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).

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.

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/

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 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.

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...

Startpage or searxng are better

Going to do a run with duckduckgo in my browser. Probably about time I move stuff away from Google anyways.

It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.

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.

Maybe OP's "search results" were the ads at the top of the google results

Me too. I got all reddit links when I did the same search. Not sure what's happening for OP. I also did it in the Google app om android.

Doesn't work but it does change the results??? https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png

So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff

Can't reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)

I hope you are asking that rhetorically.

But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.

I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it's really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.

If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.

Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?