rosenjcbYou cant even avoid irrelevant results with "site:" anymore
melonpunkI’d recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I’d recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
KoboldCoterieThere used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you’d see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they’re still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)
It’d be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the “top” results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).
I think Hotbot did that back in the 90’s, and it’s relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result.
www.hotbot.com
HotBot: Smarter Answers. AI Made Easy, Ask Your Question Now
HotBot is AI made simple. We made searching the web better in 1996, and now we're making AI easier in 2024. Just type in your question and receive your answer, all powered by ChatGPT 4. HotBot is totally free to use and no sign-up required.
Huh, I might need to restore my bookmarks backup from IE5.
What up, Lycos?
Magellan, looking good.
Flying SquidWhat about Jeeves? Did anyone ask Jeeves?
I’ll Infoseek an answer on that.
DrNeurohaxYou dare question the majesty of AltaVista?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right. I think before that was metasearch.com. It was basically a top frame that you entered the search in with a row of icons, and the bottom frame would render the search results from whichever sites you chose. I'm pretty sure it removed all the extra elements, too, so it was actually pretty decent.
StarferYou might be interested in SearXNG: docs.searxng.org
Edit: spelling
Ooh, I love this! Thanks for the link!
I JUST started using SearXNG and have been also googling the same terms to see how they compare.
So far (less than a week), SearXNG has had what i was looking for in the first 5 links every time. Googled result was either below the scroll or I gave up. Maybe only a couple dozen tests, but it wasn't even close.
Wow, I miss Dogpile! It was my go-to search engine in grad school (along with Altavista and Ask)
Dogpile is still around, and it's still a meta search engine.
Going to do a run with duckduckgo in my browser. Probably about time I move stuff away from Google anyways.
Something to keep in mind, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, and want to give Google a try after DDG: you add “!g” to the search and DDG wil redirect you to a Google results page.
Startpage or searxng are better
*dust.sysGood for privacy, but there’s definitely features (and processing power) that don’t exist there.
I’ve been using Startpage for a few weeks now and honestly it doesn’t bug me waiting an extra 3-5 seconds for my results page when it’s not ad-fueled garbage.
I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
For what it’s worth, Bing is similarly full of ads, but with a more cluttered page design and a lot of video previews. Often times I find its suggestions for related searches get in the way of actually reading the search results for the current search…
FWIW DuckDuckGo sources the traditional links / results from Bing. Their Instant Answers info does come directly from other sources, e.g. Wikipedia.
Good to know, thanks. I’d heard that DDG sources its results from other engines, though I thought they were ramping up their own index. Honestly, I haven’t paid close enough attention to it all. Nor have I tried Bing given that DDG has generally been good enough for me to not bother looking elsewhere.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
You’re fooling yourself if you think Bing is any different, or that CharGPT won’t become the same thing. The only thing the others have over Google is they’re not the primary focus of SEO, but that will change. SEO has devoured th corpse of Google search and waiting to determine what prey it should focus on next.
100% Google has been the best place to put effort it. If they slide down the popularity ladder then the next will become the zone of battle. I’m firmly of the belief that all options are temporary and on an eventual course of becoming bad, some faster than others. It’s a case of being able to just adapt and move on. Be it google, reddit, netflix, whatever.
One thing with an AI-based search engines is that they might have better luck not getting influenced by SEO techniques. Like I can pretty reliably look at a website and determine if it’s useful or just got to the top by gaming the search engine. It just takes time, and I’m sure some tools could help even more with that
Ive had some success using phind but I’m pretty sure this is just another way of using chat GPT without an account.
Either way, before the migration I found Google useless for anything but searching for stuff on Reddit, or answering questions about video games.
Good luck going to Google these days without already knowing the answer to your question.
Xylight (Photon dev)Brave Search is basically DuckDuckGo but with an independent index. unfortunately it doesn’t support images yet so it redirects you when you click on “images”
I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service.
It’s gotten a lot better recently, though sometimes I do still have to switch to Google to find stuff. I don’t care that much about my search engine privacy, so I mainly use this because Microsoft Rewards nets me giftcards and such just from searching.
But privacy-conscious people should stay the hell away.
Is there a way to to something like this for Lemmy? This is one thing that I used all the time for Reddit and found immensely useful.
to to something
to do something
(Can’t edit my comment in this app)
marsara9github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search
It’s still in EARLY development so expect bugs.
CoelacanthOh that stopped worked a while ago
zinklogThere’s redditle.com if you just want reddit results. I’ve had it bookamrked and find it pretty useful.
“it works on my machine”
Maybe OP’s “search results” were the ads at the top of the google results
It also works on mine.
GreenPlasticSushiGrassWeird. I gotta check out that Cookie and Kate recipe, though!
Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to sift through the SEO hellscape
Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.
Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.
Fuck.
The search operator in this image works perfectly when I try it. 🙃
fossilesqueDuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269
Artemis ColourWow! This is the first time I’ve heard about Knaben Database, but it looks handy. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.
Majin Boowomp@rosenjcb I gave up on Google search a few months ago. It got to a point where it would consistently show me nonsense that was written to farm ad revenue. DuckDuckGo has been better for me (once you disable the ability to show ads in the search results), but I still get occurrences of it showing me nonsense. Like, I tried looking up information on the Super Smash Bros Brawl mod Project+, and it kept showing me information on some certification.
Our cutting edge algorithm must feed you the content of whoever pays more. You don’t choose anymore. and you have to accept it.
BR, Paid Search Engines after investments dries.
I can’t reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode
Can’t reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study.
I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my “keyword picking ability”… now going back to Google feels unreal
Qwerty-SpaceSame here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do
!mcwiki diamond to search the minecraft wiki for “diamonds”
My problem with ddg is that I can’t refine my search by excluding keywords, only by adding more. For example, it’s frustrating if I’m looking to buy a product locally and half the page is Amazon results.
If I add
-amazon to the query on ddg I don’t get any Amazon results. Is this not the car for you?
It is not. It works fine for google, but not for DDG.
That is weird. I wonder why we are seeing so different behavior from ddg.
You can do that on ddg. See this link:
duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/…/syntax
This is a tragedy. I will have to see if this still works on Bing
LastI was here before Google and I’ll be here after Google, too. I knew it was all downhill when Google stoped spellchecking things for me. They did more harm than good with that SEO crap anyways.
Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.
The issue with LLMs that I have is that while they are great at certain tasks, they are bad at anything, let’s call it factual, due to their nature.
I can for example use it to quickly draft up a email or a piece of python code, and I can immediately see whether or not the response it generated is actually what I want.
If I go ask it what the hottest day in a given country was or ask it to explain something, I have absolutely no idea whether it’s bullshit or not and I will have to double check it anways.
I think the learning curve with LLMs as a tool is to be able to know when to use it and when to rely on other sources instead.
That seems rather risky, considering that they don’t really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.
queermunistAs opposed to Google searching manually, which always has accurate outputs and never outputs falsehoods as fact. 🙂
As long as you double check the source of an answer I don’t see an issue.