I ask because I’ve been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I’ve been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?
Edit: In no particular order, some recommended alternatives to Google
SearXNG
Whoogle
Ecosia
Brave
Dogpile
DuckDuckGo
Kagi
Swiss Cows
Qwant
Bing
DuckDuckGo uses Bing results. Also DuckDuckGo is not your friend.
I personally use SearXNG for best results. Public instance list.
That article is about their web browser. Agree that it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that their search engine is squeaky clean. Regardless, DDG results are much more useful than Google results, as the entire first page isn’t ads.
This. It was an interesting read and gives me doubts, but it’s undoubtably better than using google and I can set it to my default search engine in safari
Iwould honestly not use Safari either. Mozilla Firefox is the way to go (unless you’re on iOS where there actually is no real choice, although the probably still better to use the Firefox front end)
«DDG results are much more useful than Google results» – not if one is searching in anything but english; not sure for english either (had very poor results myself whenever i tried it) but at least can’t disprove it.
The English results are pretty good from what I’ve seen. Hit and miss in some areas though, like if you want to search in quotes.
Simple searches in other languages seem to work OK. It might depend on the language though. Google does better overall.
@BrikoX Thanks for that link on DuckDuckGo - interesting read.
Thanks for the link on SearXNG never heard of that before.
Yeah although this is specifically the Duckduckgo web Browser rather than their search site. The only web browser to use is Firefox, set up the privacy and tracking settings correctly plus add in privacy extensions.
Duckduckgo website doesn’t track you in the same way, but still it is a company and should not be treated as a virtuous entity.
DuckDuckGo is not your friend
please, PLEASE, never forget that the CEO of DuckDuckGo is also the founder of the “Names Database”. it is insane to me that anyone trusts DDG. where do you think they get all the money for marketing from? i’ve seen a DDG ad on a fucking bus stop in the middle of nowhere
edit: throwing in an honorary mention for Qwant, which is an EU-based privacy-oriented search engine. i’ve been using them for a couple of years now and have yet to hear anything bad about the company. SearX is also supposedly a safe bet
For me searxng hasn’t been working (tried multiple instances, throws mixed errors). I’ve been using whoogle and it works pretty well.
My site doesn’t seems to be index. Is there a way to let SearXNG instance know about my URL?
It doesn’t crawl the sites itself, it just parses the rusults from all the existing search engines and combines them.
Ask Google and Bing to index your site. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289#request_indexing
https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860b
I honestly went back to Google after seeing every fucking link in DuckDuckGo behind MSN. Almost every alternative search has Microsoft’s claws in them.
Glad to see a potential alternative in SearXNG. Thanks for the info.
same here (concerning going back to google every time); unfortunately can’t share optimism for searxng: afaiu it’s not a search engine but an aggregator/frontend, i tend to get all the same sh*t with it no matter which combination of search engines / settings i tried. finally just gave up for the moment with an internal promise to do more testing in a year or two.
I use searxng too. For the most part I usually get what I need from it when I do a search.
Yeah there is definitely something going wrong with Google. I noticed that the search results got much worse in the last weeks. Either it’s full of SEO Blog Spam, or it straight out doesn’t find anything. Especially for technical error messages it stopped finding results. I have to directly look on Github or Stackoverflow now.
The SEO spamming-the-Internet-with-AI-generated-websites crowd has been pulling ahead in the arms race with Google, I think. They’ve been making up more and more of the results.
Absolutely.
I think there’s two issues.
One is that Google’s search has gotten a LOT less useful over the last few years. I blame enshittification- it used to just search for whatever you typed in, now there’s a lot of ‘you typed X but we think you might mean Y’ type stuff that produces tons of irrelevant results. You can turn on Verbatim mode and that helps a little but it’s still not ‘just search for what I fucking typed in and not something else’.
The real advent of enshittification was when Google+ the social network came out- they removed + as a search operator and now you have to enclose something in quotes for ‘must include’. It’s been going downhill since then.The other is that Google is either losing an arms race or simply not trying to weed out SEO spam sites. So you ask a question like ‘error 0x0000001b blue screen’ and you get pages and pages of ‘how to solve error 0x0000001b [FIXED]’ that are just ‘error 0x0000001b is a common error lots of people have, it can be caused by many things, to fix it reboot your computer and if that doesn’t work try safe mode and if that doesn’t work try OfficialDriverFixRegistryCleanupUtility.exe number one free recommended utility to solve all system problems’ (only spread out over 3 pages).
Or you get a bunch of 10 minute videos that illustrate a 20 second fix.
No thanks.What do you use instead?
Still Google TBH. Just with more frustration.
At some point I’ll give DuckDuckGo another try…
I’ve tried Bing, but the search result page is so full of videos and other media elements that it makes it hard for me to go through the results quickly. The DDG interface is less cluttered and it supposedly shows the same results as Bing, but I find it’s much slower to load and perform searches.
I can’t be bothered to turn off my VPN and since Google Search is dropping CAPTCHA bombs on me every time I try to access it I dropped it. I Throughout the week I rotate between Startpage, DuckDuckGo and Bing. However lately I’m more inclined to use Bing Chat and ChatGPT.
Same, captcha was unbearable when using VPN so I just went to Bing. Fuck Google.
Honestly, Bing is unironically good. I started using it because I wanted to play around with Bing Chat back when that was in beta. Before that I was a believer in more privacy focused search. It’s funny, since they limit the chat to Edge I never even use it.
I started dropping services that ask CAPTCHA every time… shit is so fucking annoying. They treat us like idiots and most of us just take it.
Got to vote with our feet!
As someone who works in IT Security, the captchas are a necessary evil at this point. Without captchas, sites get slammed with millions invalid or malicious requests every hour. The sites I work with will see error traffic spike 3000% or more from credential stuffing attacks alone. These attacks are so highly distributed that simple IP tracking and banning all but ineffective anymore. And about 99.99% of the malicious traffic comes from VPNs and hosting providers. Unfortunately botnets and the people that run them are getting smarter and smarter about constructing the traffic to avoid bot detection.
tldr; the most effective tool to keep a site up and running and accounts secure is unfortunately captchas for VPN users.
My ISP puts us behind country wide CGNATs. So if a site bans an IP it’s possible they’ll turn the lights out for a whole region.
Google is a trash company. although Maps and Youtube are strong products that are hard to replace. Search and email have been enshittified over last decade like no other.
maps was ruined compared to what it used to be. I can’t remember when but I found it super useful and then one day they changed some stuff and doing stuff just became crap.
Popups. Any time you open Maps app now, you get a “latest in area” popup that’s some local events but mostly just sponsored ads.
@sadreality Maps and Youtube are strong products
Agree 100%
I spent years honing my google-fu only to see it become completely useless when google apparently decided that it was no longer interested in returning actually useful results and would instead return nothing but ads and a random assortment of clickbait in which one single word matches one of my search terms.
I googled a very broad, two-word phrase (“MySQL overlayfs”) and not a single one of the top 30 results had both of those words in them. It’s like Google has regressed to pre-Altavista days.
Google Search has been accusing me of being a robot a lot lately, making me solve a bajillion captchas. So I’ve stopped using search engines entirely. I’ve bookmarked a lot of the sites I regularly visit and have realized I don’t really need Google, apart from for getting the correct links to said websites because I can’t remember their .orgs and .coms.
I think Google search hitched their wagon to Reddit (whether involuntary or not is up for debate) and now it’s coming around and biting them in the ass. The “hack” of sticking Reddit or using the tag “site:reddit.com” to the end of whatever your search query was has long been figured out by the masses and I can’t help but think the search algorithm has been trained to look there more often by default as a lazy way of doing SEO.
Now that Reddit is rotting from the inside, Google is really having to scramble to do something and fix their SEO spam issues and build trust in their results. What is already a not so great product at the moment in Google Search will soon turn into a bad one if they aren’t careful. I think they have coasted for so long as being the default since there was no one else that could challenge them. But with ChatGPT and other LLMs quickly improving, Google has a real danger of losing their biggest cash cow in Seach. Hell if they aren’t careful, they could even find their way to non-existence since so much of their revenue comes from serving ads and search listings.
They’re really at a turning point and need to be extremely careful in how they move from here. With their recent track record and what they’ve shown with things like the current Search debacle they’re in, Bard, how they’ve managed Android hardware and software the last decade, etc., I’m not so sure they can do it.
Google as a whole has felt like it’s built on top of a growing sinkhole. Everything seems fine on the surface, but I look back at the last ~10 years of google and which of their products has not been killed or gotten worse? When did I start to hesitate to try anything new from Google? And now all the sudden in 2023 we’re comparing search engines again?
They’ve stopped the crazy innovation they were known for. They’ve continually eroded core products. Their ‘ecosystem’ barely functions together with bizarre limitations and multiple obvious tie-ins never capitalized on. If anyone was going to build an effective AI, I was sure it’d have been Google first. Why does it feel like they’re last to the starting line?
I’m about a year away from just fully jumping ship from almost every google product. And my family/friends would be 2-3 years beyond that (many of them are fully Apple anyway).
A few years back (or maybe several now) I used to listen to a few of the TWIT network podcasts and the one that talked about google had mentioned a new CFO at the time. They mentioned how they were “tightening the belt” and trying to control google’s massive spending. Looking back, I’ve enjoyed google products/services less and less ever since and I feel like it’s down to profits. They used to spend a ton of money developing very interesting new things and as far as I can tell they just don’t anymore. If they do it’s something like google bard which is only because ChatGPT blew up.
Everything cool that already existed is being filled with Ads (in some form) or abandoned. Are they even still trying to do the self driving car service?
Old google was wild, they even forced ISPs to offer higher speeds in the US to compete with their Google Fiber. Who knows what speeds we’d still be at right now if they never did that.
For about the last year and a half Google results have been less useful - so yes it’s fairly recent(-ish).
Especially for tech stuff. We used to have Reddit to turn to as an alternative, but now that’s not working.
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/google-admits-reddit-blackout-tanked-search-results-2191128/ - e.g. the Senior VP for searching in Google even admits that Google is not as good anymore, somewhat as a result of the Reddit issue but that was only propping up the problem that Google itself caused, by allowing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank predatory webpages over real ones with actual content.
I don’t know of any solutions to this. I was thinking to search on places individually - like SlackOverflow, but now that company too is having a strike from its volunteer workforce just like Reddit. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Slackoverflow, they all are having MAJOR issues right now, as a result of not wanting to pay their workers and get something for nothing.
So they are turning to AI to solve their problems. AI doesn’t understand shit, and in its current form simply parrots the answers that it gets elsewhere, without proper context or anything, or even acknowledging at all where the original content came from. So now as the sources of true content are drying up, and the well having been poisoned, true information is suddenly much more rare and precious than it ever was, yet harder to find than ever before as it is mixed in with all the sewage of people vomiting up their emotions, and actively upvoting things like snarky answers or memes rather than “real” ones.
The information age seems to be over, and in this Late Stage Capitalism we are now entering a new era, whatever it’s called (maybe disinformation age?).
I’ve heard people mention disinformation age and I wouldn’t be surprised if in 50 years this time period is called that. I imagine it’s at least going to get a bit worse before it gets better.
Disinformation sounds like an intentionality behind it, which in some cases is very much true (Russian sources proven in some cases in order to sow discord).
While the terms late stage capitalism and/or enshittification of the internet may capture how it is oftentimes rather a byproduct of a profit seeking motive - i.e. the disinformation was not the point, it is simply what resulted from the process of chasing profits at all costs not just to be responsible and keep the company going but to make enormous bloated kickbacks to executives and stockholders (at the expense of rather than while feeding forward the product).
It is ironic how the two forms of dis-/misinformation look remarkably similar to one another. Both are forms of destruction and decay, and both result from selfishness and greed, the only difference is whether it comes from an external or internal source, the former wanting to actively destroy while the latter is an even greater degree of malice in not even caring or possibly even noticing the fact that destruction is taking place. Like a zombie apocalypse where they eat and are not even sated as an animal eating would have been, and simply move on to eat again and again and still yet again, entirely unnaturally, according to a level of greed not even physically possible in the past (bc of constraints on stomach size, even if some animals can expand that like a python, yet they still have a limit whereas corporations do not?).
And then you have the whole “who rather than what you know” crowd for whom facts do not even matter so much, being too lazy to consume them personally. Humans are very much herd animals (sheeple) it just is a fact. These will consume the ads, and do not care really what info is fed to them, hence why should a corporation be interested in feeding them high quality info when low quality stuff is received better actually, as well as being significantly cheaper? In fact the users would outright complain if only high quality material were available, bc it is too difficult for them to read. This is an interesting tangent to explore bc it shows how it is not the greed of corporations forcing the misinformation down their users’ throats unwilling, but rather corporations properly fulfilling their duties to both shareholders and a majority of users simultaneously, giving their customers precisely what they wanted, asked for, and demanded as in they go to whoever offers that. Who is really in charge here, if not you and I making decisions - Google or Bing or DDG - every single time we do a search?
Here is an interesting article touching upon some of these thoughts: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/113196/An-older-article-that-is-taking-on-new-significance-considering.
I stopped using Google when I became more aware of privacy concerns.
Also first page is horrible, mostly sponsored/ads related links.That second point is a good enough reason in itself. Like it almost doesn’t matter what I search for, everytime it’s just links to stores.
I kind of like https://swisscows.com
@wurzelwerk Did a search on some car issues I’m having and the first link was better than anything on the first page of Google.
Google is mostly ads and robots now, I use it mostly for typing website names, not for actually searching things.
For searching things I’m testing kagi (http://www.kagi.com) which is not free, but not being ad-driven is an interesting concept for me.This looks like a very interesting option but the pricing seems bananas. Early adoption and spreading the word would be driven by power users who are easily above 1,000 searches per month…and 25$ per month is a lot just for search.
According to a blog from March, it was costing them 1.25 cents per search. It seems like they brought that cost down around May since they were able to raise the search limits from what they were in March. It doesn’t sound like they’re making a ton of money though even at these prices.
But I agree, $25 is a ton for a search engine. On the other hand, if you’re using it enough to need that plan you’re probably using it for your work. The average person (which, the average person doesn’t care enough to sign up for this) only searches enough times a month to need the standard plan for $5.
When I have specific questions that I want to have expanded on, I use GPT4 and then do some reference checking on Google
I’ve heard good things about Kagi on here. I started trying it last night. It seems good but I haven’t really used it a lot yet personally though.
I’ve been on Kagi for a couple months now. Very happy with it. Generally unless i think the problem is small and easy (search is not, imo) i want to pay for servers in an attempt to not be “the product”. So i like Kagi on that. It’s search results are good too, especially after having used DDG for a couple years (iirc? time flies)
I haven’t used it as my main search engine in years. VERY rarely I escape hatch to google search for weird queries. That used to sometimes work, now it never seems to work (or my queries have gotten more niche over time hah)
