leninmummyWhat is the least SEO-fucked search engine?
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.
ChrisFheyDuckduckgo 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.
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬This explains why their results are so much worse than Google’s.
Palpable 2015 energy in this take right here.
Alto5 years ago sure. Not sure I really agree nowadays.
Granted, that has as much to do with Google getting much worse as it does DDG getting better.
Granted, that has as much to do with Google getting much worse as it does DDG getting better.
livusFor some things. For other things they're better. Google has really jumped the shark in the past two years.
I mostly just use it for when I want corporate style results, like shopping.
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.
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?
Even exact matches with quotes don’t seem to be as useful these days. Google tries to be helpful by matching on what it thinks I want instead of what I actually want. That plus the ads and all the other junk
erogenouswarzonePlus, I used to set my new tab page to Google, but God, it’s so bad. There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something (not that I’m against any of that) I just want to get some work done and not be distracted by Google desperately clinging to power.
But Drive is nice, I like that.
There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something
You owe me a new shirt for the coffee stains I just spat all over mine
Sure, what shirt do you want?
rm_dash_r_starI’m using Chrome and added an extension called Empty New Tab Page that makes Chrome to open to a blank page. I had to do that because the Google home page got to be so annoying. Also removing the need to fetch content makes the browser and new tabs open faster.
Yes, I have done this on one of my computers and it’s working great. I need to bring the rest up to speed.
Actually, what I really need is to find a new browser for web dev. Chrome’s dark theme sucks ass.
But theyre an icon in the librarian community!
They’re not trying to be helpful, they’re trying to guide you towards a product or towards content they control that they think you will be more engaged with. They also give results that will lead to more searches, and therefore more ad exposure for their business.
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?
OpenStarsYou 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
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
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.
I don’t like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
Same here. It’s like going to the library and just asking a question of the librarian.
Have it compile a list of sources it’s already sourced from, and keep searching for any new sources it can add. Have it list its expectations for what an expert should know about a particular subject, then have it learn about each of those points, and finally present as if it is an expert there to assist you.
hosting a local LLM to summarize search results could be very cool though
I downvoted because I have literally no idea what that guy is talking about.
Bing has never been a good search engine. The results are always so terrible, plus you have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baity crap they put everywhere.
I do like Bing for porn tho…
estythe clickbait alone is enough to turn me away from Bing and Edge
cool that people don’t mind it but it shouldn’t be controversial to dislike Bing for bad UX
Have you tried using the Chat feature (GPT-4) to do searching? I just tried it, and it surprisingly works really well for some inquiries.
Like, use their chat AI, but as a natural language search engine. It’s integrated to Bing’s index so it can peruse it itself, so you don’t have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baits crap they put everywhere.
You can’t use it on mobile without downloading the app and granting it god knows what permissions. Hell nah…
I am using the app and I’ve given it zero permissions.
Have can you be so confidently judgemental without even installing it.
Notice that they said chat. It this new thing where a language model (GPT) formulates the search queries and summarizes them to provide an answer.
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.
The “preview” for the chat feature requires the app or edge on desktop currently but I do find myself turning to it every time I get frustrated with a google search these days.
Less disappointing is probably the best discrimination as you said.
DrNeurohaxI use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.
It denies mobile. I was using Firefox. Same as Reddit, anything to try to force an app download.
I just tried it again on desktop and it worked, but the reason was that I downloaded an extension a while ago and forgot about it. When I disabled the extension, it stopped working.
There used to be a way to enable installing any extension on mobile FFx Dev, but I'm not sure if that still works. The desktop extension just changes the user agent string, so that might be another route to enabling it.
I downloaded Firefox Nightly on my phone about a week ago so that I can change my user agent string to get Google to stop F’ing up YouTube pages, but it doesn’t seem to work. I guess I’ll look into that extension. Do you know what it’s called?
I signed up for Kagi.com right after posting the above. I saw someone’s recommended here in this thread and said what the heck!
apisDon't even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect the search query.
Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.
ScrubblesYep, 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
So google has reverted to late 90s search behavior
Considering what happened to late-'90s search engines, that seems like a rather dangerous idea…
They got killed by Google. I was a Dogpile man myself, until someone showed me the google search.
Does anyone know the AOL keyword for Lemmy?
🌴 𝓣𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓽This still works if you use double quotes!
That’s not why they ignore them. They ignore them because it is profitable.
Too complicated for them and their optimisations, maybe?
WDYM? Quotes work for me. Can you give an example that is broken?
StandingCatSsh, you’re ruining the circle jerk.
VoxAdActaI frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.
Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.
I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.
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.
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.
