Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
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DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I’m looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven’t tried external engines.
Kagi. I haven’t had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can’t find it either so I haven’t lost anything.
Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
It’s based on Bing from what I recall, and it’s not necessarily the most accurate engine. I tried it for a few months and couldn’t replace Google with it unfortunately.
Thank you for explaining! And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question, so that I can learn more, sheesh. Ignoring the fact for the moment that the Fediverse is becoming more Reddi-fied all the time… I appreciate you actually taking the time to answer.
I actually swap back and forth between Google and DDG. For things like local business hours, Image search and Maps, the former finds the better results. For a few things (that it may consider piracy?), Google refuses to find results even on page 10. For most other things, while the SEOs may not have entirely taken over, they at least have risen to an extremely annoying prominence.
e.g. try searching for the word “inspire”, and rather than offer you the dictionary definition, the top hit (for me right now) is the “Inspire” sleep apnea innovation - which nowhere is labelled as an advertisement:-(. I understand that the latter company would like to subvert the normal rules of politeness & etiquette and replace my prioritization so that their name appears at the very tippy-top of the search (possibly locally, or perhaps even world-wide?), but that doesn’t mean that that is what *I* wanted. Which is why more & more often these days I go to DDG first and then Google, rather than the other way around which is what I did until very recently.
But yeah, sometimes I do legit use Google search too.
I’m avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I’ve bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla’s bug tracker) and so on. I’m basically using Firefox’s “keyword” search feature in the way DuckDuckGo’s !bang syntax works.
Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.
Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.Qwant
Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes !no_stupid_questions@programming.dev usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at !cs_career_questions@programming.dev and !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)
I use my own self hosted SearXNG.
Searxng
DuckDuckGo
I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG’s results over Google’s.
I run my own searxng instance. It’s amazing.
I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.
Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.
Searxng.
Kagi. I like it
I’ve heard enough bad things about it to stay well away. Which is too bad bc it’s quite good atm! I just expect it to hoover up my data & get enshittified sooner than later & the CEO is Musk-level BSer 🤷♂️👍
What have you heard and where? I’ve not seen anything that indicates either of those things
I don’t know about beefbot, but this blog convinced me to not use kagi:
Oh really? I never felt like that was convincing in any way especially since lot of the stuff in that blog is just uninformed (for example you don’t have to pay taxes in many jurisdictions until you hit a certain threshold)
I’m not gonna try to convince you to use Kagi, but I just don’t feel like that blog is full of good reasons not to.
Correct, it was that blog And “Slimy_4og” you sound like one of the many disinformation AI bots farting around now
“You disagree with me so therefore you’re an AI bot” sure is a take…
I had someone say that to me, a Maths teacher, when I was trying to tell them where they were going wrong with their Maths! 😂And they were a programmer - no wonder all the e-calcs are wrong… (sigh)
Well, it’s plausible you’ve ingested enough influence from enough propaganda sources that you yourself believe what they’ve told you, & you parrot it back out, which sorta makes you, in the limited context of one comment, functionally indistinguishable from a propaganda worker, who probably has been replaced by an AI bot bc those can do more of that work.
So ya can’t really blame me for the shorthand of just referring to you as one, yknow?
