1y ago

titan times at r*ddit

worldpolitics: It's shitposting all the way down! @lemmy.world

Too soon?

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Google has led me there a few times since I joined Lemmy. Haven't really looked at it outside of that. It has actually popped up in searches more often recently for some reason. That reminds me that I have to switch my default search provider to something that is not shit.
- I'll offer you something that might make you switch to DuckDuckGo and never look back: "bangs".
  It saves me a full step, searching almost anywhere right from DDG. If I need Google, then !g (search query). If I need wikipedia, then !w (search query). If I need Youtube, then !yt. AZLyrics, !azl. Google Maps? !gm. Google Images? !gi... And so on and so forth. It's worth giving a try.
  
  I just want a search engine that indexes the way google and others used to index because honestly I find google's quality has gone down immensely since their focus on corporate names and on-page SEO. It's getting worse and worse with every damn search result just being completely polluted with pages 100% written for robots instead of fucking giving human beings the answers as quickly as possible.
  
  Summed up my opinion of Google perfectly. It's getting more and more difficult to find actual results for my searches, just all crowded with suggestions I'm not interested in. I wouldn't even realize how bad it was if I didn't use DDG to compare it to
  
  This, 300%. If DuckDuckGo had no search capabilities, it would still be my default search engine just due to bangs, they're amazing.
  For non English speakers, you can use your language for Wikipedia bangs. So a search with !wen will take you to English Wikipedia, and a search with !wit to Italian, for example.
  I'll add that Brave Search also supports bangs -- !ddg to use DuckDuckGo.
  
  Thanks for the heads up, I use duckduckgo and didn't even know about bangs.
  
  It's not the most prominently advertised feature of DDG, but to me it's the most powerful one. Glad to share it with my fellow Lemmings.
  
  Agreed with the other commenter: I’ve been using duck duck go for literally years and did not know bangs existed. Thanks!
  
  Thank you been using ddg for a couple of years now and had no idea, always opening a new page for Google search this is brilliant 👍
  
  I used to use DDG a while ago but Google was loads better...at the time. Now I get nothing but ads and video suggestions. I will likely just switch back to DDG again
  Any way to get a Lemmy bang? It seems like that might be difficult to get a Fediverse wide one instead of individual servers.
  
  I guess one way they could do it would be to make a DDG server connected to the fediverse directly, then use federation to index the fediverse, so it can piggyback on the existing infrastructure and it doesn't have to crawl all the servers and keep track of the network manually. Then I suppose individual instances could defederate and remove themselves from DDG searches, which wouldn't be so bad if they really wanted to opt out.
  
  on ddg's website they have a list of bangs you can search through. Maybe someone's added it already? There should also be a link where you can submit bang requests I think.
  
  I checked and there is not. I'll have to check more into making them but it seems domain specific which might be difficult to do across all of Lemmy without a bit of work.
  
  I miss having bangs... Hell, I miss having any hair on my head.
  
  You and me both buddy.
  
  Wow you just made it so much easier to permanently switch. I have my work set to DDG but have to switch to Google pretty often for more obscure things. Now I should be able to set it permanently using bangs.
  
  Great to hear. For myself as well, the rare time that DDG's bing-based results turn up empty, I add !g at the front like it's the sudo command.
  
  Brave search support !bangs too, with pretty similiar terms
  
  Thank you so much for this. Been using Brave for a long time and had never heard of this.
  
  Yep I second this! Switched to duckduckgo a few years ago and never looked back. Didn't even miss Google! Google is too intent on selling me stuff while monitoring damn near everything I do on my device. No need for them. Did love Google photos and how I could easily sync it to my PC but they've done away with that as well which is amazing to me because people loved it and there's really no alternative that works as well as it used to.
  
  Wow that's amazing!
  
  Thanks for the tip! Been using duckduck for a while now, had no idea abour bangs
- Hey, as someone who uses DuckDuckGo, they do unfortunately also engage in some cringe tracking. I think it's a bit less than Google, but honestly I don't think it makes much of a difference. They collect information about what you search for.
  I might switch to Qwant or something. Not sure yet.
  
  I mean it is a search engine, why wouldn't they track what people are searching for?
  The question is are they actually tracking you or just the words you're typing in?
  
  IIRC they track your mouse movements on the search results page, and what links you click on. It's not great :/
  
  Really? I've been using it for a while and haven't noticed tracking.
  What sorts of tracking have you seen them engage in?
  They display ads in search results, which they presumably do need to track clicks for. But you can literally just switch the ads off in the settings. And then you'll never see them again. They're on by default, but not mandatory.
  
  IIRC on the search results page they track your mouse movements and which links you clicked on. The latter I could maybe see as legitimate; the former is pretty sus.
  
  Maybe it's time we start a decentralized search engine !

324 comments