That’s why I use Kagi. It’s a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.
Nobody ever likes anything
If you really don’t believe me, check out [no longer available] - my Searx instance which I stopped using because of Kagi.
Edit: I realize now you didn’t reply to me, I came back to the after seeing people downvoting my (honest) comment in this thread and your comment kinda pissed me off so I just wrote a response quickly.
When we’re talking about the issues of search engines, and a whole bunch of people come in and “organically” promote a paid service, then my astroturfing detection rises up. This is how modern advertisement works and it fucking sucks.
That’s why I use brave search, it’s a free search engine and the results are actually really good
Idk, I found it to be quite good but it may be just me knowing how to search stuff (even tho Google just gives shitty results and DDG is hit or miss)
Even if it’s good, their long term goal will always be to appease their advertising customers, not you. Google has the ability more than anyone else to make the perfect search engine but they’re not spending their time and resources on that because that’s not what will increase their revenue. That model is just fundamentally broken.
Do they already have their own index? Last time I used it (when it was still beta) it was quite okay, but it was basically yandex or whatever with a different front-end and site-pinning
Look at https://kagi.com/faq .
They basically query other search engines and APIs in a privatized manner and they use their own indexes as well. I used Google, Ecosia, StartPage, DDG, a self-hosted SearXNG instance and then Brave. I liked DDG and I kinda liked Brave Search, as well. But in comparison to Kagi, they’re all not that good in my opinion.
The image search of Kagi is especially what blows me away. It just shows relevant results for my queries and I’m satisfied.
I love kagi. I use it mainly for work, where it gives much better results. It even has a programmer lens so that it shows results that are relevant to programmers. But its image search didn’t work that well for me. Not sure if I’m just not formulating the queries right though.
For certain questions/information, ChatGPT provides better summary information than standard search engines like Google/Bing
A slightly dangerous part is that ChatGPT makes up convincing texts that may be wrong due to misunderstanding and or biased.
Yeah I had a coworker say she likes to use ChatGPT to find answers and explanations to questions she has that you would normally Google.
This is a terrible idea. While it may contain legitimate info, ChatGPT was not designed to give factual answers. It comes up with convincing answers based on text it has read. You’re going to end up with some bad information and it’s a bit dangerous to hear that people are starting to use it that way.
Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats
idk - you can’t really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it’s google’s fault for using such a game-able system IMO
It’s a little bit of both, but you’re right. Google has had years to improve their algorithms.
But as an advertising company at heart, the more time people waste on those bullshit sites, the more Google profits.
There’s definitely a need for regulation, but I’m not going to pretend I know where to begin.
I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don’t think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.
The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn’t try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.
Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.
It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.
What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.
But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.
I’m finding that those searches will be advertisement for a vet clinic, hotels in Sparks, Nevada and they will all have a blog about this and that in vague terms advising you to spend money on the issue. Years ago I was building a water garden and found tons of useful info, a couple of years ago I decided to make a big pond and all those sites with the useful info are either gone or buried on page 73. What’s at the front is retailers of pond/garden/aquatic equipment with the same drivel about your cat throwing up.
Try duck duck go, brief subject, possibly include the word “forum” or “howto” or “Reddit” (I know I know) and then try to narrow down your search terms from there. Use quotation marks for keywords, and site: to denote specific websites that you want to limit your search to.
And that’s basically the magic right there. Another key term to use is if you get too many results of a certain type, like if you search the word constitution and keep getting the ship, include the term -ship and that should remove those results.
my lil trick is I’d just add “Reddit” after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution
It’s pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.
Does this work any better than DuckDuckGo? People praise DDG, but imo it’s results are pretty shit and I could never end to sticking with it. It can’t even get basic quoted text syntax correct.
Oh fuck man, that’s a great find! Thank you for sharing that. It’s actually providing really substantiative results which I haven’t seen from Google for at least 5 years.
I have definitely bookmarked that website, even though I use duck duck go I will probably use that as an alternate now.
Another good search engine that’s less useful for searches but for providing information is of course Wolfram alpha
Maybe that does work again after the thing with subreddits going nsfw has been somewhat resolved but not sure. It was my thing too. I heard good things about bing of all places. In general search just got worse over the last 5-6 years.
People talk about Bing and duck duck go like they’re good replacements, and I’ve given them honest good faith tries.
I always switch my search engine back to Google after simply not getting the results I’m looking for
you can use Google or Bing from duckduckgo using !bangs. g! (for google) or b! (for bing) then whatever you are searching for. I use g! all the time for non privacy related things. and since duckduckgo doesn’t use trackers and all that the results can be terrible so sometimes I just resort to using g!
Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn’t work. It’s so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.
2 months ago that was fine.
Now I don’t have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn’t open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.
Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(
Not that I’m recommending anyone give reddit any more traffic or leverage, but I’ve been using Stealth app at the recommendation of someone else on here. It’s downloadable through f-droid and specifically is meant to keep you anonymous and avoid any trackers and other trash normally found when opening reddit links. You can’t even log into an account. I use it on the rare moments I’m looking for stuff on there, it makes me feel a bit better about it.
Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.
It’s rather tragic that a tribute band called Dark Star gets priority over a scientific Dark Star. I don’t know if it’s because more people search for the band or because this search engine is trying to sell you albums by this band…
To be fair, the band puts a lot of effort into marketing and keyword targeting, and scientific teams researching dark stars only publish for specific spaces towards other scientific people that are already looking at those places.
Did you use any search operators, like quotes or minus signs to get rid of the clutter?
Knowing how to do what you did is vital for using a search engine effectively. It’s not possible for a search engine to know what you want when a word has multiple meanings (well, not yet, anyway). It could have just as easily have been the other way around, where OP wanted to search for a niche band but all they could find is astronomy things.
Adding context like “band”, “astronomy”, etc is important if you’re googling anything non trivial. Sometimes you even need to identify different words to search. Eg, there’s a programming language called Go. But “go” is such a generic word that it’s hard to search for. Searching for “golang” tends to help a lot.
Or even if it was accurate.
The future seemed so much more promising when I was a teenager. Now I’m mid 30s and the present is very… corporate and lame. Very lame. They’ve even programmed the younger generation to be sanitized and accepting of blandness. Imagine growing up with only one or two genuinely creative movies being released a year. Zoomers don’t even have their own music genre, it’s all just nostalgia. Sigh.
