LMGTFYWNMGSN
Let Me Google That For You, Wait, Never Mind, Google Sucks Now
SearX because Kagi is hailcorporate
kagi is pretty good tho
Can you elaborate? I’ve just started using Kagi for several weeks and I love it, seriously reminds me of 2012 Google
They’re talking about the open source privacy search engine SearXNG and saying hailcorporate prob cuz Kagi charges and there are a ton of people in this thread advertising it
Ah, I think paying for things that make your life better is a good thing, not everything has to be FOSS, unless there’s a differentiator that makes it better, it ends up being a “I’m better than you” without any value. I am wondering if there is any value add from alternatives though.
While Web search has gotten worse, Youtube has gotten pretty good at finding niche content with a few dozens views. In general it seems most user generated content these days is on Youtube as video, not on the Web as text. The typical Web SOC spam doesn’t really exist on Youtube outside of a few crypto scams here and there.
I hadn’t thought about this, but you may be on to something. I had a car issue, googled it, found nothing but crap and generic articles. I searched the same on YouTube and found a couple videos about fixing the exact issue on my type of car.
Really interesting observation.
The trouble with that is that videos are much harder to reference than text. If someone slaps a [citation needed] on a claim I’m making, I may have to track down the video, find the right time stamp, and link that. And then they will probably say that YouTube isn’t a valid source, even if it comes from a relatively reputable creator (I’ve had people say this for a Tom Scott video where he was interviewing a subject matter expert in the topic).
This is all so much easier with blogs. Even if people should be a little more skeptical of blogs, at least a blog can link its own sources more easily than YouTube to get to something more reputable.
Since when? last i checked you get one page with the most popular results for the query, and the rest is unrelated recommendations
For quite a while by now. Three years ago or so they started recommending older content again, instead of focusing exclusively on new stuff. And since than I frequently end up on videos and tiny channels with just hundreds of views. Meanwhile on a regular Google Web search I literally never end up on somebodies random private homepage, I have to remember that Marginalia exist if I ever wanna see one of those.
Youtube of course still favors professional monetized content, but random niche content still ends up making its way to the top surprisingly often. Youtube also does a pretty good job of not recommending me popular content that is irrelevant to me, all those channels with tens of million of views I can see on the Trending-page, they never make it into my normal Youtube browsing.
Google Maps as well. Very inaccurate at times.
Google Maps is always dead on for me. I regularly drive very long distances across the US. The time estimates are within minutes of accurate even when there are sudden or extreme backups like in Los Angeles. There’s plenty to criticize Google for, but it isn’t Google maps for me.
“Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers’ measures.”
Click bait headline. I see they’re good at SEO themselves.
Kagi is payd service, but the results are so good!
it’s decent, but I’ve stopped using it because I’m not fond of the decisions they’ve been making https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611
I nearly left them after reading through all that, but I kinda reached the conclusion that they have open discussion about it on the company portal with users, they’ve given their justifications, and they are listening. Who knows though, maybe they’re just funnelling through brave to save money, and it’s got nothing to do with search results.
To me, it’s an icecream with a smell of dogshit, rather than an icecream topped with dogshit. It’s not completely perfect, but it’s a struggle to find any service that’s 100% agreeable nowadays.
It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.
I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Here in the Netherlands, DuckDuckGo results are poor for anything local. I fall back to Google relatively frequently, although for day to day stuff it’s quite okay. I do often head straight to Wikipedia…
My wife and I were looking up a specific calendar. The search query wasn’t particularly complicated and very clear. In Google, the first result was a 2023 version of the calendar, and the rest of the results were completely useless. In Duck Duck Go, the calendar we wanted was the top result. I can’t imagine what it’s like to use Google for a search that’s actually complicated.
Idk, I use DDG as my default, but I find myself adding !g to many queries after checking out the first page of results; so much so that my brain has made such a strong connection to “!g -> better results” that I often find myself automatically typing it in Google as well when my results are unsatisfactory.
RE: potential astroturfing (my comment last time); from my comment downthread that one:
Anytime [paid search engines] are mentioned I suppose I’ll jump in and say…SearXNG is a popular non-commercial alternative. I wanted to throw Grasp in to give a commercial competitor a shout but they’ve “paused”.
Update on Grasp:
We will be back soon and will open-source our code.
Neat, wonder if SearXNG x Grasp would be synergistic.
Amazon’s no longer any good at shipping, and Google’s no longer any good at searching. What a terrible year to be a tech nerd.
They quit innovating so what tech?
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Ecosia! I did try Kagi, and honestly did not understand the appeal.
On a semi-related note, I used to know a friend that worked at a small tech company (won’t say whom, since the company’s still around and they still work there) that, if memory serves, worked directly with Google to provide clients higher search results for their services/webpages. While I know this isn’t the exact cause of the enshittification, it certainly helps.
Take this with a grain of salt though, I don’t remember exactly what they said, and that was quite some years ago.
“Worked directly with Google” yeah, I don’t think they did. Google doesn’t need partners for adwords or SEO. They’re really the only game in town, and SEO companies are notorious for misrepresenting themselves as “subsidiaries of Google” in order to make sales.
Just tried looking up if it’s safe to light a fireplace fire after having had a sinus surgery. (It’s very cold here in Seattle tonight and I had septoplasty/FESS/turbinate reduction yesterday afternoon.)
All my results were about smoking cigarettes and a result for whether it’s okay to box after surgery. Not a single source to suggest a fire being safe or not.
Your story is obviously anecdotal but I think it pretty much aligns with what what we’ve all experienced. You search for something and get results for something else. You change your search to try to get results you asked for and get… literally the exact same results. It’s infuriating.
This is why I use Bing Chat for specific questions.
"Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you had sinus surgery and that you’re feeling cold. 😟
According to some sources, it’s best to avoid exposure to smoke, dust, and other irritants after sinus surgery, as they can interfere with the healing process and cause inflammation. Therefore, lighting a fireplace fire may not be a good idea for your recovery."
Bing Chat provides sources to the claims so you can verify:
https://www.realself.com/question/cambridge-ks-pain-sinuses-weeks-after-fess-surgery https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia
That is really good to know! Thanks so much for the heads up on this! Never knew this was a thing.
You can also use perplexity.ai if Bing ai is not your cup of tea.
I don’t the answers section very very hit or miss
Often it will link you to a highlighted section with noting relevant.
What about DuckDuckGo?
I switched to DDG and then to Kagi based on all the praise it gets here. So much better than Google!
I keep hearing about Kagi, are they reputable? I moved from Google to DDG and I do a fair bit of searching so I would be interested, but I guess there’s a bit of a one-company-knowing-my-search-history going on (totally unironically).
I haven’t done extensive research, but as it’s a paid product, they have the user’s interest in mind, instead of ad revenue.
I’ve been using brave search since their early days. They used to suck, but I pushed my feelings aside and just kept trying. Now, brave out performs google on a lot of search results. Sometimes, you have to add a bit more context to your query, but it is worth staying private and not dealing with all the SEO garbage. If the results don’t fit your need, just leave feedback and it will probably be addressed soon.
What are the pros/cons of brave (what is it even)? Are they actually a search engine, or just re-skinning Bing or something like DDG does?
