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I ask because I've been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I've been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?

Edit: In no particular order, some recommended alternatives to Google
SearXNG
Whoogle
Ecosia
Brave
Dogpile
DuckDuckGo
Kagi
Swiss Cows
Qwant
Bing

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (11 children)

DuckDuckGo uses Bing results. Also DuckDuckGo is not your friend.

I personally use SearXNG for best results. Public instance list.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That article is about their web browser. Agree that it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that their search engine is squeaky clean. Regardless, DDG results are much more useful than Google results, as the entire first page isn’t ads.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This. It was an interesting read and gives me doubts, but it's undoubtably better than using google and I can set it to my default search engine in safari

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Iwould honestly not use Safari either. Mozilla Firefox is the way to go (unless you're on iOS where there actually is no real choice, although the probably still better to use the Firefox front end)

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

«DDG results are much more useful than Google results» -- not if one is searching in anything but english; not sure for english either (had very poor results myself whenever i tried it) but at least can't disprove it.

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

@BrikoX Thanks for that link on DuckDuckGo - interesting read.

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

Thanks for the link on SearXNG never heard of that before.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah although this is specifically the Duckduckgo web Browser rather than their search site. The only web browser to use is Firefox, set up the privacy and tracking settings correctly plus add in privacy extensions.

Duckduckgo website doesn't track you in the same way, but still it is a company and should not be treated as a virtuous entity.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

DuckDuckGo is not your friend

please, PLEASE, never forget that the CEO of DuckDuckGo is also the founder of the "Names Database". it is insane to me that anyone trusts DDG. where do you think they get all the money for marketing from? i've seen a DDG ad on a fucking bus stop in the middle of nowhere

edit: throwing in an honorary mention for Qwant, which is an EU-based privacy-oriented search engine. i've been using them for a couple of years now and have yet to hear anything bad about the company. SearX is also supposedly a safe bet

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah there is definitely something going wrong with Google. I noticed that the search results got much worse in the last weeks. Either it's full of SEO Blog Spam, or it straight out doesn't find anything. Especially for technical error messages it stopped finding results. I have to directly look on Github or Stackoverflow now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

The SEO spamming-the-Internet-with-AI-generated-websites crowd has been pulling ahead in the arms race with Google, I think. They've been making up more and more of the results.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I spent years honing my google-fu only to see it become completely useless when google apparently decided that it was no longer interested in returning actually useful results and would instead return nothing but ads and a random assortment of clickbait in which one single word matches one of my search terms.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I googled a very broad, two-word phrase ("MySQL overlayfs") and not a single one of the top 30 results had both of those words in them. It's like Google has regressed to pre-Altavista days.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I can't be bothered to turn off my VPN and since Google Search is dropping CAPTCHA bombs on me every time I try to access it I dropped it. I Throughout the week I rotate between Startpage, DuckDuckGo and Bing. However lately I'm more inclined to use Bing Chat and ChatGPT.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same, captcha was unbearable when using VPN so I just went to Bing. Fuck Google.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Honestly, Bing is unironically good. I started using it because I wanted to play around with Bing Chat back when that was in beta. Before that I was a believer in more privacy focused search. It’s funny, since they limit the chat to Edge I never even use it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As someone who works in IT Security, the captchas are a necessary evil at this point. Without captchas, sites get slammed with millions invalid or malicious requests every hour. The sites I work with will see error traffic spike 3000% or more from credential stuffing attacks alone. These attacks are so highly distributed that simple IP tracking and banning all but ineffective anymore. And about 99.99% of the malicious traffic comes from VPNs and hosting providers. Unfortunately botnets and the people that run them are getting smarter and smarter about constructing the traffic to avoid bot detection.

tldr; the most effective tool to keep a site up and running and accounts secure is unfortunately captchas for VPN users.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Absolutely.

I think there's two issues.
One is that Google's search has gotten a LOT less useful over the last few years. I blame enshittification- it used to just search for whatever you typed in, now there's a lot of 'you typed X but we think you might mean Y' type stuff that produces tons of irrelevant results. You can turn on Verbatim mode and that helps a little but it's still not 'just search for what I fucking typed in and not something else'.
The real advent of enshittification was when Google+ the social network came out- they removed + as a search operator and now you have to enclose something in quotes for 'must include'. It's been going downhill since then.

The other is that Google is either losing an arms race or simply not trying to weed out SEO spam sites. So you ask a question like 'error 0x0000001b blue screen' and you get pages and pages of 'how to solve error 0x0000001b [FIXED]' that are just 'error 0x0000001b is a common error lots of people have, it can be caused by many things, to fix it reboot your computer and if that doesn't work try safe mode and if that doesn't work try OfficialDriverFixRegistryCleanupUtility.exe number one free recommended utility to solve all system problems' (only spread out over 3 pages).
Or you get a bunch of 10 minute videos that illustrate a 20 second fix.
No thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Google Search has been accusing me of being a robot a lot lately, making me solve a bajillion captchas. So I've stopped using search engines entirely. I've bookmarked a lot of the sites I regularly visit and have realized I don't really need Google, apart from for getting the correct links to said websites because I can't remember their .orgs and .coms.

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

I stopped using Google when I became more aware of privacy concerns.
Also first page is horrible, mostly sponsored/ads related links.

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

I think Google search hitched their wagon to Reddit (whether involuntary or not is up for debate) and now it's coming around and biting them in the ass. The "hack" of sticking Reddit or using the tag "site:reddit.com" to the end of whatever your search query was has long been figured out by the masses and I can't help but think the search algorithm has been trained to look there more often by default as a lazy way of doing SEO.

Now that Reddit is rotting from the inside, Google is really having to scramble to do something and fix their SEO spam issues and build trust in their results. What is already a not so great product at the moment in Google Search will soon turn into a bad one if they aren't careful. I think they have coasted for so long as being the default since there was no one else that could challenge them. But with ChatGPT and other LLMs quickly improving, Google has a real danger of losing their biggest cash cow in Seach. Hell if they aren't careful, they could even find their way to non-existence since so much of their revenue comes from serving ads and search listings.

They're really at a turning point and need to be extremely careful in how they move from here. With their recent track record and what they've shown with things like the current Search debacle they're in, Bard, how they've managed Android hardware and software the last decade, etc., I'm not so sure they can do it.

[–] Greenskye 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google as a whole has felt like it's built on top of a growing sinkhole. Everything seems fine on the surface, but I look back at the last ~10 years of google and which of their products has not been killed or gotten worse? When did I start to hesitate to try anything new from Google? And now all the sudden in 2023 we're comparing search engines again?

They've stopped the crazy innovation they were known for. They've continually eroded core products. Their 'ecosystem' barely functions together with bizarre limitations and multiple obvious tie-ins never capitalized on. If anyone was going to build an effective AI, I was sure it'd have been Google first. Why does it feel like they're last to the starting line?

I'm about a year away from just fully jumping ship from almost every google product. And my family/friends would be 2-3 years beyond that (many of them are fully Apple anyway).

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[–] mpaluta 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I recently switched to Kagi. I’m happy to pay for it because it aligns my incentives with theirs. It’s not yet as good as old Google, but it’s way better than new Google.

I really enjoy being able Raise or Block domains in search results. Within my common search areas like programming or personal finance, I try to find blogs and forums I trust and Raise them in future searches. So my searching is getting better over time as I tell the engine what I like and don’t like.

I also block useless domains like Quora.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've heard good things about Kagi on here. I started trying it last night. It seems good but I haven't really used it a lot yet personally though.

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

I've been on Kagi for a couple months now. Very happy with it. Generally unless i think the problem is small and easy (search is not, imo) i want to pay for servers in an attempt to not be "the product". So i like Kagi on that. It's search results are good too, especially after having used DDG for a couple years (iirc? time flies)

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

When I have specific questions that I want to have expanded on, I use GPT4 and then do some reference checking on Google

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For about the last year and a half Google results have been less useful - so yes it's fairly recent(-ish).

Especially for tech stuff. We used to have Reddit to turn to as an alternative, but now that's not working.

https://www.dexerto.com/tech/google-admits-reddit-blackout-tanked-search-results-2191128/ - e.g. the Senior VP for searching in Google even admits that Google is not as good anymore, somewhat as a result of the Reddit issue but that was only propping up the problem that Google itself caused, by allowing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank predatory webpages over real ones with actual content.

I don't know of any solutions to this. I was thinking to search on places individually - like SlackOverflow, but now that company too is having a strike from its volunteer workforce just like Reddit. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Slackoverflow, they all are having MAJOR issues right now, as a result of not wanting to pay their workers and get something for nothing.

So they are turning to AI to solve their problems. AI doesn't understand shit, and in its current form simply parrots the answers that it gets elsewhere, without proper context or anything, or even acknowledging at all where the original content came from. So now as the sources of true content are drying up, and the well having been poisoned, true information is suddenly much more rare and precious than it ever was, yet harder to find than ever before as it is mixed in with all the sewage of people vomiting up their emotions, and actively upvoting things like snarky answers or memes rather than "real" ones.

The information age seems to be over, and in this Late Stage Capitalism we are now entering a new era, whatever it's called (maybe disinformation age?).

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

Google is mostly ads and robots now, I use it mostly for typing website names, not for actually searching things.
For searching things I'm testing kagi (http://www.kagi.com) which is not free, but not being ad-driven is an interesting concept for me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

This looks like a very interesting option but the pricing seems bananas. Early adoption and spreading the word would be driven by power users who are easily above 1,000 searches per month....and 25$ per month is a lot just for search.

[–] rubikcuber 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I felt the same a year or two ago an have used DuckDuckGo almost exclusively since. I believe DDG is a private frontend for Bing, but I may be wrong.

[–] SpaceNoodle 4 points 1 year ago

That's correct, it's Bing under the hood.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I just made the switch from Google to DuckDuckGo in the last week.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Google search has been going down gradually year by year for the last decade for me. My searches have now devolved to just having google search Reddit, like most people now. I recently started using Brave and I liked that it was recapping information for me. DuckDuckGo has been hit or Miss. I’ve started seeing people me toon SearX, which I need to try.

I wish there were a search engine that prioritized searching through places like Reddit, stack exchange, Quora, etc. vs the random clickbait websites trying to sell Amazon links.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo with bangs! It's been pretty good as I am able to narrow down my searches by service which is more necessary than I'd like it to be.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

i've been using ddg, searx and others for years, sometimes startpage when i really need g** restults

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

When I do use google I almost immediately go to the second page, like I dont even read the adverts im immune to it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've been using it less because I constantly get challenged with captchas when trying to use it with my VPN. I like DDG's privacy, but I'm not fond of it as a search engine. I heard good things about Brave search. I've been using their browser for about a year, so I may as well give their search engine a try.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah - as someone who mindlessly would google code syntax all day while working, ChatGPT has taken over that duty (and is doing a much better job at it)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I haven’t used it as my main search engine in years. VERY rarely I escape hatch to google search for weird queries. That used to sometimes work, now it never seems to work (or my queries have gotten more niche over time hah)

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