddit is the first one that comes to mind for me, too. It was always easier to use a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo and do
thing I'm looking for site:reddit.cominstead of actually using Reddit’s search feature.