this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Despite how bad Google Search had become, DuckDuckGo and Bing are somehow still worse. While Google displays the result in the first few, DDG and Bing have no idea what I'm looking for.
Gotta try Kagi sometime.
I hear this a lot, but I changed from google to DDG about a year ago and haven't even considered looking back. I can find everything I need quite easily and can only think of maybe a handful of times that I have had to resort to using a bang to try and find something using another search engine. I'm very curious what the difference is between my experience and that of others who have problems DDG.
I recently switched aswell and am surprised how well it works. I thought it didn't worked good enough but I never failed to find what I was looking for so far. Very nice.
On technical stuff, I find DDG better than google since I don't have to wade through their sponsored ad and results. Google is getting unusable that way. I try it every few months when I can't get an answer on DDG and it doesn't work any better.
I totally agree with that. I've also found Google worse about being influenced by SEO tactics (probably just because it's targeted for that) and so you get bogus results like GeeksForGeeks that are often really poorly written and irrelevant, sometimes even wrong, up at the top.
The amount of AI articles that are a bunch of padded bullshit designed to get indexed as more credible "long form" sources is getting out of hand. Sometimes it takes a couple minutes to wade through the intro bullshit where they give a bunch of background yammering, and then you find out it's recycled trash is really starting to make research take time again.
IDK how you get around this but whichever search engine does will be very successful.
TBH I didn't even notice that I was using DDG when switching to librewolf other than the icon on the top bar. I have found everything I have needed, though I usually use "site:lemmy.world" (for example) anyways.
Yeah I can't actually notice the difference. Granted I'm not paying much attention, but that means most of the times I'm finding satisfying results with ddg.
Personally I'm noticing the opposite.
I tend to do a lot of technical-related searches. I'm finding I'm getting consistently better results from DuckDuckGo / Bing -- what I'm looking for is usually available on the first page without having to faff around.
With Google however, it was drawing parallels to what I'm looking for but not what I explicitly queried. I had to either enable verbose search, or manipulate the search to look for specific words. Even then what I was looking for was in the 3-4 page.
On google, I started seeing too many of the first results tagged as "ad". It became even more concerning when those tag dissapeared but the same websites showed up.
I used to able to trouble shoot nearly anything I needed to, but now I come across completely unrelated posts more than I come across solutions.
I was iffy about bing, I still kind of am, but at least I find what I'm looking for most of the time. I'm personally going to wait a bit before trying out other browsers, when there's a bit less risk of them selling. I remember a good android launcher that used to be trusted before they sold to another company
It'll be a frigid day in hell before I pay some company to store my search history keyed to my CC for the inevitable sellout day. I'll get by with DDG, which frankly works better than a search engine that doesn't track your clicks has any right to.
I don't know much my opinion matters: but the unique features in kagi honestly really help me find what I need. I can lower domains, or raise other ones, it can search archives and has a general set of features that make digesting and finding relevant results easier. It's like a breath of fresh air, I can search and find not just endlessly search.
idk about bing, but duckduckgo either seems to be missing the index itself, or only works when you give it specific queries instead of generic keywords like Google.
I need to try kagi, in my usage I've found brave is best of the alternatives, and I'd put qwant after brave, though I might be biased by how nice qwant looks 😅
Try a Searxng instance. It's a meta search that pulls form multiple engines (incl. Google).
Instances here: https://searx.space/