• redcalcium@lemmy.institute
    0·
    3 年前

    Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they’re trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.

    • lntl@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 年前

      i test all web search engines the same way:

      • punch in “Python itertools”
      • see if the official Python.org documentation for itertools is the top result.

      if it’s not, then the search engine is contaminated with advertised or SEO optimized results and it’s wasting my time

    • lntl@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 年前

      kagi is paid search, I like the idea of that. why do you recommend kagi and not another paid search provider?

      • StorageAware@lemmings.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 年前

        As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I’ve reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.

      • snowe@programming.dev
        0·
        3 年前

        I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.

      • atkion@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        3 年前

        I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).

        They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.

        They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).

        All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.

        • blackstampede@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          3 年前

          I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.

          I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.

        • boomzilla@programming.dev
          0·
          3 年前

          I had not so good experiences with Contabo lately. Lot of outages and they withdrew 2 more month after the end of my subscription. Ionos had no outtages so far (5th month). In addition their web interface is better than Contabos.

          • CronyAkatsuki@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz
            0·
            3 年前

            I have been using contabo for over a year and had 2 outages when they had some problems last month.

            For the webinterface I don’t care since I do everywhing in the cli amd don’t mind a bad interface.

            • boomzilla@programming.dev
              0·
              3 年前

              Then it must’ve been bad luck. I had plenty more over the course of a few month with a CS GO server and it wasn’t the game server because I often couldn’t login via SSH or the session just froze. And I definitely took precautions with a firewall, fail2ban and no root, no password only certificate SSH login (a tried and tested combination of measurements I use on plenty other ionos VPS).

              You’re right the webinterface doesn’t really matter but the overall impression was much more professional on ionos with a slick interface for the config of the hw firewall.

  • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    3 年前

    Yeag, If the search is about something relatively obscure then 50% of the links are random letters and numbers or worse, believable looking links that are riddled with viruses.

    • M137@lemm.ee
      0·
      3 年前

      My main problem with DDG is that it doesn’t show the dates of results. A lot of the time, I need to know that to get the information I need. I used it for a couple of years, but I was constantly forced to go back to Google or Bing to get the information I needed.

      I found Kagi earlier this year and tried it out, and it’s as close to perfect as you can get, IMO. I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s like being back to “the before times” when Google was king, with the addition of many other features. It’s a paid service, and I’m more than happy to do so for something like this. No tracking, a ton of features, very well designed, and results that never fail. I’ve shared my account with family and friends, and everyone has mentioned how good it is after trying it.

      Sorry if it feels like I’m a shill for it, I’m just super happy with it and really feel like everyone deserves to know about it.

  • spudwart@spudwart.comEnglish
    0·
    3 年前

    This post but replace google search with the general internet.

    Nearly every place that feels like the old internet is not as popular.

    I used to think that was a bad thing, I’m starting to think maybe I’ve just been pushing aside the reality that when the internet was good, it wasn’t as popular.

    • Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      3 年前

      Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 年前

    Google’s search engine has gotten lazy, with the first dozen or more hits being YouTube and Reddit results.

    • Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      3 年前

      What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
        0·
        3 年前

        It used to be, I’d start at DDG andwhen I didn’t find my results, I’d switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they’re often better than Google.

        However, very recently I’ve been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren’t helpful.

        Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.

  • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
    0·
    3 年前

    What are y’all searching for that Google search isn’t working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I’m baffled by this.

    • krudorass@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      3 年前

      A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.

      I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.

      Google anything related to ‘laptop monitor turn off’ and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search

      • Rascabin@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 年前

        You’re a Systems Administrator, but Google Tier 2 issues, do you provide break fix support? I thought as a SA you would be working behind the scenes on systems (apps), servers, etc.

        • DesertCreosote@lemm.ee
          0·
          3 年前

          Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.

          We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…

      • JPJones@startrek.website
        0·
        3 年前

        C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I’ve always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.

      • Nommer@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        3 年前

        I’m not even a sysadmin, just a power user and this infuriates me to no end. I gave up on a search just a couple days ago because I kept getting bottom tier answers. Like thanks but I already know how to use my computer, now tell me how to fix this problem.

    • girl@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      3 年前

      Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)

    • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
      0·
      3 年前

      I use DDG and if the result is not what I’m looking for, I add !g to forward the query to Google.

      80% of the times, I need to add !g because DDG is clueless.

      I wish I could say otherwise but Google search results are still better overall than DDG.

      Sure, for some specific thematics, DDG will do better. But that’s for quite niche subjects.

      Very surprised to see people talk about DDG like it’s at the same level or better than Google.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      3 年前

      Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.

      Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        3 年前

        Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.”

        I just tried “ASCII scan codes” or “DOS scan codes”. Both gave me what you asked for in Google in the top three results, with the first one including tables that listed both ASCII values and scan codes for reference.

    • Doctor xNo@r.nfEnglish
      0·
      3 年前

      Torrents, modded apk’s,…

      Check out my results for some chinese download service called “Content Plaza” for example:

      Google:

      Yandex:

      Like, 2? On the ‘entire’ internet? 2? Right…

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        3 年前

        Was Yandex respecting your query there?

        Added quotation marks for “terabox” as well, and it was fascinating across providers:

        Yandex agreed with your Google search…

        …but not mine:

        DDG coming in with one result:

        Startpage, just one result?!

        …nope, not from the “mobile site”:

        Bing didn’t care about those silly quotation marks, here are a thousand results:

        • Doctor xNo@r.nfEnglish
          0·
          3 年前

          Yet if I enter something like ‘resolv’ in Google I need to add ‘-resolve’ to not get hundreds of unrelated results… Same goes for any not-too-popular software that is named a slight misspelling of their purpose… I even find it ridiculous how often first results litterally say underneath they did not contain your query…

          But with terabox and “content plaza” it gives 2 results?

          Startpage I have no idea, but I’m guessing they, like many, use the Google API for webcrawler results… 1 result? Those are pretty common words,…

  • Saki@monero.townEnglish
    0·
    3 年前

    Tor Browser is planning to remove Google from the search engine options a user can choose: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41835

    There some say brave onion + no JS is good: https://search.brave4u7jddbv7cyviptqjc7jusxh72uik7zt6adtckl5f4nwy2v72qd.onion/

    Mullvad team seems to be considering 4 possible options:

  • De_Narm@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 年前

    That’s not only a search engine problem in itself - websites also got worse in general to appeal to googles algorithm. Which means that other search engines would show similar crap, unfortunately.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
      0·
      3 年前

      I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

      I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

      And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    0·
    3 年前

    Which is why I stopped going since about 4 years ago now. One day I just went to a different mall, and never looked back

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
      0·
      3 年前

      Where? I feel Google has gone way downhill but the Bing based search engines haven’t seemed any better.

      • lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.dedeleted by creatorEnglish
        0·
        3 年前

        tons of alternatives.
        search engines with independent indexes(i.e., not beholden to any big search engine):

        • mojeek
        • brave search(semi independent)
        • kagi(semi independent)

        meta-search engines(gets results from other search engines):

        • startpage(google)
        • duckduckgo(bing)
        • qwant(bing)
        • swisscows(bing)
        • metager(multiple sources)
        • searx(ng)(multiple sources, configurable by user)

        I’m still missing a ton but this should give you an idea.

        for more, see this interactive graph, or this Wikipedia list which includes other niche types of search engines as well.

        I personally use mojeek(because of their independent index) with duckduckgo as a fallback.