don't use google. basically any engine is better. I would recommend using a searxng instance. Soi that nobody can ever enshittify it ever again
I swapped to ddg about a year ago. I've noticed their search results are not the greatest either. There is so much spam and paid articles that make it to the top search results I often end up frustrated trying to find what I'm looking for.
The Internet really is enshittified.
To be fair I think DDG has improved marginally over the years while Google is simply shit now. I feel like spam sites are quite prevalent on Google but less so on DDG.
I’ve been using it for years at this point, and I really prefer it to google. For most of my common/easy searches, it gets what I want pretty reliably. Occasionally I’ll have more obscure searches where I do have to switch back to Google, but honestly Google feels less and less helpful for that as time goes on. To add, DDG has bangs which are just wonderfully handy. Turning your search into a google search is as simple as adding “!g” to your query, and it’ll redirect the search. There are tons of other ones too, it’s a really nice feature that makes DDG more convenient in a lot of cases. Very much worth trying out at least
It’s really good these days. Kagi is still the beat, but if you want free, DDG is the way to go.
I'll have to give this kagi a shot I never heard of it! DDG just doesn't ever seem give me what I want and I've been trying it forever. It's like I'm always playing this cat and mouse game with the search engine and it just gives me alllllmost what I want but not quite.
It’s not free, but I find it worthwhile. I really hope Apple includes it as a default engine in the next update.
Kagi doesn’t sell you shit, so if you use Google for that, you can’t get that replacement data:
Free Google (& other) proxy: SearXNG
Further reading / Instances: Searx.space
One good instance: SearXNG.site
For basic searches (kinda a Bing reseller with disappointing results): DuckDuckGo
Vote-with-your-wallet alternative: Kagi (who may have astroturfed or may have not, but great engine at $10/mo unlimited - have tried their free trial)
Comments of mine RE: why everybody’s just reselling search ($1b+/yr to operate your own crawler): one and two
It struggles when you have more than one word, it will ignore context and give you results with maximum number of either word. Still better than Google at this point, though.
works fine for me, and their implementation of AI (only letting it use wikipedia and maybe some select other sources) is pretty nice IMO, perfect for answering questions like "how many people live in X Y Z cities in total?".
Same, but lately Bing fucked with their pricing, and now the search results are usually garbage. I have to go re-search the query in Google way too often.
You can also look into Ghostery private search also. I've been using it some and it appears to be at least as good as DDG. YMMV
this is wrong, because today you won't find the thing you're looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.
And then you notice that your search term was “corrected” to something completely different. Looking at you too, Amazon.
Fuuuuuuuck Amazon is even worse, if that's possible. You used to be able to search for a product and would get that as the first result or at least on the first page. Now, they just return shit that is vaguely related but is a paid sponsor or someone manipulating their search algorithms.
i follow a channel on youtube called yitube that's impossible to look up because it gets corrected to youtube. it's maddening.
but this doesn't depict results you're looking for in "now" unless you assume it is a product search.
edit: I see the yellow is supposed to be the same result. I am ashamed
Slight update to this comic, to call out the dangers of Google's Sponsored Results.
Examples, for those that are not aware of this risk:
It's disgusting that Google will happily make money from scammers while completely aware of what's going on
That's exactly how you make money in the search engine world - by not knowing what your paying customers do.
That's big business on the Internet! No morals, no conscience, just churning out profit for the do nothing class.
I rarely trust top results from google, since I'm uncertain if I somehow missed the tiny gray text saying that it's an add.
Yeah, that shit is illegal where I live and search engines do it anyways. Unfortunately not enough lawsuits...
Stop using Google.
And Microsoft. And Apple. And Amazon. And every single corporation that cares more about money and stealing people's privacy than serving you.
Yep!
It's all trash these days. We're having to just avoid the worst of it while preparing for the rest of it to also suck so bad that we have to find even more alternatives, and then just throw our computers away at the end or at least go back to computing where it wasn't all about stealing data, long, long ago.
I get where you're coming from, but I also feel like I might get kind of bored and I wonder how I'm going to get that hot sauce from Alabama that I like. I'll give up on a lot of my ideals and trade a LOT of frustration for artisanal hot sauces.
Get to know people in the hot sauce community (it exists!) and then you can ask person-to-person!
So, do you suggest just not using computers altogether?
Getting some cheap Nokia for the cellphone and be done with it? (Ig a refurbished IBM ThinkPad with FOSS on it is also fine)
Old computers, Free OSes. No mobile devices, not even old shitphones. Bring back payphones.
I'm honestly amazed no one's sued google over the site telling them things like "Jump off a bridge if you're depressed" or that products have been recalled that haven't
It might protect you from a lot of Google's shit show but it won't show you good results too.
Kagi is the only usable search engine for me right now. Yes, it's not free. I needed a whole year to convince myself to pay for searching but I finally did it and it is absolutely worth it. I'm a SE though, so searching stuff is like half my job.
I'm with you. At first I thought it was getting shilled, but the search results are great. I also bought a 12 month subscription to Nebula. I'm giving these services a go and see if they can replace all the enshitified services.
Well, sure. If it works for you then by all means keep using it.
I'm just recommending a service which I find very useful. I actually first heard about it on Lemmy and I'm grateful for the recommendation so I spread the word in hope of helping someone else.
I thought everyone was overreacting until I used Google on the computers at my college and I realised that DDG had been insulating me from all that horror. Thank goodness I switched when I did.
For the unaware, this is a scifi term which describe humans overthrowing robot overlords.
&udm=14 is a temporary fix for those who still feel the need to use Google's search.
Paid search isn't the solution, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of the CEO of Kagi search.
What I would like to see is a non-profit search.
Google wanted to organize all the world's information to make it useful. Sounds like a great idea destroyed by a profit motive getting in the middle. Try the same idea without the profit motive and you'll probably end up creating something people will defend endlessly, like Wikipedia.
What if your search engine asked you for a five dollar donation, once a year, the way Wikipedia does?
Search engines should be non-profit, honestly, they should be an extension of Public Libraries.
I haven't kept up on this controversy, but is this really all there is to it? People think the service is untrustworthy because the CEO tried a bit too hard to convince a critical blogger, according to the comments possibly due to neurodivergence?
Read the blog post. I can totally see where the writer is coming from. Vlad's email responses are pretty laughable with that added context. Not only did they tell him they weren't interested in engaging, but the responses he sent anyways thoroughly dodged the substance of their arguments. They did their research and came to pretty reasonable conclusions, and vlad totally talked around/failed to address the points that really matter. Kinda slimy ngl.
I can also see from the highlighted discord exchanges why they weren't interested in engaging with him further. Sure he "responds" to everything, but he doesn't really engage with constructive criticism. Whether or not the guy is autistic isn't really relevant to whether he can run the business competently and make sure questions are answered in an honest and transparent manner.
It's the equivalent of doing a Google search and then clicking on the "Web" tab for results.
Clicking on "Web" manually inserts the &udm=14 at the end of the search string. I believe udm is just classifying which type of search to run, and this is a basic "web search" with no gimmicks.
&udm=14 is fancy for nerds who think they're special but for anyone else it's just clicking on "Web" results.
I did not even know they separated out Web searches until I came to your comment. Super useful, thank you.
A URL query is pretty damn low on things that make me feel like a fancy nerd. Add it by default to your browser's search function so it applies to all searches automatically
Do you mean to tell me that I keep scrolling I'll eventually get to the yellow promised land?
I haven't used Google in about 3 years. I use duckduckgo and I just eventually figured out how to use it, you have to be a little more specific but I can get what I'm looking for straight away these days. I'm aware they're not private anymore since they got bought out but I use technology like this with the assumption any data that can be collected, is collected, and will be sold off at some point, so don't search anything you wouldn't want your grandmother knowing about lol.
This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.
I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.
I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I've tried all that I've heard of, and none will provide complete results.
The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there's lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.
That's the neat part, you don't.
The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.
It's a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we'll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.
Same with visiting almost any website.
Then
Now
I'm currently prioritizing DuckDuckGo over Google and others for a better quality of search results. There ain't much ads to mess your attention, and the results are quite good most of the time.
If you need to use Google, I'd recommend the &udm=14 trick, as demonstrated on the linked site. It goes straight to a "web only" filter for search results. There are some tricks and tips to set that to your default search option in settings, or you can get a browser extension.
CEO of Kagi has no boundaries and doesn't know how to take "no" for an answer. He thinks he can just browbeat other people into agreeing with him. It's a bad look and makes me have zero trust in Kagi as a product.
https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/kagi-ceo-s-recent-controversy/8119/2
I said elsewhere just a few days ago: These fucking techbros need to realize that sometimes shutting the fuck up and letting your products speak for themselves is the better move than trying to browbeat everyone into acceptance of your view of your products. Prelovac's insistence on being heard by someone who has no interest in a conversation with him screams entitlement and a controlling attitude. People who can't take no for an answer generally are not good people. Not being able to accept someone else's lack of consent and wanting to bully them into consent is a bad fucking look, period.
When I read your post I was expecting something much worse than what you linked to.
It wasn't really all that bad. Imo, it was 1 or 2 emails too many.
Maybe I'm a little biased because I love the product so much. It's a fantastic search engine again and all of the AI extras add value and aren't obnoxious like everyone else's.
I am still happily paying for kagi even if the CEO emails people that write shitty blogs about them.
It feels like this is the only bad thing about kagi that keeps getting shared every time kagi is mentioned. Somehow it feels like one person and their followers trying to promote themselves as Karen's more than legitimate accusations.
A CEO getting involved with the end users is not a bad thing imo
It's an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.
I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the "Don't be evil" slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore "we" cannot "fix" this. Only they could, and only if they want.
But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to "have things", but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.
SearXNG does pretty well.
There's also an ongoing project called Yacy which is trying to make a decentralized ever-growing index, but it's small enough right now that the results are still quite poor even when federating with other users until you spend enough time fine-tuning it, which most people don't want or have time to do.
That's neat - though I would worry that it could get polluted easily, e.g. China, Russia, and/or fascists everywhere would very much like to control the conversation, so as it got a wider userbase that would be the time for it to cease functioning, whereas before that it could be allowed as something to occupy our time. So much of our daily lives are impacted by such geopolitics that we don't even/often think of.
I hope that we (people writing FOSS) can explore the concept of voting more - e.g. how wikipedia does its edits with "trust actors", similarly the Fediverse (& searching) could have a much wider pool of trusted community mods (or potentially a lesser category of that, lacking full post-removal capability as current ones do) where mods could vote and once something went below a certain threshold (e.g. 5x more down- than up-votes from such community curators), then a flag could go up like "this post has been marked as containing potential misinformation - are you sure that you would like to read it?" By distributing the load like that, it could help make this place MUCH more active, by lowering the barrier to moderation as it conjoins normal reading activities with a very simple button bush for most people. (and then a higher category of mods can double-check the curator mods, etc.)
On the other hand, authoritarian developers are unlikely to want to extend the Lemmy code along those lines, and rather go the opposite direction so that anytime someone says something even the slightest bit against their party line, boop the person becomes insta-banned in every single community that they have ever interacted in, even if never having commented but solely voted in them (I am not exaggerating this up - for one see the notes for the upcoming v0.19.4 release allowing this capability, and multiple recent threads discussing how this has already happened to numerous people - e.g. here is one excellent accounting of that process).
So anyway, if someone is willing to build a good system, then the people do seem willing to take it forward - e.g. see how many have already done so to Google Maps with all the reviews & pics including menus & such to share with everyone. But ofc there will be resistance to now doing that again for somewhere else, and perhaps still yet again if that one fails, and so on in perpetuity.:-(
Seems like you're trying to address systemic problems of learned human nature at this point, which is something that can't really be done through software alone. There needs to be a fundamental culture shift for that. Yacy is mostly good because it's self-hosted with the option to federate to a decentralized index, and so is able to be tailored to your own needs without any external entity. However, the tailoring process means that the initial search results are absolutely atrocious compared even to Google at first, and then get much better over time. SearXNG, on the other hand, is a sort of self-hosted aggregator of search results from dozens of other search engines, rather than being a search engine in itself. It also serves as a proxy, since it is doing the searching and not you.
Complex problems will not be solved overnight, it's true, but we can get there one step at a time!:-)