Keep your links, I’m going back to askjeeves

kagi is paid search, I like the idea of that. why do you recommend kagi and not another paid search provider?

YALL NEED KAGI.COM

I refuse to pay for a search engine. There are numerous searxng instances out there in which I’m not the product even though I’m not paying.

Google Scholar is still quite good for the moment

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!

No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.

On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it’s niche partially because it’s made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I’m referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!

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.

The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.

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 just ask ChatGPT these days.

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.)

Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there’s other alternatives and searx unified them all

A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.

I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.

Google anything related to ‘laptop monitor turn off’ and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search

Torrents, modded apk’s,…

Check out my results for some chinese download service called “Content Plaza” for example:

Google:

Yandex:

Like, 2? On the ‘entire’ internet? 2? Right…

Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.

Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.

Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)

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.

What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.

i test all web search engines the same way:

• punch in “Python itertools”
• see if the official Python.org documentation for itertools is the top result.

if it’s not, then the search engine is contaminated with advertised or SEO optimized results and it’s wasting my time