this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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[–] melonpunk 169 points 1 year ago (16 children)

I'd recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I've heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I'd recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it's fucking awful for delivering useful links.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you'd see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they're still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)

It'd be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the "top" results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).

[–] BobaFett26 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/

Edit: spelling

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[–] melonpunk 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think Hotbot did that back in the 90's, and it's relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com

[–] whynotzoidberg 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh, I might need to restore my bookmarks backup from IE5.

What up, Lycos?

[–] melonpunk 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] FlyingSquid 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What about Jeeves? Did anyone ask Jeeves?

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn't hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.

[–] deweydecibel 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it's fucking awful for delivering useful links.

You're fooling yourself if you think Bing is any different, or that ChatGPT won't become the same thing. It's destiny is to be a smarter version of Alexa, only users will falsely assume neutrality it doesn't possess.

The only thing the others have over Google is they're not the primary focus of SEO, but that will change. SEO has devoured the corpse of Google search and waiting to determine what prey it should focus on next.

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[–] whynotzoidberg 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FWIW DuckDuckGo sources the traditional links / results from Bing. Their Instant Answers info does come directly from other sources, e.g. Wikipedia.

Source: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.

For what it's worth, Bing is similarly full of ads, but with a more cluttered page design and a lot of video previews. Often times I find its suggestions for related searches get in the way of actually reading the search results for the current search...

[–] UrielMC 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Startpage or searxng are better

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[–] rosenjcb 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Going to do a run with duckduckgo in my browser. Probably about time I move stuff away from Google anyways.

[–] EyesEyesBaby 7 points 1 year ago

Something to keep in mind, if you can't find what you're looking for, and want to give Google a try after DDG: you add "!g" to the search and DDG wil redirect you to a Google results page.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.

Others, more specific uses:

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.

[–] rosenjcb 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.

[–] tehmics 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it's extremely frustrating when you're trying to sift through the SEO hellscape

[–] dustedhands 24 points 1 year ago

Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.

Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.

Fuck.

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[–] eating3645 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] RaoulDook 21 points 1 year ago

Maybe OP's "search results" were the ads at the top of the google results

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[–] Siegfried 30 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my "keyword picking ability"... now going back to Google feels unreal

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[–] nutel 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just tried searching the same thing and it works for me

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just tried it and it still works perfectly fine.

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

When using Google to search the internet, one needs to select tools > verbatim for the search operators to work as expected. Even for simple things like double quotes.

[–] rosenjcb 9 points 1 year ago

Doesn't work but it does change the results??? https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can still.

Under the Tools dropdown you can change it from "All Results" to "Verbatim".

Try this: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=tacos%20site:reddit.com

[–] rosenjcb 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That's not that bad... Way worse is that Google will push your site to the 10th-or-so page abyss for minor problems yet they keep on showing more and more spammy sites (the ones which contain random sentences with your search term mysteriously embedded in the middle of them, without any kind of relevance, and with painfully obviously randomly generated domains... I still don't understand how do they manage to put the term you're searching right now into the search results.)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can't reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode

[–] DreamlandLividity 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can't reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

@rosenjcb I gave up on Google search a few months ago. It got to a point where it would consistently show me nonsense that was written to farm ad revenue. DuckDuckGo has been better for me (once you disable the ability to show ads in the search results), but I still get occurrences of it showing me nonsense. Like, I tried looking up information on the Super Smash Bros Brawl mod Project+, and it kept showing me information on some certification.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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[–] Yoz 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷‍♂️

[–] theragu40 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I hope you are asking that rhetorically.

But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.

I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it's really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.

If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.

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[–] nineninenine 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?

[–] Nahvi 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.

That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.

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

For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.

I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.

Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.

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[–] brygphilomena 8 points 1 year ago

I always have used inurl: instead to great effect. For instance if I wanted just the technology subreddit it would be inurl:reddit.com/r/technology

[–] redditcunts 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bug or most likely faked. I'm selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.

Tech hate, so hot right now.

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

It looks like you might be using the built-in Google app. Could that be a factor?

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