Kids today might not realize that, for about twenty years there, you could go to Google Search and find things you were looking for! Google now features a hilariously unreliable AI summary as the f…
yeah, I appreciate the push towards more privacy-centric search engines but as a result searches that are relevant to me geographically on places like startpage are next to useless. I understand why but I wish that local results were a bit better on the alternatives.
We all keep saying this but can anybody point me to which one is better?
I invariably end up having to go back to them because the other search engines all have their own problems.
The issue is the internet is polluted with SEO and all the useful things that used to be spread out are now condensed onto places like Reddit, or places that aren't even being indexed.
Supposedly there's a paid one that is good. I haven't tried. The thing is Google is completely enshittified. They don't have to care about you or the sites you search. So my theory is Bing is better because they are hungrier and anything that takes away market share from Google is good—but I'm fully aware that Microsoft was just as shitty as Google and will be again if they get back on top.
Everything else I know of is either just an alternate front end for one of them or an aggregator of both. So you're right, there's precious little alternative to Google. But it's almost bad enough I'm ready for the return of web rings of good sites vouching for each other.
Serious question. Can you spell out for me the exact advantages you feel they provide? I have a free account, but every time I try them out I feel like their answers are honestly a little bit worse than Ecosia.
This is funny, but it was also 13 years ago. A lot can change in that time. I don't personally use Bing though, so I don't have firsthand experience either way.
A lot can change in 13 years, but a company that starts off morally evil does not magically get better as time goes on. If anything, they're worse - we just don't have the luxury of knowing exactly how yet.
All I'm trying to say is that they're not necessarily doing the same thing now that they were back then. They'd have a strong motivator to be better than google nowadays instead of just copying their results because google's results suck now.
Thankfully there are other options because you just nailed the two places I refuse to ever get gas from when there is any other option. If there was a good third option I'd take it here, but while Google commands so much market share and a new competitor would probably siphon users from Bing (and it's not enough users) I don't think a real alternative will come. I'm intrigued by kagi, though.
Look at twitter. Now look at mastodon. Tell me which one is more shitty. Now tell me which one has something like 85% of the market, and which one most people haven't heard of.
Just because something it better, doesn't mean people use it. You can fit all of Lemmy in the world in one of the larger NBA size arenas. You can't even fit twitters total user base into some smaller CITIES.
I think the amount of people who are familiar with search engine options besides Google is quite a bit larger than the population of Lemmy. (It fuckin better be, anyway)
He's already owned it for nearly two years. I'd definitely take the over on that bet. I just don't see what Twitter could possibly do that they haven't done already to kill it?
At least in the UK there is now lots of mainstream discussion of "Is it time for people to leave twitter as it's too much of a cesspool". Granted they usually then mention threads or bluesky as an alternative not mastodon, but it is definitely possible for social media companies to die out. Once people start to leave in large numbers it can become a mass exodus (see digg and myspace).
I think the issue now is that the market got fragmented and now you can’t find as much content as before without using multiple services, which is an annoyance.