Comment by OpenStars@discuss.online on Do we just need to accept that Google is sort of broken now?

Some of us left it behind quite awhile ago:-).

DuckDuckGo is just Bing.

Please explain

Nice. Downvoted for asking for more information.

It’s powered by Bing. That’s all. Compare DDG results with a private Bing session.

So, it uses Bing to some extent, I’ll take that. But it’s not entirely Bing.

Even if a large part of DDG relies on Bing doesn’t mean they are the same. That’s an oversimplification at least.

To a great extent. To the point that search results are identical.

Since the entire topic is about the quality of results, the comparison is quite valid.

I’m going to need more than “they look similar”. I don’t think it’s a smart thing to trust random people on the internet based off their word alone.

Lots of things could seem similar when they are still very different.

In terms of results, yes. But at least there’s no ads, nor sponsored results, nor bloody AI crap.

It’s not just Bing. They added an animal mascot. :-D

Explains why it so good for finding porn

Tbf, it’s not hard to find porn on the internet:-D.

Sometimes it’s hard not to

Sometimes it’s hard

See, you found a phrase that you could use to get you started already!?:-P

And use what instead of??

Duckduckgo, searxng, and if you are willing to pay, kagi is far better than google was.

Kagi has some problems

“is” absolutely, “was” there was a time in the mid-teens when Google’s search was god-like in its powers of finding what I wanted.

Duckduckgo is ok but not great even, although search in general is harder nowadays I think

Yeah i was mostly referring to pre ai enshitification google. Back when all they did was search the web for you and show you a single text ad, those were the days.

Im also inclined to agree that search in general has gone downhill, but that is more the fault of tech corps locking away info while seo ruins the leftover results.

I’m worried when ml models really take off the current web dies completely between corpos milking it to death, seo producing nothing but hollow, vapid nonsense to keep you engaged with their non information; and then as final nail in the coffin the ml model ability to entirely fabricate virtually anything digital, truth and information will be completely gone.

I noticed a decline in google right around 2015.

2012 it was the best thing running.

The problem is that a fuckton of the web is SEO poisoned, so even a better search engine will find garbage because for a lot of subjects garbage is all that’s available.

The best chef in the world can’t turn shit into anything you want to eat.

I don’t understand what you are saying. If some other search methodology were to use the same exact methodology of Google in paying attention to the SEO terms, then obviously it would fall prey to the same thing that killed Google. Similarly if the method was not precisely 100% identical yet still used SEO, then it too would be poisoned.

However, if the search method were to ignore SEO entirely and focus purely on the content of the page, plus other metrics such as number of links to that page, from other highly-ranked websites, but independently of SEO, then it would not be poisoned by SEOs. Although it might suck due to other causes, either related or not.

Anyway it all depends so heavily on what you want to find - e.g. a replacement for Google Maps is harder, and Google Images is also fairly great too.

i can’t tell if you know more or less than me about what SEO is

Probably less, in their modern formulation. I knew more about past ones but it’s been awhile and I have no idea how much of that is even still relevant.

99% of users marked this site as shit -> no longer display it

Shrug.

Not that hard to see the difference between consistent complaints and coordinated attacks.

100000 “users” then popped up and left the same glowing 5-star review > must be a great site.

It really isn’t that hard to tell the difference between bots activities and humans. If Facebook can detect a nipple in a picture in microseconds they can tell that “hmm a surprisingly high number of IoT fridges have strong opinions about this anti-Putin blogger, starting last week” isn’t valid.

A lot of content sites have altered how they write articles to be in line with google SEO to drive traffic. In doing this, the content that can be found by any search engine is now of lower quality.

What Google used to do is a lot of manual effort to keep SEO stuff at a minimum. You can’t make it go away entirely, but it was a give-and-take that basically worked.

We’re stuck now because Google decided they didn’t want to spend the money on it anymore, so the SEO people won.

However, if the search method were to ignore SEO entirely and focus purely on the content of the page

As another poster mentions, SEO is about gaming the content so search engines pick them up. If you change your algorithm, they’ll just change their methods. Google’s old method may be the only way to clamp down on it.

Admittedly I am much behind on the technicals, but here is an example: if an answer to a technical problem appears on StackOverflow, Reddit, and pleaseclickmePuLEASEpleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.xxx, then why allow the latter ones to rise to the top and the former two don’t show up until like page 3? Regardless of content on the page, the former two sites have a reputable “reputation” - is this what you mean by manual efforts, to designate them as more trustworthy sites?

Ironically the Reddit upvote/downvote style would work for search results, helping guide others to find similar content after a few people blaze the trail. However, voting has its own issues… as we see even in irl elections, as people game that system too with alt accounts. Anywhere profits are involved, it becomes a cat-and-mouse game where you have to fight off the vested interests.:-(

But for something important, it becomes worthwhile to invest some effort into it?

It’s only important in so far as Google can make a profit on it.

Yes, they could favor specific servers, and that used to be the case. That takes specific effort to pick those sites out, though. They don’t want to do that anymore.

It’s only important in so far as Google can make a profit on it.

It did not used to be that way. However, we collectively deluded ourselves into thinking that we were “safe”, forever, b/c Google “wasn’t evil”.

Yes, they could favor specific servers, and that used to be the case. That takes specific effort to pick those sites out, though. They don’t want to do that anymore.

In a sense, they wouldn’t even have to anymore, if they allowed the old ones to remain at the top. But I see what you mean - e.g. Reddit could change, and Lemmy would never get added.

Just block sites that do it or even worse do what the AI people are doing, data harvest it, and present the answer only.

I stopped looking up recipes ever since chatgpt became a thing.

This is what they want you to think but they’re hardly even trying. Google is shitty on purpose because if initial search results are bad, you “engage” more and see more ads. And since they’re not worried about competition because google is the default search nearly everywhere – most people don’t even know there are alternatives, google is synonymous with search – they can enshittify their search as much as they want. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

That’s what I enjoy about kagi: because I can block and rank sources, I get to do some reverse-SEO, and the results are really good with remarkably few adjustments.

DuckDuckGo has AI now.

Oh fuck!

Looks like you can turn it off though - https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures.

Also Quant, Ecosia, Startpage

Qwant is the best one by far, imo

What do you like about those over searx?

I love searx but it’s slow 🙁

Apologies if you already know this but there are tons of different instances of searx hosted by different people.

It’s possible the speed issue is related to the specific instance you tried, do you remember what it was?

Here is the list of all them: https://searx.space/

As I type this I realize I’m probably just not sensitive to slowness since I use tor for all my browsing lol

This is precisely why I don’t use searx.
I just want to quickly find shit, not maintain a list of instances that all have slightly different functionality and frontends.

I self-hosted it, and used it for years and liked it. But the results take 3, 4, 5 seconds to come in as you wait for it to run the search on all the different engines. I just tested searx.be above and found the same thing.

When I use any other search engine, I get results in half a second or less. I know it’s only a few seconds but it’s definitely noticeable when you use a different search engine.

I see, sorry for the assumption.

Doesn’t that just use Bing?

Yes, but I use it over Bing because Bing filters most of its news articles through MSN and then pressures you to download the app. Either way, both are giving me better results than Google at this point.

Yes. Go ahead and find a free Google alternative that doesn’t.

i think so, but the results are in any case mostly okay in my experience, and they have an AI feature that ACTUALLY WORKS since it just summarizes relevant parts of wikipedia articles and links you to the precise sections it used.

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