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.
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.)
Profit motives are good at ruining social platforms; society.
Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there's other alternatives and searx unified them all
SearX isn’t maintained anymore, SearXNG is the meta-search engine that is still maintained.
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.
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!
Holy crap I remember that
The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.
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.
I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/
I also don't want to need an add-on for every niche thing I like to look at.
DuckDuckGo ftw 💯
SEO abuse has ruined the internet. We could've had something good.
I use Google for maps and I'm still using their email for one account but I hate it. Duckduckgo's maps are way less useful. I know they're tracking my every move. I want to normalize leaving my cell phone at home at this point.
For some stuff I had more luck using ChatGPT and crosscheck using DuckDuckGo.
YALL NEED KAGI.COM
Also:
- Classic web search: https://wiby.me
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/
- Pirates only: https://knaben.eu
- Non commercial search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Esp good for tech Qs: https://www.phind.com/search?home=true
- https://www.perplexity.ai/
Decentralise and build a toolbox, it's better for your brain.
kagi is paid search, I like the idea of that. why do you recommend kagi and not another paid search provider?
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.
Keep your links, I'm going back to askjeeves
'We didn't find many results matching the terms you wrote.'
THAT'S WHY I FUCKING WROTE THEM.
What are y'all searching for that Google search isn't working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I'm baffled by this.
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.
