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The Verge shows how Google search is useless
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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.
Personally really like ddg over it though. Only gotta be more precise with keywording for finding what you need.
I use DDG but i do wonder what i dont see sometimes.
I often google a specific brand of components at work and even with the exact brand and/or part number in the search it sometimes doesnt turn up any results (say 5-7 random unrelated webpages) and thats it. Then i put the same search in google and bam, top result.
That's what I said - the right key wording. It's pretty strict, whereas Google's results sometimes are a tiny bit more loose understanding of what you roughly mean. Though not always, and on Google I found myself often just adding "Reddit" for specifics. Though really really depends on what you search.
For me DDG offers a lot more than just search results, the bangs and features like I added a script to directly port my questions to some AI is really useful.
I don't know what "right" key wording you want if not the exact model and part number.
Quotes help. So
"model" "part number"since those force them to be in the results. DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results."DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results."
Wow sounds extremely useful and like a feature I want. I love searching for something specific and they are like "did you mean totally unrelated thing?"
Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are "use the search function, this question has been answered already"
Are they actually recommending the Reddit search function? We shit on their internal search function for over a decade, and told people to just use Google and site:Reddit in the search.
I've noticed half the subs are now marked as "NSFW" when searching for something like a plumbing issue for example, which won't allow you to see the posts without using the reddit app.
Use old.reddit as long as you're able to. Don't even need to log in (at least where I live), you just hit the "I'm 18" button
I do (and did when I was still there) use it on a desktop but on a phone it directs you to the terrible mobile site where the HVAC and plumbing subreddits are somehow NSFW and restricted. Maybe next time I'll try to manually redirect to old.reddit and see if it works.
Yup, I rarely use Reddit these days, and when I do, I use old reddit. Oh, and I never log in, no need for that nonsense.
That was my issue with old school SymForums. I don't see that so much on reddit.
To be fair when Google solved SEO spam in 1999, thanks to pagerank, it was no small feat. The others were bad not because they abused ads but because they didn't know how to deal with cheating webmasters.
Why can't someone replicate old Google pagerank?
Pagerank worked first, but SEO adapted since with link farming.
DDG is better, but only in the sense that Google got so bad that now it’s worse than it.
I've found DDG to be adequate for the majority of things I search, but when I need something specific or with some nuance, it fails miserably. For that reason I still use Google when I do stuff for work, or when I do troubleshooting. For my daily usage DDG is just fine, though.
I think it takes a while for that kind of competitor to emerge and gain enough traction to become a genuine alternative option. The primary option everyone long since adopted kinda has to suck for a while :/
It also is going to take another leap in algorithm.
It was a hard problem to solve when Google's founders cracked it, but it's an even harder problem to solve now that you have state of the art spam bots filling the Internet full of shit that looks like it was composed by humans.
If someone cracks how to figure out whether something is ai or not (for real, not the fake solutions we have now) and adds that to a good search algorithm and filters the fake shit by default, they will have a hell of a product on their hands.
I'm of the opinion that it will require human interaction to fix this. It can't be purely solved via algorithms.
What people don't realize is that the original Google search algorithm, PageRank, effectively looks at how real humans interacted with the websites they were indexing. Only websites referenced by other websites were being considered by Google's search engine. And at the time, that meant real human beings were making those links. This gave them a real advantage over other, purely algorithmic search engines.
Something like this will have to be recreated. We will have to figure out a way of prioritizing search results that real human beings have found to be useful.
Tough to do when those services tend to get infiltrated by bots as well.
DDG has been around for quite a while. Now it was a few years ago I used it last time, but the reason I switched back to Google was because I was clearly less productive with DDG.
I don't think something like duckduckgo is gonna be the eventual contender to take on google. I think it'll have to be an engine with its own index or some kind of lateral solution.
Something like brave, kagi, qwant, or stract could maybe turn into something exciting with more momentum, but honestly I have a hard time seeing them be the kind of scrappy competitor with a new approach that unseats the old king who has lost their way in pursuit of more profit at the expense of product quality. None of them seem like they truly have a new approach, but only time will tell how that story plays out this time.
I honestly think it will have to be semi curated and look a lot like a more complex digital version of an encyclopedia.
I mean I think the stupid LLM craze is from trying to make something like that in the vain of the "Hitchhikers Guide" but without having to do the actual work and using autogenerated articles except that makes them prone to being false. The Hitchhikers Guide still had writers and people entering and double checking information.
It can then further link you to related stuff from the web but the wide spread of information is somewhat dead since it's now the product to be sold and free and easy sharing of it would ruin profit margins.
Kagi is better
I'm almost convinced that Kagi comments on Lemmy are spam. Please prove me wrong:
Has anyone here tried Kagi because of a recommendation from here and, well, actually found it better than the rest?
I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.
Thank you for your insight. Much better than the usual, "oh yeah, Kagi is good. All praise Kagi!"
Your account makes it sound very appealing, so I'll check Kagi out more closely.
I didn't get recommended it here, but elsewhere. I ended up paying for a years worth last year and yeah I like it better than pretty much everything else. There is still a rare occasion that I need to use Google, but that is maybe once a week whereas with DuckDuckGo it was multiple times per-day.
I did lol, why the hell would I recommend it otherwise?
It’s a search engine, so to be better than the others it’s obvious it would have to return better results than the usual ad-based crap — and it does. There is a free trial and you can check out if it’s worth it for you btw
It has quite a lot of QoL features for searches, but their main one — searching — is worth the cost; if you do a search once in a blue moon or append “Reddit” at the end of a query, it’s not imo since any search engine is “good enough” for that. If you instead actually do a search without having a specific website in mind, it’s good. You can also filter out the quora and other shitty websites results, which is nice
Not directly saying that you're doing this, but c'mon, you know the answer. Why would anyone recommend a paid product?
Nice! I didn't know there was a trial. Good to know.
Oh, now we're talking!! That's very cool.
Cause the free alternatives are trash, so… it’s not like “free is better” is always true
I'm starting to feel like a shill because I say this so often, but Kagi is the only one I've found that actually does the job anymore. To me a search engine that works is worth the small cost each month, but unfortunately I don't see paying for search becoming mainstream anytime soon.
I was sceptical at first too, but a not-paid-for search engine will either have ads, paid results or try to monetize the search data in some way. I feel it helps me find what I need, better than the alternatives I tried, and I like the features and configuration options it has.
chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.