• iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    What are y’all searching for that Google search isn’t working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I’m baffled by this.

    • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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      11 months ago

      I use DDG and if the result is not what I’m looking for, I add !g to forward the query to Google.

      80% of the times, I need to add !g because DDG is clueless.

      I wish I could say otherwise but Google search results are still better overall than DDG.

      Sure, for some specific thematics, DDG will do better. But that’s for quite niche subjects.

      Very surprised to see people talk about DDG like it’s at the same level or better than Google.

  • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    That’s not only a search engine problem in itself - websites also got worse in general to appeal to googles algorithm. Which means that other search engines would show similar crap, unfortunately.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

      I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

      And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

  • Pistcow@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something. I also don’t want to he directed to Pintrest and be required to have an account. Honestly, I’ve started using Bing more often.

    • Daryl76679@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Try Brave Search, Duckduckgo, Startpage, or Searxng. For more detail on these recommendation (that I definitely did not just steal), check out the Privacy Guides page, or The New Oil for a different, albeit overlapping, set of recommendations and take on search engines.

        • kattenluik@feddit.nl
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          11 months ago

          DuckDuckGo has recently become a not very useful search engine too, it still has way way better queries than Google though.

          Going back usually shuffles the search results and after like 5 results there’s just a bunch of random entries based on your geolocation.

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Yeah honestly. The Google ad-based search system created a set of incentives that just destroyed the internet! I miss the days when people created their own fun little quirky websites like Ian’s Shoelace Site. That used to be every site on the internet!

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.