Google has been giving me far far shittier results over the last 5-10 years. It’s crazy to think, but in my opinion it was WAY more accurate years ago than it is today at giving me what I blatantly searched for.
It’s not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don’t make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.
Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won’t find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.
At the very least, it’s no better than the alternatives any more. Whenever I put Duck Duck Go up against Google, I get very similar results, other than all the extra ads on Google.
Same experience.
I’ll click on a page, scroll for a bit, get frustrated, Ctrl-F for the active part of my search string, and not find it.
I left Google because of that but it followed me to Duck Duck Go.
Interesting. I looked it up and found this, so it looks like it’s some hybrid of many 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.
Google has been giving me far far shittier results over the last 5-10 years. It’s crazy to think, but in my opinion it was WAY more accurate years ago than it is today at giving me what I blatantly searched for.
It’s not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don’t make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.
Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won’t find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.
Kagi sucks for this reason too. I can’t believe people recommend that $200/yr paid search engine garbage.
Put another way, spam sites have become more effective at defeating anti-webspam measures.
At the very least, it’s no better than the alternatives any more. Whenever I put Duck Duck Go up against Google, I get very similar results, other than all the extra ads on Google.
Same experience.
I’ll click on a page, scroll for a bit, get frustrated, Ctrl-F for the active part of my search string, and not find it.
I left Google because of that but it followed me to Duck Duck Go.
DDG is just a front-end for Bing. There are very few search engines that actually do their own indexing.
Interesting. I looked it up and found this, so it looks like it’s some hybrid of many sources:
Well I noticed a difference between duckduckgo and Ecosia, both taking results from Bing. Not sure if it’s the language setting, or something else.