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Memes @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Google “search”

286 comments

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
- 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 would like a Firefox add-on that filters out sites where recipe ingredients are measured in cups and the recipes contain butter and sugar when they shouldn't, thanks very much
  Adding "UK" used to work, but doesn't anymore
  
  I also don't want to need an add-on for every niche thing I like to look at.
- The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.
- 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
  
  You mention brave but no mention of kagi? Kagi is way better than DDG too.
  
  Did the Privacy Guides drama ever get resolved re: PrivacyTools. I recall one was split off from the other over draaaamaaa.
- No joke, Bing Chat is considerably better at finding answers than any search engine I've used in recent years. I don't even bother googling things anymore. Just ask the AI.
- No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.
  On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it's niche partially because it's made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I'm referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!
  
  Is it much different from a pallet wrapper? A big platform you can set a pallet on loaded with stuff and it spins? And you hold what's like a yard wide rolling pin with plastic wrap on it to wrap the pallet as it spins?
- me too

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.
- Yep the whole Internet feels like a dying mall. There are still some places I go for specific needs, but I'd say my casual browsing of any kind just keeps getting smaller.
- Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there's other alternatives and searx unified them all
  
  DuckDuckGo is not good. It's only marginally less pathetic than Google, but that has to do for the time being.
  
  Eh, DDG is mediocre, but I don't know of a better one ATM.
  
  SearX isn’t maintained anymore, SearXNG is the meta-search engine that is still maintained.
- I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).

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
  
  my homie refdesk just called and said "we are so fucking back"
- 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.
  
  I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It's just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
  
  I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
  
  I’d pay for Kagi if it were $5/month unlimited. Not going to pay $5/month for limited search.
- Google Scholar is still quite good for the moment
  
  Here is an example for searching for "cats" with academic turned on. It's not just .edus but it's definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
  You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
  
  Archive.org scholar is great too! This academic search is a bit different because it does webpages and not just publications.
- 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.

SEO abuse has ruined the internet. We could've had something good.
- I worked very briefly for a company that was hirable to push websites for SEO. It was basically all young underpaid contractors and interns even the HR team except for upper management who was all the same people from their previous big company running telemarketing bullshit.
  So yeah just want to add the usual suspects definitely had a hand in the enshitification of the search engine as you might think.
- More like content farming right?

DuckDuckGo ftw 💯
- Nowadays I use Qwant and it's working great. If you use Google with a VPN it's always asking for captchas 🙃
  
  I had taken a look at Qwant. It's pretty cool... But I love DDG's Bang shortcuts. Idk how many engines support those.

What are y'all searching for that Google search isn't working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I'm baffled by this.
- 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.
  
  C'mon now. "Laptop monitor turn off" has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I've always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.
  
  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.
- 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:
- Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)
  
  That is a dumb feature that shouldn't be trusted.
  
  Ah, yes, arbitrary examples. I can make those up too.
- Everything.
  They fucked up the magic sauce, now exact searches reveal similar topics it thinks(paid) you might want to look at.
  It basically adds its own keywords into your results to direct you to what it wants you to see instead.
- 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.
- I made the switch to DDG a few days ago and it actually is insane how much more relevant the information is compared to google.
- The latest in hipster rants. apparently not easy to find on Google ;)

I just get tired of jumping through hoops to find what I'm searching for... Instead of what Google wants me to see

I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it's just because it's more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it's faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.
- I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.

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
- Same, DDG fails with local results here in the Philippines, I found myself adding "g!" to my searches more often
  
  not !g?

Honestly people keep saying this but I just don't find it to be true. Google is a vital daily resource for me, and usually the best way for me to find most things.
Is this because I don't use social networks? Are people somehow using Instagram or TikTok as search engines to find what they're looking for? It feels like people just use social networks these days and nothing else, so maybe that's it?
- Let's say I want to find an aftermarket built-in air jack kit for a car. Nevermind why, but let's say it's what I want to find.
  So I look up car air lift jack. Google spits back a grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, a stack of videos of floor air bag jacks by people trying to sell them, Another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, then finally a couple of the kind that go on a car, and godammnit another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, finally sponsored posts for floor jacks or the wrong kind, Amazon ads for the same thing, ads for brands of the floor jacks, and more, more, more, makers of the wrong thing, lowes, home depot, walmart...it's all wrong.
  So the very next words out of your mouth are "Well, you used the wrong search term!" No, not really, but let's try getting rid of "bag", because that seems to be a big incorrect return on the search. So in goes "-bag" to the search term. What does that get us?
  The exact same fucking thing. "-" is meaningless anymore.
  So that's google now.
  Want help with a tech problem?
  Wade through a stack of a dozen shitty youtube videos 10 minutes long each (because google pays more for ad space, longer videos have more space, so those get pushed to the top, and a problem that would take a paragraph of text to solve now becomes a shitty video with blather, subscribe, previous videos, like, other videos, and 2 minutes of actual help), a bunch of sponsored links to tech makers that have shit to do with your problem, and SEO sites like solveyourtechproblem.com or wefixitgood.com or whatever BS name for sites that consist of boilerplate help like "did you turn it off and on again?" Maybe after all that you'll get an out of date reddit or github list of posts that don't have anything to do with your exact issue. So you put it in quotes, that should work, right?
  "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" says google.
  Why? I dunno. Not enough returns on the search to cram ads, sponsored links, shit for sale in?
  Google is shit. I've switched to DDG. It has it's own frustrations, but at least I don't have to put up with Google cramming every ad and sponsored link in front of me along with garbage SEO sites. Google's heyday has ended.
  
  The troubleshooting you list here second is my primary use for a Google search and it is completely garbage. Just like you say, it's a bunch of trash SEO sites that don't really address the problem so most of the time I add reddit to the search to get legit answers. Because reddit has a garbage search engine, of course.
  Though I have to admit I have given up on that and just use DDG to search for Reddit results. It used to be that I'd start on DDG and if it didn't have what I need I'd go to Google, but Google search has gotten so bad that I almost never bother anymore.
- I've been doing a lot of searches lately about running, picking shoes, overpronation, training schedules, etc.
  Straight google searches (ones that would have returned worthwhile results even ten years ago) are all trying to sell me something, or are AI generated content filler garbage.
  I have to add "reddit" to every search in order to get real information from normal people.
  
  Reddit has axed access to Nordic VPN connected devices sadly, so no more reddit in my searches
- a lot of people are using reddit and youtube to search for thing now
  
  YouTube is fantastic but it's a video platform, all you're going to find there are videos.
  If I need to find a business or product page, I'm not going to look on YouTube. Same if I need to find a driver download, or a PDF manual, or the local weather, or information on a historical event, or....we'll, you get the idea. They just do videos.
  Similarly Reddit has a lot but it's mainly centered around discussions of things. I use it as a very valuable resource, but similar to the above, it's not where I go when I'm not looking for the one thing they do very well - discussion.
  It sounds as if the main thrust of this idea isn't that Google (or a search engine in general) is any less vital in daily web life, but rather that for some things you can go straight to the more centralised source and search there. E.g. if I want a video I'll search on YouTube, rather than searching Google for aggregated results from many video hosts.
  In that sense Google is slightly less relevant sure I agree, but only a little bit, and only for very specific things.
  
  i use google to search reddit and youtube. reddit's search still sucks and youtube brings up the same results as google generally and it's in my address bar aleady.
- You just described my situation. I'm a developer, I google A LOT of shit everyday. I haven't used social media in 4 years or so.
- If I have a basic question I usually find myself going to chatgpt now.
  
  Oh goodie. If I want made up answers based on the middle of the road guess work of an auto complete that sounds like a fun idea but I'd really just like to find out if anyone is selling the used record I'm looking for.
  
  Same. I can even ask follow up questions

Haven't used Google search for years.
- Teach me your ways
  
  https://ddg.gg
  
  Does https://startpage.com count?

Of course it has, and this effect was completely foreseeable, and indeed, was foreseen, from the very moment they decided to whore themselves out with that IPO. They took their role as custodian of the baby internet and became a pimp.
Stop calling it anything else. As a musician, I promise you, trying to promote yourself online feels like prostitution. If you've ever tried, then you know too. The only difference is if I were a prostitute I might actually make some money back.

Is DuckDuckGo the best alternative?
- I would say that there isn't currently a "best alternative" but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have "use cases" as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.
  There's some focused more on "privacy" like DuckDuckGo and searX.
  I've heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft's investment in OpenAI.
  I've heard good things about Qwant for music searches.
  Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by "emotion."
  Presearch is decentralized, but I haven't looked "under the hood" of how its decentralization works.
  Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn't getting your info when you search.
  I mean, it seems like there's a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn't be surprised if what's left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.
  
  Kagi has worked REALLY well for me for all topics, but it is a paid service...
  
  I've had a lot of issues with Bing, although it may have improved since I was really using it. AI has a tendency to "hallucinate," which is a problem if you are interested in results that well... exist.
  
  Time to bring back dogpile methinks
  
  I fucking hate this this is a thing again... We got past this because it was fucking stupid to have to swap between AltaVista, Askjeeves, Yahoo, etc.
  Now we're literally at the same point. Just like with streaming services and cable.
  At this point I just think the average person is a moron and when enough of them adopt something it goes to shit.
  
  Thanks for the info.
  Is DDG just straight Bing results but private and maybe minus AI stuff?
- I've been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).
  I've been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.
  
  Kagi seems to be the real deal. I'd say anecdotally it cuts my searches in half (If I had to do 4-6 searches to find something previously, now it's 2-3 max). Sometimes I will find myself accidently on DDG and I'll think, "Wow, why are these results all over the place?" DDG still edges out Google and Bing (actually I think it uses Bing as a backend for certain tasks).
  
  I tried Kagi briefly and the results were as good as google. Searches for stuff near me, programming questions, and travel related stuff were not helpful.
  I live in Canada, so I wonder if there's some sort of regional prioritization.
- Searxng is I think
- Ecosia for planting trees
  
  I used to have my default engine set to ecosia. I loved it, but their recent change in their privacy policy about giving information to Google was a big no-no for me.
- Kagi is orders of magnitude better than DDG. I hated DDG results.
- It's just Bing with extra steps.
  
  What is this referring to? I've been using ddg for the last 3 years or so and never really used bing
- SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.

you still go there out of habit
Speak for yourself

Kagi.com is one of the best services I pay for. I know paying for Internet search seems outrageous because we've been accustom to our data being the payment, but I think it's worth it. The search feature and added stuff really make it very functional plus the no adds or SEO type sites is bonus.
- I love the idea of paying for services I use, but I didn't get many useful results from Kagi.
  Out of curiosity, do you live in the US?
  
  I do. Did you find better results on Google? I've used DDG, yandex, qwant, and brave search engine but I really like the add free results and I understand something has to pay for the servers.

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
  
  The first result from Google was the official Python.org docs for me

Kagi has kicked ass for me. Its paid, but you get what you pay for.
The only sore spot is image search.
- I liked kagi for the first couple months I had it but then I noticed the results seems to be getting worse. Google tier. I cancelled because why pay for that?
  I'm not sure if the results were better at first or whether I just noticed flaws more the longer I used it.
  I'm often not even bothering to search for technical issues now. There's been a big mindset shift in me. If I can't figure it out on my own then pack it up and move on to the next thing. It's a 5050 shot at best whether you'll get help on a forum and search is a dumpster fire everywhere. I'm learning a lot more this way and retaining but fuck me running is it ever frustrating
  
  Have you tried downranking (or even blacklisting) the spammy sites on your Kagi search result? That alone is an improvement over Google.

I started self hosting a SearxNG instance. It's pretty cool, it combines several engines while not spying on you.

ive not used it in a long time, so I'm ootl. What's going on with their search?
- It's ads all the way down
  
  It's not really the ads on Google Search itself that break it.
  It's that almost every result is some automatically generated spam created entirely in response to Google's algorithms. And it's those pages that are covered in ads. Google broke the internet.
  You can still get what you're looking for, but I home in on results that look like forums or other actual user generated content. Didn't even realise I was doing it tbh. I just mentally filter out most of the shit.

duckduckgo has been fine for me
- My main problem with DDG is that it doesn't show the dates of results. A lot of the time, I need to know that to get the information I need. I used it for a couple of years, but I was constantly forced to go back to Google or Bing to get the information I needed.
  I found Kagi earlier this year and tried it out, and it's as close to perfect as you can get, IMO. I really can't recommend it enough. It's like being back to "the before times" when Google was king, with the addition of many other features. It's a paid service, and I'm more than happy to do so for something like this. No tracking, a ton of features, very well designed, and results that never fail. I've shared my account with family and friends, and everyone has mentioned how good it is after trying it.
  Sorry if it feels like I'm a shill for it, I'm just super happy with it and really feel like everyone deserves to know about it.

Google's search engine has gotten lazy, with the first dozen or more hits being YouTube and Reddit results.
- What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.
  
  It used to be, I'd start at DDG andwhen I didn't find my results, I'd switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they're often better than Google.
  However, very recently I've been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren't helpful.
  Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.
  
  What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?
  Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren't as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they're being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever "owns" the space.
  
  another part is that youtube and reddit are the only places where SEO and chatgpt hasn't (totally) destroyed the search results

Nowadays i find myself leaning the old ways: browser bookmarks. Not long ago, search was so good that i stopped using them.

Yeah, If the search is about something relatively obscure then 50% of the links are random letters and numbers or worse, believable looking links that are riddled with viruses.

I use DDG and it's fine? Just use a different search engine
- In my experience DDG and Google are pretty close to the same quality. IE neither is good.
  
  I like DDG, but I believe it uses the Bing API to get the search results. So even though it’s a privacy focused site, you’re still getting results from a giant corporation.

Yep, I switched to kagi a while back and couldn’t be happier with the results. If you don’t want to be the product, maybe consider paying for search?
- Same
- I started a trial witg kagi after ddg stopped finding results (while Google did)

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
- Where? I feel Google has gone way downhill but the Bing based search engines haven't seemed any better.
  
  Kagi.
- 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.

The old "Bing is just like Google" ad copy is getting truer and truer in a bad way.

This is why I have been using aselfhosted searxng instance for over a year and half now.
- It's still just Google and ddg and whatnot though.,?
  Like. There's only a few search engines. Bing. Google. Yandex. Yep.
  I haven't found aggregating them with search to be even remotely useful because more garbage is still garbage
  
  There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
  Edit: Also the main poin't of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
- Is it a very demanding service to run?
  
  Not at all, for me and couple friend's that use I can easilly run it on a 1core 1gbram vps.
  You can test out my instance that's run on a contabo vps and then you can decided if you wanna host it https://searx.cronyakatsuki.xyz
- What software stack do you use for this?
  
  I have a vps that I run the docker contaner on. You can test it out on my website https://searx.cronyakatsuki.xyz
  Edit: Also use nginx as the reverse proxy.

This post but replace google search with the general internet.
Nearly every place that feels like the old internet is not as popular.
I used to think that was a bad thing, I'm starting to think maybe I've just been pushing aside the reality that when the internet was good, it wasn't as popular.
- Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.
- I’m starting to think maybe I’ve just been pushing aside the reality that when the internet was good, it wasn’t as popular
  nah you're just becoming older

This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.
I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?
- Bit-warden for password manager, FOSS cross platform. FF should import all the bookmarks. I'd save all open tabs to a new bookmark folder before transfer then open that folder after.
- Firefox doesn't need extensions to handle the password and bookmark imports, it can do those automatically. I saw someone suggest you create a folder in your bookmarks that is your open tabs, bookmark each tab as you close them, import passwords and bookmarks, and open that folder for a relatively painless migration.
  
  Do not rely on the built-in password managers to keep your passwords safe. Use a purpose-built one like Bitwarden to generate unique ones, save and complete them, agnostic to the browser. Virtually every stealer out there can easily grab the built-in password db's content.

ITT: people who don't know that DuckDuckGo is just Bing with a bird on it
- I think that’s an oversimplification. I get different results.
  Wiki claims (with five sources I didn’t check):
  DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.
  
  Last time I did a comparison, I got identical results from DDG and Bing run in sandboxed browsers.
- I feel that, cause most news links are of msn. But atleast it wont send data to ms for just searching.
- And without a key part like having to use bing

All the people complaining must not be using verbatim search (in search tools, toggle from "all results.")
- Verbatim search? As in direct string comparison? What is this 1999?

Tor Browser is planning to remove Google from the search engine options a user can choose: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41835
There some say brave onion + no JS is good: https://search.brave4u7jddbv7cyviptqjc7jusxh72uik7zt6adtckl5f4nwy2v72qd.onion/
Mullvad team seems to be considering 4 possible options:
Startpage: https://www.startpage.com/
Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
Brave Search: https://search.brave.com/
Metager: https://metager.org/
PS: Not disgussing ddg / ddg onion too much, basically because ddg is the long-time default search engine of TB. Most TB users assume ddg is a decent, standard, generic option, esp. its non-JS version.

I've used Startpage for a year or more on my main computer and it works okay.
But if anyone has any tips for a search engine that actually supports queries with boolean logic and such, I'd be all for it. Lately they all seem to just not do that anymore.
I vastly prefer a search engine in the EU, that respects the privacy laws here.

I still use it every day (logged out in private/incognito, of course) and returns far more valid results than any other search engine I've used.
Sorry, but they're a necessary evil IMO. Google is shit, but the search engine is great.

I'm in a worse situation. I still go to Yahoo every day out of habit going back to the nineties. I instantly regret it every time I do it.
- You know what? I tried it, and even though it's dated, it gave me better results that google.
  Hard to believe it's still around. But then so is AOL.com.
  hehe, just for fun I tried prodigy.com (wasn't there) but holy shit compuserve.com was!

I use Google search when I want to buy something, for some reason, it gets good résultats when I want to buy from my country. but if you want reliable results for a product review, you have to look elsewhere.
- Makes sense. It's an advertisement platform.

This is so true.

It's why I use the duck

Any discussion on search on Lemmy will bring up Kagi as it has been here already. I will just mention that. A. You can cheat and just keep using a bunch of email accounts to get free trials from them B. If you do that long enough you'll realize their 300 search plan is pretty fair and having saved preferences is worth a membership and they have an option where you can use crypto to pay your fees and remain anonymous (this is very important to me as the only thing more evil than Google would be to have all your search data, your full name and your credit card info - I strongly recommend the crypto pay option and create a dedicated email address. For Kagi membership).
- This reads like a sponsored ad.
  
  Yeah they have a program - for every redditor I get to join I get 100 free searches. For every Lemmite that joins I get 20.
- How good is it? I've heard good things but would love a second or third opinion
  
  Fantastic. I left some other comments on here but I switched within days of doing the trial and I haven’t gone back at all. I think the total number of times I’ve used Google search since then is 3. Yes 3 total searches on Google in the past six months. None of those searches gave me what I wanted, but those were the times i couldn’t find what I needed with kagi. So 3 kagi failures in 6 months and Google wasn’t helpful either.
  
  Why? The trial literally just needs a BS working email address.

Word. It's ridiculous how hard it is to get good hits these days. And while GPT makes shit up sometimes it's at least related to what I'm actually asking about. Google desperately wants to show the SEO optimized pages about something tangentially related instead of the page which actually has relevant information.
Getting a solid old forum hit for an obscure DNS issue takes a lot more work these days.
It's Googles fault, but it's not the algorithm getting worse, everyone is just too good at gaming it which fucks it up for everyone (the humanity special).

i hate the fact ecosia uses them somewhat

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.
- Never heard of it before, I'll test it out! Thanks for the tip

What's a better alternative that you guys use (if there is one)?
Just asking because I've gotten a lot of great tech recommendations here on Lemmy :)
- For the moment the best search engine I know of is googling something and appending 'site:reddit.com'
  It's less useful than it used to be but still leagues ahead of Reddit
  If you're willing to pay for it I've also heard good things about https://kagi.com/
  
  I've been using Kagi for a few months and it has been exponentially better than Google. I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for people talking about it on Lemmy, actually.
- Duck duck go, is my current primary search. Work a look IMHO
- Kagi. I thought it was a ripoff to pay for search but I tried the trial and started paying before the trial was even up, that’s how much better it is.
- I use Ecosia, even though it has ads, but it uses 80% of its profits to support tree-planting projects.
- I use duck duck go but also tik Tok depending on the type of thing I'm looking for.

🦆🦆👉

But we can still get Orange Julius, right?
Right?

So, what, Bing then?
- I’ve been pretty happy with DuckDuckGo. Some people have made the switch to using a search engine aggregate thing like SearXNG. And then there’s the one $12/month search engine I’ve heard people talk fondly of that I can’t remember the name of.
  
  Kagi? It's $5 where I am, or $10 for unlimited searches and AI tools. YMMV
  
  DDG has Bing under the hood.

Lemmy really likes Tweets lol

For some stuff I had more luck using ChatGPT and crosscheck using DuckDuckGo.

So what is the best search engine for programming?
- ChatGPT 4
  
  To the point that it's actually painful when you run out of time and it reverts to 3.x for the rest of the day
- I’m making one right now. It’s still kinda rough and MVP but soon should be more mature and useful. Try it out: https://kukei.eu
  
  Wow, this is so cool, is it based on something?

We need “Google find” instead of “Google search”.

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