I always have used inurl: instead to great effect. For instance if I wanted just the technology subreddit it would be inurl:reddit.com/r/technology
Bug or most likely faked. I’m selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.
Tech hate, so hot right now.
What do I need to do to prove it’s not fake? Record the screen from another phone?
I recently switched my default search from Google to DuckDuckGo: Google has begun refusing to find anything while exact same search on DuckDuckGo just works. Google is slower because I have to think+ignore first half of the page due to Ads/SEO crud.
Wrong. I regularly use “site:” all the time.
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.
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.
Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.
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).
I think Hotbot did that back in the 90’s, and it’s relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com
You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Edit: spelling
As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.
It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.
Photoshop? I just did this search on my phone, with chrome, all the top results are from reddit.com. There are ads at the bottom of the search results, after the “more search results” button, but not in the results themselves.
https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png
I honestly couldn’t be assed to Photoshop. This only happens when I’m logged into my Google account. Incognito mode has regular results.
Are the first two after the Reddit link unmarked sponsored results?
Yup, it’s all unmarked.
DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
- https://www.ecosia.org/ - search with praxis, kind of mixed results but non tracking and they do good things
- https://www.perplexity.ai/ - longform answers by ai with citations plus search
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ - anti corpo search
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/ - STEM
- https://www.phind.com/ - programming
- https://knaben.eu/ - torrents
- https://annas-archive.org/ - books
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.
Our cutting edge algorithm must feed you the content of whoever pays more. You don’t choose anymore. and you have to accept it.
BR, Paid Search Engines after investments dries.
maybe try the inurl operator
Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to sift through the SEO hellscape
The search operator in this image works perfectly when I try it. 🙃
The google search tool is still a thing in 2023?! Maybe it’s time to convert to other search engines.
For all its other flaws, Google is still quite a good search engine, even if it is worse than it used to be. It’s still the definitive search engine.
You don’t have many other good options, either. What are you going to do, jump to Yahoo! Or AskJeeves? Bing??
I stick with duckduckgofor years now. Though, search results are inferior sometimes. I also blame it for mostly showing reddit posts, even these days. On the flipside: Isn’t that exactly what reddit googlers are looking for, right now?
Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.
That seems rather risky, considering that they don’t really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.
As opposed to Google searching manually, which always has accurate outputs and never outputs falsehoods as fact. 🙂
As long as you double check the source of an answer I don’t see an issue.
If you’re double-checking the sources, both to make sure that they exist, and they are accurate, you may as well do the research without using an LLM in the first place.
You’re just adding to your workload unnecessarily in that case.
I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my “keyword picking ability”… now going back to Google feels unreal
Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do
!mcwiki diamondto search the minecraft wiki for “diamonds”I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse
My problem with ddg is that I can’t refine my search by excluding keywords, only by adding more. For example, it’s frustrating if I’m looking to buy a product locally and half the page is Amazon results.
You can do that on ddg. See this link: http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax
If I add
-amazonto the query on ddg I don’t get any Amazon results. Is this not the case for you?It is not. It works fine for google, but not for DDG.
That is weird. I wonder why we are seeing so different behavior from ddg.
Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷♂️
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.
I don’t use anything that’s made or based on the US. Serious redflag!
Eh. I guess I understand some suspicion, but for better or worse a very large portion of the internet is US-centric. It’s pretty difficult to use any major internet content and avoid US based stuff entirely.
Also from what I’ve seen, while these companies may be US-based they 100% have their own profits prioritized over any national interests. I’d be surprised to learn of any kind of overt nationalism biased towards the US from Google, for instance.
“americabad”
Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic – what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?
I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.
That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.
Would you say that duckduckgo’s search algorithm has gotten better, or that you have gotten better at using it?
Google’s algorithm works better at finding really weird things deep in the bowels of the web (for example: obscure programming questions around GPU shaders in a specific framework or graphics pipeline) and when searching for local things if outside the US (because Google has the notion of Region when returning search results, so for example here in Portugal if I search in portuguese for a store to buy something I don’t get results from Brasil) whilst duckduckgo works better for everything else.
Personally I default to duckduckgo and only use Google when duckduckgo isn’t returning good enough results, which is surprisingly unusual.
Startpage, Qwant, Swisscow, SearX
If these don’t work for you, try duckduckgo but I don’t recommend it as its made and based in the US.
Any app thats developed and hoated in US is a serious threat. Use any app which are developed and hosted in the EU .
brave, it is a separate database then Google and they have a discussion sub search. Qwant is a French based search that does not track you. also good results and based in the eu. metagear is a meta seaech engine that pulls results from yahoo Bing and goggle.
why did they even start
