• cypher_greyhat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google’s search results are absolute garbage lately. It pushes the most advert-heavy spam sites first.

    DuckDuckGo has more reliably been giving me the technical documentation I was looking for in the past year.

      • lps2@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        The first half of the first page is all ads now on Google. It’s utter shit - the things it’s a lot better at than DDG is NLP, being able to understand questions, and anything news related. If you know exactly what you’re searching for though, using the old style of search words works great on DDG

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Search engines are about to be replaced by AI anyway.

        If you want good results, use something like perplexity.ai.

        It is slow, so it isn’t my main engine. But those results are amazing. You can be very specific in what you are searching and keep refining your search since it remembers your previous results, it tells you why the result is relevant and it also gives summaries of the website so you can know what it says before you click on it.

        It truly is artificial intelligent searching.

    • Sendbeer@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I used to be able to search for a tracking number by Google and it would link to the correct delivery tracking service. About 1-2 months ago Google stopped doing this and just gives no results. Why would they stop linking you to FedEx or UPS? Who knows, but my wild ass guess is since Google was not able to link “related” sponsored links along with it they just removed the functionality. They are just actively making their service shittier anytime something minor doesn’t dish out a shitty ad along with it.

      I’ve gone on to using Kagi and DDG. Rarely do I miss Google search.

        • Sendbeer@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Not sure what I am doing wrong, work is when I discovered problem. This is what happens when I try to search in android. Doesn’t work on my work pc or on mine. Maybe it is a Firefox thing?

          EDIT: YUP. Tried it with chrome and DuckDuckGo browser and ups tracking search works fine. Wonder what’s going on with Firefox preventing it. Don’t think it’s an extension because doesn’t work in Firefox focus either and my work pc doesn’t have any addons.

      • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        Kagi looks neat but they’d have to have absolutely amazing results if they want me to pay for them, which I doubt they have… And sorry, but paying $10/month for a fucking search engine (where the actual cost per user is negligible and profit scales with number of users extremely nicely) is just insane.

        I guess Google would make at most about $1/month off of ads from me… if I didn’t block them. I’d be willing to pay that, maybe up to $3 for a really good service. But this is just insane, and continues the trend of “oh you like a service that’s not complete crap? I guess you should pay an order of magnitude (or several) more than what’s necessary to provide that service, because fuck you, what can you do?”

        If I had to pay for every service like that I’d probably spend $500/month just for that and then they’d still figure out that hey, we can still put ads in and make a little bit more cuz why not, what are they gonna do?

        • AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You are not wrong, but Kagi is basically still a baby. They started maybe like last summer or so? And already decreased their prices twice (well, relative prices.) I think if we give them some time there will be a good priced tier for everyone.

          P.S. Search engine is not the only thing they have.

      • kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Google search is less than useful nowadays. Google assistant seems to be Google’s inbred idiot cousin. DDG doesn’t seem to be any better. Most of my searches give the same clickbait results that google does.

        Honestly, outside of Google Maps, is there any legitimate value to any google product? Is there a single search engine that is brave enough to give 0 results and also literally parses what you’re asking instead of valuating against what the advertisers want you to see?

        I dream daily of Google imploding, and every single investor at that useless company going immediately bankrupt and destitute for the disgusting, addled, brain-malware they push.

    • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      If I recall correctly, DuckDuckGo uses Bing’s search database (not search itself, just the database).

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      When I built my PC last year I decided to just let Edge and Bing go for a bit instead of immediately downloading another browser or changing the search engine. I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to enter in Google.com to get a different or better result. And almost every one of those was because I wanted a google maps results and not whatever weird maps MS has.

    • ComradeR@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I miss the 2000s/2010s Google. Now I need to endlessly scroll down the page in an attempt to find something barely useful.

      • cypher_greyhat@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Depends on what you’re doing. I look up Linux admin stuff. DDG points to the Arch Linux wiki which is solid, even for non-Arch Linux stuff. Google points to random sponsored blog tutorials that are sometimes outdated or the author doesn’t have a full understanding of what their copy-paste terminal commands do.

        Recently I used google to look up a Kotlin coding thing. It pointed to every source except the official Kotlin documentation.

    • nitefox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      DuckDuckGo has been giving me poor results lately - especially when I look for news, everything is a redirect to Bing now - so I instead use Brave Search. It’s kind of disappointing since DDG had always worked great for me