I was just talking to some people about this. I use to be the guy who researched everything now I feel stupid AF because finding what I'm looking for feels impossible at times. Hell there's times where I search something and Google even says "there's nothing to find".
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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append reddit and if that still brings up garbage like reddit says... Articles
Use site:reddit.com it'll only show from reddit.com and nothing else.
Yes, and that's why I switched to Kagi
I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi's 100 free searches, and decided that it's worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.
I don't blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.
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It's garbage full of seo spam and malicious links
When I'm on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I'm not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.
Yes.
I recently tried switching to DDG for my browsers default searches... Instead of Google. It's wasted so much time.
The others are significantly worse. Even using very specific search terms for threads and content I've already gone to.
Bing was nice for porn for a while... Not so much anymore.
Yes. It varies by topic, but on many topics now it's 100% useless.
Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results
Yeah, here's a fantastic recent article about it:
The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results - Reddit's dominance and the downsides of that https://detailed.com/forum-serps/
Big time.
I use Google with modifiers like plus and minus, quotation marks and most importantly with uBlocklist. This way I can hide seo bullshit with a single click
You *think you use Google with modifiers, but now your modifiers are even modified or nulled by Google
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What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
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I haven't used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months
If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.
Man all this positivity for Kagi feels astroturfed. No offense if you're actually not a paid shill, but everywhere I go it seems too flowery to believe.
I mean they give you 100 searches to try before asking you to pay so the opportunity cost to find out is pretty low.
I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.
+1 to what others have said ... Plus I think lemmy is still way too small for "paid shills" in any case. It's okay to like a product you've spent money on, presumably that's why you're spending the money 🤷♂️
Edit: Granted, the original commenter does have a very small lemmy comment history (at least as seen from my instance ... maybe larger if you take the time to load their profile on their home instance)
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It is rather terrible.
Yep, and now you have to scroll through ads and the AI bs. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago. It's mostly good, my biggest issue is that Firefox on Android always takes several seconds before loading the page. Gotta do what ya gotta do for uBlock Origin though.