What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
Over all bing search it self isn’t bad.
Dunno why you’re getting down voted. It’s literally a search engine that can read all the bullshit faster than you, so that you don’t have to.
perplexity is also good
If it isn’t open / free / private there is a % of the community that will not even try it.
Just like on Reddit lots of negative energy in some subs.
Hardly saying bing is amazing only that lately I have been drawn to trying it more since the chat based search that allows follow ups in natural language.
Google bards equivalent is only available in the US and just this last week the UK so I can’t try it out.
However over all I agree that more and more google search results have more adds and the good results pushed further and further down.
I don’t like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
Have it compile a list of sources it’s already sourced from, and keep searching for any new sources it can add. Have it list its expectations for what an expert should know about a particular subject, then have it learn about each of those points, and finally present as if it is an expert there to assist you.
Same here. It’s like going to the library and just asking a question of the librarian.
hosting a local LLM to summarize search results could be very cool though
I downvoted because I have literally no idea what that guy is talking about.
Bing has never been a good search engine. The results are always so terrible, plus you have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baity crap they put everywhere.
I do like Bing for porn tho…
the clickbait alone is enough to turn me away from Bing and Edge
cool that people don’t mind it but it shouldn’t be controversial to dislike Bing for bad UX
Notice that they said chat. It this new thing where a language model (GPT) formulates the search queries and summarizes them to provide an answer.
Have you tried using the Chat feature (GPT-4) to do searching? I just tried it, and it surprisingly works really well for some inquiries.
Like, use their chat AI, but as a natural language search engine. It’s integrated to Bing’s index so it can peruse it itself, so you don’t have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baits crap they put everywhere.
You can’t use it on mobile without downloading the app and granting it god knows what permissions. Hell nah…
I am using the app and I’ve given it zero permissions.
Have can you be so confidently judgemental without even installing it.
I recently switched to Bing after years of disappointment from Google and months of disappointment from DDG. Bing is pretty disappointing too, but less so, so far. I tried to use the chat feature a couple of days ago, but it said I have to download the app. Nah… fuck these tech companies and their apps.
The “preview” for the chat feature requires the app or edge on desktop currently but I do find myself turning to it every time I get frustrated with a google search these days.
Less disappointing is probably the best discrimination as you said.
I use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.
It denies mobile. I was using Firefox. Same as Reddit, anything to try to force an app download.
I just tried it again on desktop and it worked, but the reason was that I downloaded an extension a while ago and forgot about it. When I disabled the extension, it stopped working.
There used to be a way to enable installing any extension on mobile FFx Dev, but I’m not sure if that still works. The desktop extension just changes the user agent string, so that might be another route to enabling it.
I downloaded Firefox Nightly on my phone about a week ago so that I can change my user agent string to get Google to stop F’ing up YouTube pages, but it doesn’t seem to work. I guess I’ll look into that extension. Do you know what it’s called?
I signed up for Kagi.com right after posting the above. I saw someone’s recommended here in this thread and said what the heck!
Use a decentralized SearXNG instance and have it query every search engine that exists on the internet, or host your own of you’re really actually worried about privacy, and never look back.
+1 for SearXNG. I’ve personally found mostly better results, for my use cases, than Google or duckduckgo, although I keep DDG as a backup.
SearXNG is great.
I think the features I’m missing are easily adding more engines (haven’t looked much into it), and automatically blacklisting domains from coming up in searches.
I just tried two of the instances listed with a search for “how to filter mineral spirits”, and they both gave me errors. Both Google and DDG gave me an answer. Is there some trick I’m missing here?
The instances get overloaded quickly and the IPs blocked by google/Microsoft/etc… Better off self-hosting.
+1 for SearXNG… I run my own instance in docker, and host it through a cloud flare tunnel. I set all my “web browser bars” on all my devices to auto use its address, so I don’t even have to think about it, and all my searches are auto routed through my instance. It’s Great!
I use Swisscows and Metager, and usually find what I need, if I don’t I retry the query with Startpage.
yandex.com if you don’t mind ru gov spying on you. Though you can use it with tor or VPN for privacy.
I am not sure whether DDG or SearX results are optimised by someone, but it is different from what I would see on Google for a given topic.
DDG seems to get most of their results from Bing, but they do tweak it a bit themselves. From the link:
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
This explains why their results are so much worse than Google’s.
For some things. For other things they’re better. Google has really jumped the shark in the past two years.
I mostly just use it for when I want corporate style results, like shopping.
Palpable 2015 energy in this take right here.
5 years ago sure. Not sure I really agree nowadays.
Granted, that has as much to do with Google getting much worse as it does DDG getting better.
Where can I find soemthing about startpage changing to bing?
I’ve been using https://www.ecosia.org/ because they plow some of their profits into planting trees. They use bing results and I generally find what I need quickly.
Topics like this remind me of the pre-Google era. If Google can’t see the damage they’ve done, they deserve to vanish like the ones they’ve vanished in the early years.
Your own whonix
I’m using brave search, and am very satisfied with it overall.
Probably the new Google search that uses Bard. It’s not public yet, but you can ask for access.
Edit: It’s currently referred to as “generative search”, and you can use it on Android if you sign up for the beta version of the app on the play store.
Does it link to it’s sources yet?
Don’t even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect my search queries.
Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.
Yep, Google decided it was too complicated and removed it all. Dont know how it was too complicated, people just wouldn’t use it if they didn’t know about it. They felt “natural language” would be more useful. Bullshit, I search for “foo and bar” it’ll return me results for foo and ignore the rest
So google has reverted to late 90s search behavior
Considering what happened to late-'90s search engines, that seems like a rather dangerous idea…
Does anyone know the AOL keyword for Lemmy?
They got killed by Google. I was a Dogpile man myself, until someone showed me the google search.
Too complicated for them and their optimisations, maybe?
That’s not why they ignore them. They ignore them because it is profitable.
This still works if you use double quotes!
WDYM? Quotes work for me. Can you give an example that is broken?
I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.
Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.
I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.
Ssh, you’re ruining the circle jerk.
Yeah I really miss those days of logical operands. Back in the Alta Vista days I could do Boolean searches, but yeah that’s been replaced with speech recognition which doesn’t work as well. To this day I still like the Boolean search better. Newer does not always mean better. Most of the time it only means dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
Operands still work. You may be confused because the se will offer you results without them if your operands produced nothing.
duckduckgo.com only had 2 ads that were clearly identified when I just tried it. no idea how manipulated the rest of it is.
i gotta use duck duck go on my work laptop. no sugarcoat its dogshit google is still better even tho google is getting worse
I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I’m a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.
Duck Duck Go search results are a little lacking, though, like it’s completely missing some possibilities. Looking up tech stuff for a Linux issue I’m having, Duck will miss a site that Google finds - and even if I enter the exact text of the site, it’s completely absent from Duck.
For a brief moment in time search engines were perfected. Then they veered off course. All of them did. Why though.
Remember when you could list vaguely some words related an obscure movie to Google. Then it would tell you the movie you’re thinking of. That’s been nerfed.
Tangentially related. What’s the deal with search engines of online stores. It’s like they aren’t even search engines at all. They’re doing nothing more than showing me products/sellers they want me to buy from. Digikey lets you drill down to precise specification filters. I wish all search engines could be like that.
Actually the vague movie description thing was due to imdb’s movie tags that users had set on the movie and search engine was doing the simples things it could i.e. “all this one word links point to this movie, perhaps it is this?”
Why’d they stop?
