• driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
    0·
    7 months ago

    99% of my Google searchs are about how to do something in python or, if I already know how is done, the documentation of that.

    • RmDebArc_5@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      I would say that there isn’t currently a “best alternative” but rather there is a small group of alternatives that each seem to have “use cases” as it were (shocker, kind of how it used to be in the 90s/00s before Google dominance). But even from person to person, people disagree on what the best use case for each is.

      There’s some focused more on “privacy” like DuckDuckGo and searX.

      I’ve heard Bing has pretty good results for anything AI related for all Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI.

      I’ve heard good things about Qwant for music searches.

      Someone else here in this thread just brought up Mojeek, which is supposed to be also privacy focused but includes searching by “emotion.”

      Presearch is decentralized, but I haven’t looked “under the hood” of how its decentralization works.

      Startpage is Google search results but behind a proxy so Google isn’t getting your info when you search.

      I mean, it seems like there’s a lot of decent alternatives. I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left of the shell of Yahoo! started investing in trying to outperform Google at this point.

      • DontMakeMoreBabies@kbin.social
        0·
        7 months ago

        I fucking hate this this is a thing again… We got past this because it was fucking stupid to have to swap between AltaVista, Askjeeves, Yahoo, etc.

        Now we’re literally at the same point. Just like with streaming services and cable.

        At this point I just think the average person is a moron and when enough of them adopt something it goes to shit.

      • BossDj@lemm.ee
        0·
        7 months ago

        Thanks for the info.

        Is DDG just straight Bing results but private and maybe minus AI stuff?

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          7 months ago

          It’s just a bit more complicated than that:

          When people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, lyrics, weather, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (e.g., Tripadvisor), content site (e.g., Musixmatch), or dedicated source (e.g., Dark Sky) that does a better job of actually answering searches than a general search engine can with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.

          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.

          Partners and Privacy: As per our strict privacy policy, we never share any personal information with any of our partners that could lead to the creation of search histories. When we send a request to a partner for information used in search results, the transfer of information is proxied through our servers so it stays anonymous. That means our partners see those requests as though they came from us instead of our users, and no unique identifiers are passed in that process (e.g., your IP address). That way, we can work with partners to produce relevant search result pages, while keeping you anonymous to them (and us!).

          So they use some in-house tools and they source other results “largely” from Bing.

          In other words:

  • Pistcow@lemm.ee
    0·
    7 months ago

    I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something. I also don’t want to he directed to Pintrest and be required to have an account. Honestly, I’ve started using Bing more often.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
        0·
        7 months ago

        I’m just starting to learn HTML and oh my fucking god do I LOVE chatGPT… Holy hell… I can’t even begin to express just how amazing it is to be able to ask basic questions and not only get a reply, but provide example code, and it will elaborate or be as concise as you like… I LOVE IT! I’m especially happy to see they don’t ask for your phone number and other absurdly intrusive unnecessary information anymore. That’s what kept me away at first.

        I do know it’s not infallible and I probably won’t use it as much as I move on to more complex programming.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.

    • Daryl76679@lemmy.ml
      0·
      7 months ago

      Try Brave Search, Duckduckgo, Startpage, or Searxng. For more detail on these recommendation (that I definitely did not just steal), check out the Privacy Guides page, or The New Oil for a different, albeit overlapping, set of recommendations and take on search engines.

        • Daryl76679@lemmy.ml
          0·
          7 months ago

          I mean I guess. They aren’t actively fighting or anything like that to my knowledge. I personally think the Privacy Guides is the better resource, because PrivacyTools has vpn recommendations like Nord and Surfshark with affiliate links that are not actively disclosed from my quick check.

        • Gogo Sempai@programming.dev
          0·
          7 months ago

          Avoid the browser but I’ve been using their search on Firefox. Really like the AI summarizer and the results are also good.

        • kattenluik@feddit.nl
          0·
          7 months ago

          DuckDuckGo has recently become a not very useful search engine too, it still has way way better queries than Google though.

          Going back usually shuffles the search results and after like 5 results there’s just a bunch of random entries based on your geolocation.

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      Yeah honestly. The Google ad-based search system created a set of incentives that just destroyed the internet! I miss the days when people created their own fun little quirky websites like Ian’s Shoelace Site. That used to be every site on the internet!

    • ANGRY_MAPLE@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      6 months ago

      No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.

      On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it’s niche partially because it’s made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I’m referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!

  • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.comEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Word. It’s ridiculous how hard it is to get good hits these days. And while GPT makes shit up sometimes it’s at least related to what I’m actually asking about. Google desperately wants to show the SEO optimized pages about something tangentially related instead of the page which actually has relevant information.

    Getting a solid old forum hit for an obscure DNS issue takes a lot more work these days.

    It’s Googles fault, but it’s not the algorithm getting worse, everyone is just too good at gaming it which fucks it up for everyone (the humanity special).

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    7 months ago

    Any discussion on search on Lemmy will bring up Kagi as it has been here already. I will just mention that. A. You can cheat and just keep using a bunch of email accounts to get free trials from them B. If you do that long enough you’ll realize their 300 search plan is pretty fair and having saved preferences is worth a membership and they have an option where you can use crypto to pay your fees and remain anonymous (this is very important to me as the only thing more evil than Google would be to have all your search data, your full name and your credit card info - I strongly recommend the crypto pay option and create a dedicated email address. For Kagi membership).

    • gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      7 months ago

      YALL NEED KAGI.COM

      I refuse to pay for a search engine. There are numerous searxng instances out there in which I’m not the product even though I’m not paying.

      • fossilesque@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        Here is an example for searching for “cats” with academic turned on. It’s not just .edus but it’s definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.

        You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.

    • lntl@lemmy.ml
      0·
      7 months ago

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

      • snowe@programming.dev
        0·
        7 months ago

        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.

      • StorageAware@lemmings.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        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.

      • fossilesque@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It’s just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.

      • atkion@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        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·
          7 months ago

          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.

  • De_Narm@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    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·
      7 months ago

      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.)

        • boomzilla@programming.dev
          0·
          7 months ago

          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·
            7 months ago

            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·
              6 months ago

              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.