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.
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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”
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.
What are y’all searching for that Google search isn’t working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I’m baffled by this.
A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.
I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.
Google anything related to ‘laptop monitor turn off’ and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search
I’m not even a sysadmin, just a power user and this infuriates me to no end. I gave up on a search just a couple days ago because I kept getting bottom tier answers. Like thanks but I already know how to use my computer, now tell me how to fix this problem.
C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I’ve always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.
C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result
That’s not what they’re saying. They mean that if your search contains that or is somewhat adjacent (despite being more specific), your results will be drowned in it. For example, if you had something like “laptop monitor turn off when bla bla bla”, 90% of the results will completely ignore what you’ve added.
I’ve got to deal with the same shit whenever I have to deal with complicated programming questions. Half the results will be related to some really basic mistake on the user’s side that I haven’t done, and I’ll need to spend a lot of time trying to find the magical word combination that doesn’t trigger those non-related issues and actually show me what I need.
Yeah, and what I was saying is it’s always been that way since the first search engines started popping up.
Stupid searches yield stupid results
You’re a Systems Administrator, but Google Tier 2 issues, do you provide break fix support? I thought as a SA you would be working behind the scenes on systems (apps), servers, etc.
Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.
We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…
I think this is a training issue that needs to be resolved at the Helpdesk level. I understand that nobody is perfect but if you keep seeing tickets like that - Helpdesk managers need to update their training modules and start tweaking the Helpdesk system to have service requests go to the proper groups. Incident tickets are another story but that’s where the training comes in.
Torrents, modded apk’s,…
Check out my results for some chinese download service called “Content Plaza” for example:
Google:
Yandex:
Like, 2? On the ‘entire’ internet? 2? Right…
Was Yandex respecting your query there?
Added quotation marks for “terabox” as well, and it was fascinating across providers:
Yandex agreed with your Google search…
…but not mine:
DDG coming in with one result:
Startpage, just one result?!
…nope, not from the “mobile site”:
Bing didn’t care about those silly quotation marks, here are a thousand results:
Yet if I enter something like ‘resolv’ in Google I need to add ‘-resolve’ to not get hundreds of unrelated results… Same goes for any not-too-popular software that is named a slight misspelling of their purpose… I even find it ridiculous how often first results litterally say underneath they did not contain your query…
But with terabox and “content plaza” it gives 2 results?
Startpage I have no idea, but I’m guessing they, like many, use the Google API for webcrawler results… 1 result? Those are pretty common words,…
Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)
That is a dumb feature that shouldn’t be trusted.
I mean if they got it right it would be a handy feature lol, but yes it clearly can’t be trusted so I stopped bothering
Right. I just think it was overly ambitious. It’s right just enough to earn trust and wrong just enough to burn you. I had a really, really dumb argument once because of that feature
Ah, yes, arbitrary examples. I can make those up too.
Is he not slated for season two? I thought that robot he voiced was going to be in it, I remember reading some article months ago though I admit I only have a passing interest in the show.
I see speculation but nothing solid. I think google is pulling from the rumors, which it really shouldn’t. If he is slated then that’s fine, let me know if you find anything
I don’t actually care enough to go looking into it, I was just mentioning what I remember reading.
yes that’s why I made up an arbitrary example of something I had experienced firsthand
oh okay, you wanna be like that
Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.
Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.
Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.”
I just tried “ASCII scan codes” or “DOS scan codes”. Both gave me what you asked for in Google in the top three results, with the first one including tables that listed both ASCII values and scan codes for reference.
I use DDG and if the result is not what I’m looking for, I add !g to forward the query to Google.
80% of the times, I need to add !g because DDG is clueless.
I wish I could say otherwise but Google search results are still better overall than DDG.
Sure, for some specific thematics, DDG will do better. But that’s for quite niche subjects.
Very surprised to see people talk about DDG like it’s at the same level or better than Google.
I made the switch to DDG a few days ago and it actually is insane how much more relevant the information is compared to google.
The latest in hipster rants. apparently not easy to find on Google ;)
‘We didn’t find many results matching the terms you wrote.’
THAT’S WHY I FUCKING WROTE THEM.
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
Aren’t they just an alt frontend for Google? Maybe you’re having issues with the UI. Most of the results should be the same.
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.
I wonder if that could be because your Google results are personalized.
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.
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?
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.
Agree.
I think people’s ability to effectively Google varies though. There are people who will write full questions in, or fail to iteratively improve their search terms based on the results, and ignoring the fact that bard is actually pretty good if they start using that, googling is much more effective if you stick to relevant keywords and search using operators.
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
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/
Duckduckgo is a frontend for Bing.
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.
you still go there out of habit
Speak for yourself
