• fossilesque@mander.xyzEnglish
    46·
    1 year ago

    DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.

    Others, more specific uses:

  • Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my “keyword picking ability”… now going back to Google feels unreal

  • melonpunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      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).

    • inverimus@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • aleph@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.

    • Xylight (Photon dev)@lemmy.xylight.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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”

      • Makeshift@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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

          • Makeshift@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            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

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        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

      • melonpunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Skyline@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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…

  • CubitOom@infosec.pubEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    When using Google to search the internet, one needs to select tools > verbatim for the search operators to work as expected. Even for simple things like double quotes.

  • tehmics@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to sift through the SEO hellscape

    • dustedhands@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • theragu40@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • theragu40@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Eh. I guess I understand some suspicion, but for better or worse a very large portion of the internet is US-centric. It’s pretty difficult to use any major internet content and avoid US based stuff entirely.

          Also from what I’ve seen, while these companies may be US-based they 100% have their own profits prioritized over any national interests. I’d be surprised to learn of any kind of overt nationalism biased towards the US from Google, for instance.

    • nineninenine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

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

      • Nahvi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.

        That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.

        • SuddenDownpour@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Would you say that duckduckgo’s search algorithm has gotten better, or that you have gotten better at using it?

          • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            Google’s algorithm works better at finding really weird things deep in the bowels of the web (for example: obscure programming questions around GPU shaders in a specific framework or graphics pipeline) and when searching for local things if outside the US (because Google has the notion of Region when returning search results, so for example here in Portugal if I search in portuguese for a store to buy something I don’t get results from Brasil) whilst duckduckgo works better for everything else.

            Personally I default to duckduckgo and only use Google when duckduckgo isn’t returning good enough results, which is surprisingly unusual.

      • 𝐘Ⓞz҉@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Startpage, Qwant, Swisscow, SearX

        If these don’t work for you, try duckduckgo but I don’t recommend it as its made and based in the US.

        Any app thats developed and hoated in US is a serious threat. Use any app which are developed and hosted in the EU .

      • joel_feila@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        brave, it is a separate database then Google and they have a discussion sub search. Qwant is a French based search that does not track you. also good results and based in the eu. metagear is a meta seaech engine that pulls results from yahoo Bing and goggle.

    • Goronmon@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      It still returns better results for many queries than the alternatives. My ability to weigh usefulness against ideological concerns is pretty limited at times, so I’ll use which search engine gives me the best results.

  • gamebuster@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.

    • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      1 year ago

      That seems rather risky, considering that they don’t really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.

      • queermunist@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        As opposed to Google searching manually, which always has accurate outputs and never outputs falsehoods as fact. 🙂

        As long as you double check the source of an answer I don’t see an issue.

        • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          If you’re double-checking the sources, both to make sure that they exist, and they are accurate, you may as well do the research without using an LLM in the first place.

          You’re just adding to your workload unnecessarily in that case.

          • alternative_igloo@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            That’s not necessarily true, LLMs are a very useful research aid because they give you a place to start. They give you a high level summary and may cite sources which may/may not exist, and it’s up to you to fact check and develop your own opinions. They can also summarize complex texts and filter out SEO garbage that would otherwise clutter google search results. Research still works the same as before, LLMs are just an accelerator if used correctly.

    • Adlach@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      18·
      1 year ago

      ChatGPT is not a search engine, it’s a language model. It does not provide correct answers, it imitates what correct answers sound like.

    • UncommentedCode@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      The issue with LLMs that I have is that while they are great at certain tasks, they are bad at anything, let’s call it factual, due to their nature.

      I can for example use it to quickly draft up a email or a piece of python code, and I can immediately see whether or not the response it generated is actually what I want.

      If I go ask it what the hottest day in a given country was or ask it to explain something, I have absolutely no idea whether it’s bullshit or not and I will have to double check it anways.

      I think the learning curve with LLMs as a tool is to be able to know when to use it and when to rely on other sources instead.

  • tsl@vlemmy.netEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    That’s not that bad… Way worse is that Google will push your site to the 10th-or-so page abyss for minor problems yet they keep on showing more and more spammy sites (the ones which contain random sentences with your search term mysteriously embedded in the middle of them, without any kind of relevance, and with painfully obviously randomly generated domains… I still don’t understand how do they manage to put the term you’re searching right now into the search results.)

  • redditcunts@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    Bug or most likely faked. I’m selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.

    Tech hate, so hot right now.

    • rosenjcb@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s not fake. You can look at my other screenshots. It’s just not happening to you.

      • anticommon@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        This is why targeted media and advertisement is a bad idea.

        It makes it incredibly easy to test people and put them into information silos where what you see is not what I see.

        Yeah sucks back in the day on nationalized television one add would run cross country, but at least then you knew it was going to be scrutinized by a wide swath of individuals. Or maybe the segregation of information was not as widely considered then.

        But now? We’ve seen how platforms can engage certain people and even cause mental disability through force feeding insane garbage at them. And the rest of us get to suffer for it, while being blissly unawares as to why.