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.
Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there’s other alternatives and searx unified them all
SearX isn’t maintained anymore, SearXNG is the meta-search engine that is still maintained.
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.
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 just ask ChatGPT these days.
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”
Yeah it is kind of like the “trust, but verify” paradigm. It will likely generate useful code or a very good starting point, but you should always check if it actually does what you expect it to.
You can’t trust them blindly. But They’re very helpful in your day to day tasks.
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 also don’t want to need an add-on for every niche thing I like to look at.
SEO abuse has ruined the internet. We could’ve had something good.
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
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.
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.
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.
What are y’all searching for that Google search isn’t working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I’m baffled by this.
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.
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,…
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.
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.
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…
DuckDuckGo ftw 💯
I use Google for maps and I’m still using their email for one account but I hate it. Duckduckgo’s maps are way less useful. I know they’re tracking my every move. I want to normalize leaving my cell phone at home at this point.
For some stuff I had more luck using ChatGPT and crosscheck using DuckDuckGo.
‘We didn’t find many results matching the terms you wrote.’
THAT’S WHY I FUCKING WROTE THEM.
Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they’re trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.
i test all web search engines the same way:
- punch in “Python itertools”
- see if the official Python.org documentation for itertools is the top result.
if it’s not, then the search engine is contaminated with advertised or SEO optimized results and it’s wasting my time
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
deleted by creator
What’s the consensus on Mojeek? https://www.mojeek.com/
Mojeek has pretty bad results. I’d only use it to avoid censorship of results
if you’re willing to help at all we’re always looking for feedback on specific results, and also have this page for testing staging algorithms, there’s a big change on there currently. No bother if not.
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
And that mall is
tons of alternatives.
search engines with independent indexes(i.e., not beholden to any big search engine):- mojeek
- brave search(semi independent)
- kagi(semi independent)
meta-search engines(gets results from other search engines):
- startpage(google)
- duckduckgo(bing)
- qwant(bing)
- swisscows(bing)
- metager(multiple sources)
- searx(ng)(multiple sources, configurable by user)
I’m still missing a ton but this should give you an idea.
for more, see this interactive graph, or this Wikipedia list which includes other niche types of search engines as well.
I personally use mojeek(because of their independent index) with duckduckgo as a fallback.
thanks a lot for the mention, if you wanna use that fallback less and less, feeding back on algo updates via https://www.mojeek.com/eval always helps us
didn’t know about the page. thanks! and good to see you on Lemmy.
Haven’t used Google search for years.
Teach me your ways
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.
