2y ago

You cant even avoid irrelevant results with "site:" anymore

152 comments

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.
- 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).
  
  You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
  Edit: spelling
  
  I think Hotbot did that back in the 90's, and it's relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com
  
  Wow, I miss Dogpile! It was my go-to search engine in grad school (along with Altavista and Ask)
- 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.
  
  Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.
- 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/
  
  Good to know, thanks. I'd heard that DDG sources its results from other engines, though I thought they were ramping up their own index. Honestly, I haven't paid close enough attention to it all. Nor have I tried Bing given that DDG has generally been good enough for me to not bother looking elsewhere.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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
  
  Good for privacy, but there's definitely features (and processing power) that don't exist there.
  I've been using Startpage for a few weeks now and honestly it doesn't bug me waiting an extra 3-5 seconds for my results page when it's not ad-fueled garbage.
- Going to do a run with duckduckgo in my browser. Probably about time I move stuff away from Google anyways.
  
  Something to keep in mind, if you can't find what you're looking for, and want to give Google a try after DDG: you add "!g" to the search and DDG wil redirect you to a Google results page.
- 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"
  
  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
- Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.
- Ive had some success using phind but I'm pretty sure this is just another way of using chat GPT without an account.
  Either way, before the migration I found Google useless for anything but searching for stuff on Reddit, or answering questions about video games.
  Good luck going to Google these days without already knowing the answer to your question.

DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
https://www.ecosia.org/ - search with praxis, kind of mixed results but non tracking and they do good things
https://www.perplexity.ai/ - longform answers by ai with citations plus search
https://search.marginalia.nu/ - anti corpo search
https://www.wolframalpha.com/ - STEM
https://www.phind.com/ - programming
https://knaben.eu/ - torrents
https://annas-archive.org/ - books
- ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269
- Wow! This is the first time I've heard about Knaben Database, but it looks handy. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.

As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.
- It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.

"it works on my machine"
- Maybe OP's "search results" were the ads at the top of the google results
- It also works on mine.

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
- 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.

I just tried searching the same thing and it works for me
- Same here - only Reddit results.

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
- Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do !mcwiki diamond to search the minecraft wiki for "diamonds"
  I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse
  
  My problem with ddg is that I can't refine my search by excluding keywords, only by adding more. For example, it's frustrating if I'm looking to buy a product locally and half the page is Amazon results.

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

Just tried it and it still works perfectly fine.
- 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.

Still works fine for me.
- Weird. I wonder if it's device specific.
  
  do you have a nonstandard keyboard/language setup? i wonder if that's not the basic latin colon character (unicode 003A) or something like that. try copy/pasting this directly: site:reddit.com
- Works fine for me too. Used an iPhone/safari

You can still.
Under the Tools dropdown you can change it from "All Results" to "Verbatim".
Try this: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=tacos%20site:reddit.com
- So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff
  
  Wow, that’s really strange. They aren’t marked as ads either…

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.)

@rosenjcb I gave up on Google search a few months ago. It got to a point where it would consistently show me nonsense that was written to farm ad revenue. DuckDuckGo has been better for me (once you disable the ability to show ads in the search results), but I still get occurrences of it showing me nonsense. Like, I tried looking up information on the Super Smash Bros Brawl mod Project+, and it kept showing me information on some certification.

I can't reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode
- Can't reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)
- For me it is still working. But ig it will go all downhill rather quickly.

Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷‍♂️
- 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.
  
  I don't use anything that's made or based on the US. Serious redflag!
- Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?
  
  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.
  
  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 .
  
  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.
- 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.
- I stopped using google as my main search engine about 4 months ago. Duckduckgo.com is comparable in most ways, except things like maps are a bit less visually enjoyable to use.
- why did they even start

That is fake
- It's not fake. You can look at my other screenshots. It's just not happening to you.
  
  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.

I always have used inurl: instead to great effect. For instance if I wanted just the technology subreddit it would be inurl:reddit.com/r/technology

For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.
I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.
Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.
- Yeah honestly, it's great so far. I tried searxng for quite awhile and it did the trick somewhat, but damn SEO farms were my biggest pet peeve. The time I save is worth the money

It looks like you might be using the built-in Google app. Could that be a factor?
- Same results in the browser as well.

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.
- What do I need to do to prove it's not fake? Record the screen from another phone?

Between this and Amazon it's almost completely useless to search anything through them. You just need to go to forums to get recommendations and reviews

The enshittification continues.

maybe try the inurl operator

I recently switched my default search from Google to DuckDuckGo: Google has begun refusing to find anything while exact same search on DuckDuckGo just works. Google is slower because I have to think+ignore first half of the page due to Ads/SEO crud.

Wrong. I regularly use "site:" all the time.

I've been pretty happy with my selfhosted SearX. I think maybe I've used google for so long that I don't know how to properly use other search engines. Bing never seems to give me the results I want.

Weird. I gotta check out that Cookie and Kate recipe, though!

Our cutting edge algorithm must feed you the content of whoever pays more. You don't choose anymore. and you have to accept it.
BR, Paid Search Engines after investments dries.

There's https://redditle.com/ if you just want reddit results. I've had it bookamrked and find it pretty useful.

This is a tragedy. I will have to see if this still works on Bing

Works fine for me.

What's the difference to domain:?

My search engine results have been so dogshit lately, this just makes it worse. Glad I don't use Google anymore (even though all of them are bad regardless).

Oh that stopped working a while ago. All site: will do now is put those results up top. It absolutely refuses not to also show you irrelevant results.
- I've noticed a lot of operators seemingly not work as they're supposed to or correctly. Very weird.

Is there a way to to something like this for Lemmy? This is one thing that I used all the time for Reddit and found immensely useful.
- There's someone actually building this right now. It's a Lemmy search engine. https://browse.feddit.de
- https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search
  https://www.search-lemmy.com
  It's still in EARLY development so expect bugs.
- Search-Lemmy is under development for this.
- to to something
  to do something
  (Can't edit my comment in this app)

I am avoiding google search where ever I can. Google feels very slow compared to Bing search and does not nag me to accept their popup every time I use it from a private tab.

Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.
- 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.
  
  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.
- ChatGPT is not a search engine, it's a language model. It does not provide correct answers, it imitates what correct answers sound like.
- 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.

The google search tool is still a thing in 2023?! Maybe it's time to convert to other search engines.
- For all its other flaws, Google is still quite a good search engine, even if it is worse than it used to be. It's still the definitive search engine.
  You don't have many other good options, either. What are you going to do, jump to Yahoo! Or AskJeeves? Bing??
  
  I stick with duckduckgofor years now. Though, search results are inferior sometimes. I also blame it for mostly showing reddit posts, even these days. On the flipside: Isn't that exactly what reddit googlers are looking for, right now?

152 comments