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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I'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.
There 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).
You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Edit: spelling
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.
Ooh, I love this! Thanks for the link!
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. https://www.hotbot.com
Huh, I might need to restore my bookmarks backup from IE5.
What up, Lycos?
Magellan, looking good.
What about Jeeves? Did anyone ask Jeeves?
I'll Infoseek an answer on that.
You 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.
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.
DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn't hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.
Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.
You're fooling yourself if you think Bing is any different, or that ChatGPT won't become the same thing. It's destiny is to be a smarter version of Alexa, only users will falsely assume neutrality it doesn't possess.
The only thing the others have over Google is they're not the primary focus of SEO, but that will change. SEO has devoured the 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.
Time for a federated search engine?
Stop. Don't make federated the next crypto/blockchain
It was mostly in jest. But some sort of community run search engine could be interesting.
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
FWIW DuckDuckGo sources the traditional links / results from Bing. Their Instant Answers info does come directly from other sources, e.g. Wikipedia.
Source: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
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.
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...
Startpage or searxng are better
Good 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.
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.
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 love brave search. I think it's way better than DDG. and that's not even considering their summarizer feature. it's basically autotldr for your search
Same, I love it too. The UI is great, it's fast, and the discussions tab is nice. I get pretty high quality results too.
I can't believe I forgot the discussions tab! that is a super awesome feature. especially now since it works on all sorts of forum sites, not just reddit, since that's gone to shit
Thanks. Never heard of that before. This is awesome.
Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.
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.
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.