Google's search engine has gotten lazy, with the first dozen or more hits being YouTube and Reddit results.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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duckduckgo has been fine for me
My main problem with DDG is that it doesn't show the dates of results. A lot of the time, I need to know that to get the information I need. I used it for a couple of years, but I was constantly forced to go back to Google or Bing to get the information I needed.
I found Kagi earlier this year and tried it out, and it's as close to perfect as you can get, IMO. I really can't recommend it enough. It's like being back to "the before times" when Google was king, with the addition of many other features. It's a paid service, and I'm more than happy to do so for something like this. No tracking, a ton of features, very well designed, and results that never fail. I've shared my account with family and friends, and everyone has mentioned how good it is after trying it.
Sorry if it feels like I'm a shill for it, I'm just super happy with it and really feel like everyone deserves to know about it.
Nowadays i find myself leaning the old ways: browser bookmarks. Not long ago, search was so good that i stopped using them.
Yeah, If the search is about something relatively obscure then 50% of the links are random letters and numbers or worse, believable looking links that are riddled with viruses.
Which is why I stopped going since about 4 years ago now. One day I just went to a different mall, and never looked back
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I use DDG and it's fine? Just use a different search engine
In my experience DDG and Google are pretty close to the same quality. IE neither is good.
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Yep, I switched to kagi a while back and couldn’t be happier with the results. If you don’t want to be the product, maybe consider paying for search?
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The old "Bing is just like Google" ad copy is getting truer and truer in a bad way.
This is why I have been using aselfhosted searxng instance for over a year and half now.
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All the people complaining must not be using verbatim search (in search tools, toggle from "all results.")
Verbatim search? As in direct string comparison? What is this 1999?
This post but replace google search with the general internet.
Nearly every place that feels like the old internet is not as popular.
I used to think that was a bad thing, I'm starting to think maybe I've just been pushing aside the reality that when the internet was good, it wasn't as popular.
Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.
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ITT: people who don't know that DuckDuckGo is just Bing with a bird on it
I think that’s an oversimplification. I get different results.
Wiki claims (with five sources I didn’t check):
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.
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This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.
I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?
Bit-warden for password manager, FOSS cross platform. FF should import all the bookmarks. I'd save all open tabs to a new bookmark folder before transfer then open that folder after.
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Tor Browser is planning to remove Google from the search engine options a user can choose: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41835
There some say brave onion + no JS is good: https://search.brave4u7jddbv7cyviptqjc7jusxh72uik7zt6adtckl5f4nwy2v72qd.onion/
Mullvad team seems to be considering 4 possible options:
- Startpage: https://www.startpage.com/
- Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
- Brave Search: https://search.brave.com/
- Metager: https://metager.org/
PS: Not disgussing ddg / ddg onion too much, basically because ddg is the long-time default search engine of TB. Most TB users assume ddg is a decent, standard, generic option, esp. its non-JS version.