Stop using Google. You can’t change them, you have to leave.
I’m using Duck Duck Go now.
I swapped to ddg about a year ago. I’ve noticed their search results are not the greatest either. There is so much spam and paid articles that make it to the top search results I often end up frustrated trying to find what I’m looking for.
The Internet really is enshittified.
To be fair I think DDG has improved marginally over the years while Google is simply shit now. I feel like spam sites are quite prevalent on Google but less so on DDG.
Is it a viable alternative? How is it going?
I’ve been using it for years at this point, and I really prefer it to google. For most of my common/easy searches, it gets what I want pretty reliably. Occasionally I’ll have more obscure searches where I do have to switch back to Google, but honestly Google feels less and less helpful for that as time goes on. To add, DDG has bangs which are just wonderfully handy. Turning your search into a google search is as simple as adding “!g” to your query, and it’ll redirect the search. There are tons of other ones too, it’s a really nice feature that makes DDG more convenient in a lot of cases. Very much worth trying out at least
TIL bangs. Thanks!!
Free Google (& other) proxy: SearXNG
Further reading / Instances: Searx.space
One good instance: SearXNG.site
For basic searches (kinda a Bing reseller with disappointing results): DuckDuckGo
Vote-with-your-wallet alternative: Kagi (who may have astroturfed or may have not, but great engine at $10/mo unlimited - have tried their free trial)
Comments of mine RE: why everybody’s just reselling search ($1b+/yr to operate your own crawler): one and two
It struggles when you have more than one word, it will ignore context and give you results with maximum number of either word. Still better than Google at this point, though.
I’ve been using duck duck go for months now. It’s totally cromulent in my opinion!
It’s really good these days. Kagi is still the beat, but if you want free, DDG is the way to go.
I’ll have to give this kagi a shot I never heard of it! DDG just doesn’t ever seem give me what I want and I’ve been trying it forever. It’s like I’m always playing this cat and mouse game with the search engine and it just gives me alllllmost what I want but not quite.
It’s not free, but I find it worthwhile. I really hope Apple includes it as a default engine in the next update.
Kagi doesn’t sell you shit, so if you use Google for that, you can’t get that replacement data:
works fine for me, and their implementation of AI (only letting it use wikipedia and maybe some select other sources) is pretty nice IMO, perfect for answering questions like “how many people live in X Y Z cities in total?”.
Same, but lately Bing fucked with their pricing, and now the search results are usually garbage. I have to go re-search the query in Google way too often.
You can also look into Ghostery private search also. I’ve been using it some and it appears to be at least as good as DDG. YMMV
DDG drops ads in results too just not as many yet
this is wrong, because today you won’t find the thing you’re looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.
And then you notice that your search term was “corrected” to something completely different. Looking at you too, Amazon.
Fuuuuuuuck Amazon is even worse, if that’s possible. You used to be able to search for a product and would get that as the first result or at least on the first page. Now, they just return shit that is vaguely related but is a paid sponsor or someone manipulating their search algorithms.
i follow a channel on youtube called yitube that’s impossible to look up because it gets corrected to youtube. it’s maddening.
This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.
I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.
I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.
The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.
Stop using Google.
And Microsoft. And Apple. And Amazon. And every single corporation that cares more about money and stealing people’s privacy than serving you.
…like AMD and Intel and nVidia and ARM and Apple and Qualcomm?
Oh wait.
Yep!
It’s all trash these days. We’re having to just avoid the worst of it while preparing for the rest of it to also suck so bad that we have to find even more alternatives, and then just throw our computers away at the end or at least go back to computing where it wasn’t all about stealing data, long, long ago.
So, do you suggest just not using computers altogether?
Getting some cheap Nokia for the cellphone and be done with it? (Ig a refurbished IBM ThinkPad with FOSS on it is also fine)
I get where you’re coming from, but I also feel like I might get kind of bored and I wonder how I’m going to get that hot sauce from Alabama that I like. I’ll give up on a lot of my ideals and trade a LOT of frustration for artisanal hot sauces.
Get to know people in the hot sauce community (it exists!) and then you can ask person-to-person!
Vote with your mouse-clicks and don’t use Google. Enough people leave they’ll either change or become irrelevant like so many before them.
Slight update to this comic, to call out the dangers of Google’s Sponsored Results.
Examples, for those that are not aware of this risk:
- https://www.techradar.com/avoid-google-ad-malware
- https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/scams-verify/google-ads-scammers-redirect-website-url-different-search/536-4ef6c41d-087e-4db9-a281-86bcf7637c68
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/01/using-google-search-to-find-software-can-be-risky/
- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/rogue-sites-causing-trouble-in-google-advert-results
It’s disgusting that Google will happily make money from scammers while completely aware of what’s going on
I rarely trust top results from google, since I’m uncertain if I somehow missed the tiny gray text saying that it’s an add.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.
It’s a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we’ll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.
It might protect you from a lot of Google’s shit show but it won’t show you good results too.
Kagi is the only usable search engine for me right now. Yes, it’s not free. I needed a whole year to convince myself to pay for searching but I finally did it and it is absolutely worth it. I’m a SE though, so searching stuff is like half my job.
Talks about some search engine no one has heard of before that sounds Chinese or something
Yeah, nyah I think I’ll stick with DuckDuckGo, which has never failed to find me what I was searching for if it exists on the Internet, and oh by the way costs me nothing to use.
Well, sure. If it works for you then by all means keep using it.
I’m just recommending a service which I find very useful. I actually first heard about it on Lemmy and I’m grateful for the recommendation so I spread the word in hope of helping someone else.
until bing goes down again
I tried getting xpadder yesterday and the top search results were fake websites. I’m still not convinced I found the real one
Just double checked the email confirmation from when I bought it in 2016. Most recent xpadder version is 2024.05.01.
Also if you’re looking for controller remapping software (and you’re on windows OS), check out DS4Windows. Contrary to the name, it works for most brands of controller, and it’s got a lot of stuff that xpadder doesn’t.
I landed on it for the better control stick adjusting (you can change dead zone/max zone, and also sensitivity curve). I stuck with it because it can use an emulated controller while hiding the actual controller from programs and games (which solves any double input jank from shit like steam).
Also it can also map gyro controls to mouse input, which is real neat for essentially using my joycons as a remote for my pc, and the occasion where splatoon style gyro aiming fits in games without being too barfy.
Been like this for years now, I jumped ship 4 years ago to DuckDuckGo, might even jump that ship if it gets any worse, but alternatives…
I tried using DDG for about 3 months, until I had to ditch it. I want to use it, but its results are even worse than Googles.
While on Google I might have to scroll past the ads, sponsored links and obvious AI blog results, the first page will usually at least contain a relevant result somewhere, whereas DDG simply doesn’t bother to show any relevant results at all. Even on it’s first page, it will stray far from the actual search term.
I’m honestly amazed no one’s sued google over the site telling them things like “Jump off a bridge if you’re depressed” or that products have been recalled that haven’t
Likely settled out of court silently with an NDA
I just subscribed to Kagi to try it out.
Great! Everyone should try the free tier just to have a look at alternatives. To be honest after a few weeks and several specific searches I’m not ready to do the switch though.
Do you mean to tell me that I keep scrolling I’ll eventually get to the yellow promised land?
Just one more “o”, maybe it will be there…
that’s what she said
deleted by creator
For the unaware, this is a scifi term which describe humans overthrowing robot overlords.
If you need to use Google, I’d recommend the &udm=14 trick, as demonstrated on the linked site. It goes straight to a “web only” filter for search results. There are some tricks and tips to set that to your default search option in settings, or you can get a browser extension.
