Google search engine is much worse than it used to be and seems to be getting worse.
udm=14 doesn’t seem to improve Google search results by a significant margin.
Bing and DuckDuckGo seem to perform better than Google at present.
Google itself is failing. I’m not going to speculate why.
uBlacklist is my current extension for removing spam results.
There’s been a two pronged assault on it over the years.
Mostly from websites doing anything to spam up the results via SEO and mass produced articles about product recommendations, that are little more than the top 10 selling items of that type on Amazon along with affiliate links.
But also from within as Google morphed from a search company to an advertising company. Especially once they reached peak saturation and that all important growth must continue. I just don’t think the capitalism machine works for these tech corporations once they reach the size of Google. How do you even grow from there? Enshittification and eating yourself is the only possible outcome.
Lol they put the guy who ran Yahoo into the ground in charge of Google search.
Lots of talk about which search engine to use; surprisingly little talk about extensions.
Block or Highlight Search Engine Results is my personal recommendation. Whichever SE you use, when you see a result that’s AI slop or a garbage website like Forbes, just add bullshit.com to the filter, set to hide, and you’ll never see that trash in a search result ever again.
Be diligent about it for a good week or so, and your search result quality will absolutely explode, whether your using Google, DDG, or several others.
It would be great if it did anything for SEO, but alas.
Using a search engine that isn’t saturated with ads and AI trash also solves this problem.
I stopped using Whoogle (Privacy engine using Google search) because of the bad search results. Google’s fault of course.
Trying SearxNG now.
Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?
Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…
Searx is fancy about it though, It queries everybody and gives you the results that came back from multiple places. This effectively eliminates ads, AI, and unless they all missed it, spam.
I have nothing against any meta search engine, they are very useful, and I use them primarily as well.
However, they are not a true alternative, because they depend on third-party services. The same as Invidious is a very useful, but also not an alternative to YouTube itself, just a different user interface.
The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.
I started paying for Kagi. Works like Google in 2019. Fast, useful and customizable. One of the best features is hiding results from shit sites like Reddit, which blocks me for using a VPN. $10 well spent just to have that option.
why would you block reddit results? it’s often useful (at least when related to tech, possibly other topics too). I would recommend to install libredirect instead, which redirects reddit to a libreddit/redlib frontend
I don’t know if Bing’s search results are better than Google’s.
They all suck.
Kagi has an AI search option which IIRC is on by default – or at least was at one point – where it’ll try to also synthesize an answer and stick it in a box with the results, but you can just turn it off in your preferences. I have it off.
There may be a day when we have AI assistants that are so good that their summaries are better than looking at the original source, but I’d put a high bar on that, and think that we’ve got a way to go.
Lets you turn it off for good…until Google removes that feature
