I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something. I also don’t want to he directed to Pintrest and be required to have an account. Honestly, I’ve started using Bing more often.
Yeah honestly. The Google ad-based search system created a set of incentives that just destroyed the internet! I miss the days when people created their own fun little quirky websites like Ian’s Shoelace Site. That used to be every site on the internet!
Holy crap I remember that
But do you remember Geocities?
I had an Angel fire site
Every 3-5 years, I go and check on my Angelfire. It’s still there today.
Your old site isn’t just fire, it’s angelfire!
Lucky! Mine’s gone, and I honestly can’t remember if I deleted it
Am I old if I remember xoom?
I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/
I would like a Firefox add-on that filters out sites where recipe ingredients are measured in cups and the recipes contain butter and sugar when they shouldn’t, thanks very much
Adding “UK” used to work, but doesn’t anymore
the recipes contain butter when they shouldn’t
But noodles aren’t that difficult to make
I also don’t want to need an add-on for every niche thing I like to look at.
The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.
Try Brave Search, Duckduckgo, Startpage, or Searxng. For more detail on these recommendation (that I definitely did not just steal), check out the Privacy Guides page, or The New Oil for a different, albeit overlapping, set of recommendations and take on search engines.
Best not to use brave since it’s a front for crypto. Other’s are okay
DuckDuckGo has recently become a not very useful search engine too, it still has way way better queries than Google though.
Going back usually shuffles the search results and after like 5 results there’s just a bunch of random entries based on your geolocation.
I disagree! It’s best to not use Brave since it’s a front for a homophobe.
Avoid the browser but I’ve been using their search on Firefox. Really like the AI summarizer and the results are also good.
Did the Privacy Guides drama ever get resolved re: PrivacyTools. I recall one was split off from the other over draaaamaaa.
I mean I guess. They aren’t actively fighting or anything like that to my knowledge. I personally think the Privacy Guides is the better resource, because PrivacyTools has vpn recommendations like Nord and Surfshark with affiliate links that are not actively disclosed from my quick check.
You mention brave but no mention of kagi? Kagi is way better than DDG too.
I just ask ChatGPT these days.
I’m just starting to learn HTML and oh my fucking god do I LOVE chatGPT… Holy hell… I can’t even begin to express just how amazing it is to be able to ask basic questions and not only get a reply, but provide example code, and it will elaborate or be as concise as you like… I LOVE IT! I’m especially happy to see they don’t ask for your phone number and other absurdly intrusive unnecessary information anymore. That’s what kept me away at first.
I do know it’s not infallible and I probably won’t use it as much as I move on to more complex programming.
I do fairly complex programming and still use chat gpt. It will contribute to be helpful to say “write me a function that does this” rather than “how do I code this”
Yeah it is kind of like the “trust, but verify” paradigm. It will likely generate useful code or a very good starting point, but you should always check if it actually does what you expect it to.
You can’t trust them blindly. But They’re very helpful in your day to day tasks.
No joke, Bing Chat is considerably better at finding answers than any search engine I’ve used in recent years. I don’t even bother googling things anymore. Just ask the AI.
No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.
On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it’s niche partially because it’s made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I’m referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!
Is it much different from a pallet wrapper? A big platform you can set a pallet on loaded with stuff and it spins? And you hold what’s like a yard wide rolling pin with plastic wrap on it to wrap the pallet as it spins?
me too
That’s not only a search engine problem in itself - websites also got worse in general to appeal to googles algorithm. Which means that other search engines would show similar crap, unfortunately.
I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.
I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.
And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)
Profit motives are good at ruining social platforms; society.
Profit motive does okay with goods you buy. But free stuff in a profit motive system is gonna be weird.
Yep the whole Internet feels like a dying mall. There are still some places I go for specific needs, but I’d say my casual browsing of any kind just keeps getting smaller.
Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there’s other alternatives and searx unified them all
DuckDuckGo is not good. It’s only marginally less pathetic than Google, but that has to do for the time being.
Eh, DDG is mediocre, but I don’t know of a better one ATM.
Kagi is pretty good. But not free.
Kagi is pretty good *because it’s not free
I really hope it’ll get better if more people use it
I also wonder how it will be abused by the sEo sPeCiAliSTs who spam my fucking business email ten times a week. Fuck off “Chris”
Kagi. Way better than Google and DDG.
SearX isn’t maintained anymore, SearXNG is the meta-search engine that is still maintained.
I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).
YALL NEED KAGI.COM
Also:
- Classic web search: https://wiby.me
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/
- Pirates only: https://knaben.eu
- Non commercial search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Esp good for tech Qs: https://www.phind.com/search?home=true
- https://www.perplexity.ai/
Decentralise and build a toolbox, it’s better for your brain.
Keep your links, I’m going back to askjeeves
my homie refdesk just called and said “we are so fucking back”
kagi is paid search, I like the idea of that. why do you recommend kagi and not another paid search provider?
I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).
They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.
They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).
All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.
I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.
I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.
As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I’ve reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.
I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It’s just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
I did the same!
I’d pay for Kagi if it were $5/month unlimited. Not going to pay $5/month for limited search.
yeah, i agree. I’ve get email for €1/month
Google Scholar is still quite good for the moment
Here is an example for searching for “cats” with academic turned on. It’s not just .edus but it’s definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
I didn’t know kagi is supported in Brave mobile. Been trying to set it up on Mull (Firefox) but gotta wait for v122 so I can install via a file
Yup, yup. Should be under recently visited in the selection settings iirc if you visit the page first. Trying to pen in my Google use to very specific things, but Brave will probably be last to go. Excited for mobile FF!
Archive.org scholar is great too! This academic search is a bit different because it does webpages and not just publications.
YALL NEED KAGI.COM
I refuse to pay for a search engine. There are numerous searxng instances out there in which I’m not the product even though I’m not paying.
Yes. And they all suck by comparison.
SEO abuse has ruined the internet. We could’ve had something good.
I worked very briefly for a company that was hirable to push websites for SEO. It was basically all young underpaid contractors and interns even the HR team except for upper management who was all the same people from their previous big company running telemarketing bullshit.
So yeah just want to add the usual suspects definitely had a hand in the enshitification of the search engine as you might think.
More like content farming right?
DuckDuckGo ftw 💯
Nowadays I use Qwant and it’s working great. If you use Google with a VPN it’s always asking for captchas 🙃
I had taken a look at Qwant. It’s pretty cool… But I love DDG’s Bang shortcuts. Idk how many engines support those.
I just get tired of jumping through hoops to find what I’m searching for… Instead of what Google wants me to see
Haven’t used Google search for years.
Teach me your ways
Heh, cool.
Does https://startpage.com count?
Not since they got their own crawler which manages to be worse than Google’s one.
At least I assume that’s what happened. Their results are noticeably worse than they used to be and noticeably worse than a Google search, although that might be because I’m signed in
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I often search for things with plenty of results on any other search engine and get one or (more commonly) zero results from Startpage. I remember they used to be a proxy for Google. I’m no longer convinced they are.
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I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it’s just because it’s more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it’s faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.
I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.
‘We didn’t find many results matching the terms you wrote.’
THAT’S WHY I FUCKING WROTE THEM.
Honestly people keep saying this but I just don’t find it to be true. Google is a vital daily resource for me, and usually the best way for me to find most things.
Is this because I don’t use social networks? Are people somehow using Instagram or TikTok as search engines to find what they’re looking for? It feels like people just use social networks these days and nothing else, so maybe that’s it?
Let’s say I want to find an aftermarket built-in air jack kit for a car. Nevermind why, but let’s say it’s what I want to find.
So I look up car air lift jack. Google spits back a grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, a stack of videos of floor air bag jacks by people trying to sell them, Another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, then finally a couple of the kind that go on a car, and godammnit another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, finally sponsored posts for floor jacks or the wrong kind, Amazon ads for the same thing, ads for brands of the floor jacks, and more, more, more, makers of the wrong thing, lowes, home depot, walmart…it’s all wrong.
So the very next words out of your mouth are “Well, you used the wrong search term!” No, not really, but let’s try getting rid of “bag”, because that seems to be a big incorrect return on the search. So in goes “-bag” to the search term. What does that get us?
The exact same fucking thing. “-” is meaningless anymore.
So that’s google now.
Want help with a tech problem?
Wade through a stack of a dozen shitty youtube videos 10 minutes long each (because google pays more for ad space, longer videos have more space, so those get pushed to the top, and a problem that would take a paragraph of text to solve now becomes a shitty video with blather, subscribe, previous videos, like, other videos, and 2 minutes of actual help), a bunch of sponsored links to tech makers that have shit to do with your problem, and SEO sites like solveyourtechproblem.com or wefixitgood.com or whatever BS name for sites that consist of boilerplate help like “did you turn it off and on again?” Maybe after all that you’ll get an out of date reddit or github list of posts that don’t have anything to do with your exact issue. So you put it in quotes, that should work, right?
“It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search” says google.
Why? I dunno. Not enough returns on the search to cram ads, sponsored links, shit for sale in?
Google is shit. I’ve switched to DDG. It has it’s own frustrations, but at least I don’t have to put up with Google cramming every ad and sponsored link in front of me along with garbage SEO sites. Google’s heyday has ended.
The troubleshooting you list here second is my primary use for a Google search and it is completely garbage. Just like you say, it’s a bunch of trash SEO sites that don’t really address the problem so most of the time I add reddit to the search to get legit answers. Because reddit has a garbage search engine, of course.
Though I have to admit I have given up on that and just use DDG to search for Reddit results. It used to be that I’d start on DDG and if it didn’t have what I need I’d go to Google, but Google search has gotten so bad that I almost never bother anymore.
I’ve been doing a lot of searches lately about running, picking shoes, overpronation, training schedules, etc.
Straight google searches (ones that would have returned worthwhile results even ten years ago) are all trying to sell me something, or are AI generated content filler garbage.
I have to add “reddit” to every search in order to get real information from normal people.
Reddit has axed access to Nordic VPN connected devices sadly, so no more reddit in my searches
a lot of people are using reddit and youtube to search for thing now
YouTube is fantastic but it’s a video platform, all you’re going to find there are videos.
If I need to find a business or product page, I’m not going to look on YouTube. Same if I need to find a driver download, or a PDF manual, or the local weather, or information on a historical event, or…we’ll, you get the idea. They just do videos.
Similarly Reddit has a lot but it’s mainly centered around discussions of things. I use it as a very valuable resource, but similar to the above, it’s not where I go when I’m not looking for the one thing they do very well - discussion.
It sounds as if the main thrust of this idea isn’t that Google (or a search engine in general) is any less vital in daily web life, but rather that for some things you can go straight to the more centralised source and search there. E.g. if I want a video I’ll search on YouTube, rather than searching Google for aggregated results from many video hosts.
In that sense Google is slightly less relevant sure I agree, but only a little bit, and only for very specific things.
i use google to search reddit and youtube. reddit’s search still sucks and youtube brings up the same results as google generally and it’s in my address bar aleady.
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You just described my situation. I’m a developer, I google A LOT of shit everyday. I haven’t used social media in 4 years or so.
If I have a basic question I usually find myself going to chatgpt now.
Oh goodie. If I want made up answers based on the middle of the road guess work of an auto complete that sounds like a fun idea but I’d really just like to find out if anyone is selling the used record I’m looking for.
Same. I can even ask follow up questions
not sure about other languages, but with Polish Google is still the most useful one, Bing and DDG don’t even hold a candle to it, that said i still think Google went to shit hard
Same, DDG fails with local results here in the Philippines, I found myself adding “g!” to my searches more often
not
!g?
Duckduckgo is not only privacy centric but now it has better results than Google. Google is floundering in every area of their business lately. Pixel phones still have a very small niche share of the market, their search is garbage, chat gpt is a better AI than bard by miles, and their productivity suite is just as readily replaced by libreoffice or office 365.
The only thing Google has anymore is YouTube.
And YouTube is completely unusable without paying or adblock. Letting literal scams market on their platform
Just wanted to chime in and say that I am super happy with my Pixel 7 so far. Easily one of the best phones out there, especially considering the price.
Android is, on the whole, an incredible OS/ecosystem Google has spun up, but at the end of the day, they still need people to use their web services to remain profitable… and primarily, that’s Search.
Duckduckgo is not only privacy centric but now it has better results than Google.
Its been very hit and miss for me. The engines appear to be optimized differently, but I won’t say the DDG results are “good”. I just get better results when I search both engines than when I rely on one over the other indefinitely.
chat gpt is a better AI than bard by miles
It does very simple things very well, where as Bard just kinda fumbles everything that isn’t geared to its niche knowledge set. But they’re both… not great. ChatGPT still hallucinates routinely. Its output is often verbose to the point of repetition. Anything current-events related or otherwise subjective is… dicey at best.
Its the best of the worst, but 9 times out of 10 I’ll get a better result fishing for answers on Reddit or a topic-specific Discord or a bog-standard search engine if I put in a good fifteen minutes of serious investigation. I’m just weighing that against the instant-but-substandard answer I can get from AI.
Although they’re nowhere near marketshare of Apple they definitely haven’t had failure in the Pixels. Every generation I notice more and more people using them rather than the previous niche audience. They’re probably the best all-around Android phones out there for average people, and with the standard pixel 8 being $550 reasonably good value compared to their competition for all but heavy mobile gamers.
They’re still a very niche device with the largest adoption in Canada at only ~5%. https://www.statista.com/chart/25463/popularity-of-google-smartphones/
Of course it has, and this effect was completely foreseeable, and indeed, was foreseen, from the very moment they decided to whore themselves out with that IPO. They took their role as custodian of the baby internet and became a pimp.
Stop calling it anything else. As a musician, I promise you, trying to promote yourself online feels like prostitution. If you’ve ever tried, then you know too. The only difference is if I were a prostitute I might actually make some money back.
Is DuckDuckGo the best alternative?
I would say that there isn’t currently a “best alternative” but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have “use cases” as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.
There’s some focused more on “privacy” like DuckDuckGo and searX.
I’ve heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI.
I’ve heard good things about Qwant for music searches.
Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by “emotion.”
Presearch is decentralized, but I haven’t looked “under the hood” of how its decentralization works.
Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn’t getting your info when you search.
I mean, it seems like there’s a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.
Kagi has worked REALLY well for me for all topics, but it is a paid service…
I am constantly evangelizing Kagi to all my tech friends. Thankfully I don’t use mint or do CrossFit otherwise I’d be 3 for 3 and lonely. That said, it is really nice to have actual search results again. I toggle over to DDG when I have more ad based results in mind but avoid Google Search at all costs.
You know the old saying, “you get what you paid for.”
I’ve had a lot of issues with Bing, although it may have improved since I was really using it. AI has a tendency to “hallucinate,” which is a problem if you are interested in results that well… exist.
I’ve heard far more people using it for helping with simple coding exercises and helping them approach coding problems than I have heard of people using it for research.
I wouldn’t be doing much of any research through AI for exactly that reason myself. It hallucinates too much.
So, like I said, it depends on what you’re using each one for. People seem to be having success with Bing and programming, but less so with Bing and anything actually human-life related.
Time to bring back dogpile methinks
Thanks for the info.
Is DDG just straight Bing results but private and maybe minus AI stuff?
It’s just a bit more complicated than that:
When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, lyrics, weather, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (e.g., Tripadvisor), content site (e.g., Musixmatch), or dedicated source (e.g., Dark Sky) that does a better job of actually answering searches than a general search engine can with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).
So they use some in-house tools and they source other results “largely” from Bing.
In other words:
I’ve been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).
I’ve been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.
Kagi seems to be the real deal. I’d say anecdotally it cuts my searches in half (If I had to do 4-6 searches to find something previously, now it’s 2-3 max). Sometimes I will find myself accidently on DDG and I’ll think, “Wow, why are these results all over the place?” DDG still edges out Google and Bing (actually I think it uses Bing as a backend for certain tasks).
I tried Kagi for a while but it wasn’t as good as Google or DDG for me, especially in my native language. Too bad, I’d love paying for search.
I’m in the same boat. The results from Kagi just weren’t good.
I tried Kagi briefly and the results were as good as google. Searches for stuff near me, programming questions, and travel related stuff were not helpful.
I live in Canada, so I wonder if there’s some sort of regional prioritization.
I have searched for stuff in AHK, VB.net (helping a friend poke at code), and Lua (game stuff for myself), and it’s been okay, but I don’t code ‘real’ things anymore, kinda burnt out as a hobby a few years ago. I’m stateside.
Searxng is I think
Ecosia for planting trees
I used to have my default engine set to ecosia. I loved it, but their recent change in their privacy policy about giving information to Google was a big no-no for me.
Kagi is orders of magnitude better than DDG. I hated DDG results.
It’s just Bing with extra steps.
What is this referring to? I’ve been using ddg for the last 3 years or so and never really used bing
It’s powered by Bing. You get the same results if you just use regular Bing without the bird decorations.
SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.
you still go there out of habit
Speak for yourself
