What is the least SEO-fucked search engine?
What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding "reddit" or whatever internet community to the results?
Don't even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect my search queries.
Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.
Yep, Google decided it was too complicated and removed it all. Dont know how it was too complicated, people just wouldn't use it if they didn't know about it. They felt "natural language" would be more useful. Bullshit, I search for "foo and bar" it'll return me results for foo and ignore the rest
That's not why they ignore them. They ignore them because it is profitable.
WDYM? Quotes work for me. Can you give an example that is broken?
Too complicated for them and their optimisations, maybe?
This still works if you use double quotes!
Yeah I really miss those days of logical operands. Back in the Alta Vista days I could do Boolean searches, but yeah that's been replaced with speech recognition which doesn't work as well. To this day I still like the Boolean search better. Newer does not always mean better. Most of the time it only means dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
Operands still work. You may be confused because the se will offer you results without them if your operands produced nothing.
I don't know what is the best but the clearest thing to me is that each day Google is getting worse...
Definitely. So many searches lately will return results that only partially match the search terms. What's even the point of searching if you're just going to show a bunch of unrelated results?
I hate that so much
Sorry, looks like you searched for stuff that isn't really popular. How about these unrelated Facebook and Pintrest links instead?
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of your doing your search: they got paid for the results that they delivered, and for the ad traffic of you having received it! Don't you see why this is best for them you? /s
I actually prefer Google for shopping. Just turn off your adblocker, search for a particular item you want to buy and bam your first 3 to 4 pages are retailers pushing the product with their prices listed (with a touch of scam websites that I presume pay for advertising). Anything else I add 'Reddit' or just watch a few YouTube videos depending on what kind of answers I'm looking for
For my job and work. I use Kagi. Its not free, but the search returns are very good, you can filter domains out from your returns, it supports custom "bangs" ala duck duck go and theres no tracking of queries. There are also specific filters for things like programming, or recipes for cooking etc. Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer. They are trying to establish a sustainable model to run on that allows for privacy.
I find it quite refreshing. It isnt free and I generally hate subscription stuff, but this is easily one I dont mind as it pays dividends often when searching for work.
Wow. I don't mind paying for stuff if it's good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.
The problem here is so many people are used to tech running at a loss on the books and/subsiding operating costs by selling customer data and analytics.
The reality is running tech companies is hard and expensive. The money here goes straight back into development. It’s just out of beta since march, and they have increased their quotas since I have been a customer.
But people are spoiled by free where you aren’t a customer. You are the product. If you are cool with that it’s fine. This isn’t the product for you.
For me, I like the idea and the searches are better than DDG/bing and startpage/google. So it’s worth the cost personally. I would rather pay that than say…Amazon prime where I’m both the customer and the product.
The free trial with a 100 searches makes it pretty easy to figure out how much you actually search online and if you're not a power user, that 300 searches plan is pretty OK. If you work in tech, that 10$ plan is definitely enough - in searching pretty much constantly and never got above the 800 searches the 10$ plan used to offer (now that plan has 1000 searches in it).
Those prices don't seem super horrible, but I don't see any reason to trust that this company isn't mining and selling my data in addition to collecting my money.
Not sure where you are, but there's practically no place in the US you get a lunch for that. In flat terms it's quite cheep. It's only expensive relative to free.
And when you think about it, your search service really is your internet. It shapes your whole internet experience. If that's not worth $5/month to make sure it's good and not polluted with ads, I don't know what to tell you.
Having to pay for a limited number of searches really takes away a lot of freedom. I would really have to think about my search query and be upset if it didn't give me the results I was looking for. I would need unlimited searches just for my peace of mind. And I'm definitely not paying more then a couple of dollars for it. Might sound cheap but I really really hate subscription services.
They have quota controls as well. A soft limit that will send you alerts when you hit them and you pay 1.5 cents per search and a hard limit that will stop searches from being run.
Personally I went to a tier that I dont exceed (10/month). I ahve considered going to the annual subscription which is also unlimited but the same as the 25/month, just discounted a bit. I could probably write that one off for work too, definately could with taxes.
I like the idea of paying for internet services, but $5 a month is way too expensive for me.
Seconding Kagi. I like the ability to pin/raise/lower domains as well as just block them. I tend to surface websites like the NHS.
My God, 5$ for unlimited searches would have been expensive, but you only get 300! This thing would have to literally read my mind, and even then I don't think it would be worth it
Yeah I did a free trial, tore through the 100 free searches in like a week so I'd need over 300 to get through a month, and I refuse to pay $25/month.
I really liked it while it lasted but I don't $25/month like it.
I'm also a kagi user and share the same feelings about it. Definitely worth it. Specially since I know my search data is not used to bias search results or sell ads on the search results.
i'm also a Kagi user/fan. it looks good, is fast, doesn't have ads, & the results appear to be better than i get using other engines. the lenses are also nice.
Theres also no ads, you are paying and are the customer.
This is a fallacy. Just because you're paying doesn't mean you're the customer. Whoever pays the most money is the customer; everyone else is the product and is merely paying for the privilege of being the product. Examples: Microsoft Windows, most Android phones, cable TV.
The difference being it’s literally part of their mission statement and core purposes for creating the product…
Hey, thanks for the recommendation. I had no idea a service like this existed. I've been frustrated with all of the search engines for years now. I just signed up. Hopefully it turns out to be rad.
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
Over all bing search it self isn’t bad.
Dunno why you're getting down voted. It's literally a search engine that can read all the bullshit faster than you, so that you don't have to.
If it isn’t open / free / private there is a % of the community that will not even try it.
Just like on Reddit lots of negative energy in some subs.
Hardly saying bing is amazing only that lately I have been drawn to trying it more since the chat based search that allows follow ups in natural language.
Google bards equivalent is only available in the US and just this last week the UK so I can’t try it out.
However over all I agree that more and more google search results have more adds and the good results pushed further and further down.
perplexity is also good
I recently switched to Bing after years of disappointment from Google and months of disappointment from DDG. Bing is pretty disappointing too, but less so, so far. I tried to use the chat feature a couple of days ago, but it said I have to download the app. Nah... fuck these tech companies and their apps.
Here's my experience with some search engines:
A Tier -- Gives me the closest results.
B Tier -- Gives me decent results.
C Tier -- Gives me poor results.
Open Source Front Ends - Results quality varies.
F Tier -- It sucks.
If anyone knows of any other search engine not in this list, let me know so I can try it out.
It used to use Google search results but they switched to Bing. It is worse than Google.
That'd be news to me and an ad hoc comparison I just did shows results much closer to Google than Bing with results usually just locally having switched places while on Bing it's an entirely different order.
They do(did?) use Bing for mobile search results because daddy Google forced them to not be competitive on the platform they're most interested in.
Now that I'm trying it again, it actually is similar to Google's results but it filters some of the more useful results I get from Google based on some things I'm searching up.
We have more broadly incorporated Microsoft Bing into our results, using a unique solution specifically fitted to our privacy promise. Our collaboration with Microsoft also has enabled us to provide a superior mobile experience. You will see benefits like better search suggestions, fewer ads, and greatly improved similar image results, among others.
I don't know of this only applies to the widges or actual search results.
I can agree with the google placement if you're assuming the searcher has experience with search operators, most of the time if I'm not wasting time crafting my search results to exclude all the SEO spam sites and Q&A sites written with the same amount of padding as a middle school book report, DuckDuckGo will give me better results than Google.
Is you.com having issues currently? Tried test searches and every content element just keeps loading
Where can I find soemthing about startpage changing to bing? Can't find anything about that in my search engine 😅
We have more broadly incorporated Microsoft Bing into our results, using a unique solution specifically fitted to our privacy promise. Our collaboration with Microsoft also has enabled us to provide a superior mobile experience. You will see benefits like better search suggestions, fewer ads, and greatly improved similar image results, among others.
I don't know if this applies to the actual search results or the widgets. But upon checking, the results are actually still closer to Google but it filters out some results that I find useful. It also pulls up the first Wikipedia article it can find in the first page and displays it as a little widget on the side even if it's far from relevant.
what about yep.com ?
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll try it out this week when I work on my papers.
How about yahoo.com?
I'll try it too this week.
Topics like this remind me of the pre-Google era. If Google can’t see the damage they’ve done, they deserve to vanish like the ones they’ve vanished in the early years.
For a brief moment in time search engines were perfected. Then they veered off course. All of them did. Why though.
Remember when you could list vaguely some words related an obscure movie to Google. Then it would tell you the movie you're thinking of. That's been nerfed.
Tangentially related. What's the deal with search engines of online stores. It's like they aren't even search engines at all. They're doing nothing more than showing me products/sellers they want me to buy from. Digikey lets you drill down to precise specification filters. I wish all search engines could be like that.
Actually the vague movie description thing was due to imdb's movie tags that users had set on the movie and search engine was doing the simples things it could i.e. "all this one word links point to this movie, perhaps it is this?"
Why'd they stop?
duckduckgo.com only had 2 ads that were clearly identified when I just tried it. no idea how manipulated the rest of it is.
Duck Duck Go search results are a little lacking, though, like it’s completely missing some possibilities. Looking up tech stuff for a Linux issue I’m having, Duck will miss a site that Google finds - and even if I enter the exact text of the site, it’s completely absent from Duck.
I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I'm a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.
i gotta use duck duck go on my work laptop. no sugarcoat its dogshit google is still better even tho google is getting worse
Use a decentralized SearXNG instance and have it query every search engine that exists on the internet, or host your own of you're really actually worried about privacy, and never look back.
I just tried two of the instances listed with a search for "how to filter mineral spirits", and they both gave me errors. Both Google and DDG gave me an answer. Is there some trick I'm missing here?
The instances get overloaded quickly and the IPs blocked by google/Microsoft/etc.. Better off self-hosting.
+1 for SearXNG. I've personally found mostly better results, for my use cases, than Google or duckduckgo, although I keep DDG as a backup.
SearXNG is great.
I think the features I'm missing are easily adding more engines (haven't looked much into it), and automatically blacklisting domains from coming up in searches.
+1 for SearXNG… I run my own instance in docker, and host it through a cloud flare tunnel. I set all my “web browser bars” on all my devices to auto use its address, so I don’t even have to think about it, and all my searches are auto routed through my instance. It’s Great!
I’m using Kagi, which aggregates search results from several search engines (including their own), but without the ads, with less crap and with features like searching for literal strings and promoting/demoting certain websites. It’s a paid service, though, but I like it enough that I’m ok with that.
I've been using https://www.ecosia.org/ because they plow some of their profits into planting trees. They use bing results and I generally find what I need quickly.
I use Swisscows and Metager, and usually find what I need, if I don't I retry the query with Startpage.
yandex.com if you don't mind ru gov spying on you. Though you can use it with tor or VPN for privacy.
Where can I find soemthing about startpage changing to bing?
I am not sure whether DDG or SearX results are optimised by someone, but it is different from what I would see on Google for a given topic.
DDG seems to get most of their results from Bing, but they do tweak it a bit themselves. From the link:
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.
Duckduckgo uses search results from Bing, combined with other search engines and their own bot if Wikipedia is to be believed.
No Google search results are used.
Probably the new Google search that uses Bard. It's not public yet, but you can ask for access.
Edit: It's currently referred to as "generative search", and you can use it on Android if you sign up for the beta version of the app on the play store.
Does it link to it's sources yet?
Your own whonix
Have you tried https://search.brave.com?
Disclaimer: I work at Brave, but I think it's pretty good
Brave Search shadily relicenses the content of others: https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
Oh shoot. I actually use it. That's bad. But then again, what isn't? What do I switch to? It's all shit, but at least with Brave search, I actually get results for
<insert obscure Linux issue here>
.