• fossilesque@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.

    Others, more specific uses:

    • rosenjcb@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.

  • melonpunk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’d recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I’d recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.

    Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you’d see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they’re still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)

      It’d be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the “top” results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).

    • inverimus@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn’t hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.

      • aleph@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.

  • PasswordIsTaco@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.

    I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.

    Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.

    • theragu40@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I hope you are asking that rhetorically.

      But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.

      I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it’s really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.

      If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.