So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years.
I just can’t believe how poor it’s results are, and how it’s trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).
I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I’m wrong.
How long has Google been this bad?
It’s only been about a year really, but the Enshittification was logarithmic and got twice as bad every day
I went to StartPage personally.
That’s just a proxy for google. Same terrible results.
^This is for anyone who doesn’t know, click on the web button in the “More” drop down list after making a search to get the old style search results instead of the new ones. People mentioned this in the thread earlier so I thought I’d make it clear.
I use Swiss Cow and it works fine https://swisscows.com
I don’t see much AI stuff on Google yet but most searches there now give me only video results for some reason, with no way to opt out of them and get text results. It DDG fails me I just give up now.
Use brave search so much better than google
I think Brave is one of the few somewhat common browser/search companies that is worse than Google
Prefer Firefox browser. But what is bad about their search it seems to be the most accurate to what I want. I always found ddg to give me stuff outside of exactly what I want. Google just started going out of right field. Then the summary ai thing recently added to brave search has been decent. I like the sources
Google has been this bad since their initial IPO, when they signalled their intent to do this, and should have been stopped to protect the most useful public utility ever invented. Since that day they’ve been a pimp; the decision to become a pimp led to this.
“Do no evil”
“Don O’Evil”
Google is great if you want to buy things. It’s absolutely shit for information gathering.
I’d argue the noise is to a point where it’s even shit for buying things.
It used to be great for information if you included reddit in the search terms. Instead of google learning from reddit, reddit is now full of ads and bots. I guess google apps will be complete garbage soon too.
I remember a time when you didn’t even have to include Reddit to get good Google search results.
I remember a time when yahoo search was by categories.
Id argue it’s also shit for buying things because it will only give you products with paid ads. It’s useless to discover adjacent products or finding different sources.
And in web search when searching for a product it gives you dozens of “product tests” pages that are actually paid SEO articles. No, that page that shares a name with a newspaper has not actually tested what the best dishwasher in 2024 is.
I don’t think Google can be beat when it comes to searching local businesses, but otherwise you might as well go straight to Wikipedia.
Yeah I’ll concede that, Google is still good for local business and maps.
I don’t know, been on Kagi for a year so forgot Google.
Looks nice, do you recommend it? Why not use ddg?
Kagi is just excellent so I guess that’s why. It’s so good I completely forgot about Google when I tried it.
I used ddg a few years back too but I always had to use Google for certain queries and never felt fully satisfied with the search results. It felt like a worse search engine that I was using because I didnt want to use Google.
With Kagi it’s the opposite. It’s a better search engine than Google. It’s Google results without the dark patterns and hostile behavior from google.
I use it, and like it. They dropped prices a while back so now you can get unlimited searches for $10 a month (they also have a $5 limited tier and a free trial).
First thing is I’d like to live in a world where search engines (and the internet in general) don’t have to be ad supported. This is a different model so I want to support it.
But also Kagi has some nice features. My favourite is how I can block Pinterest, and boost the ranking of other sites like Wikipedia. Basically you can have some control over search results.
If you’re familiar with SearxNG, that’s basically how Kagi works. They run the searches on a bunch of search engines and then present one cohesive search results page. But SearxNG for me takes several seconds to get the results, and Kagi is almost instant.
I don’t know if it’s significantly better than the free options, but I like using it and it’s pretty cheap really.
Not OP, but I copy my reply from the last time someone asked an opinion on kagi:
I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.
How do you use it on mobile? I’ve seen there’s no mobile app
Just set Kagi as default search in your browser. There is a plugin you can install that does it, easiest way.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Read for the exact timeline
That is an amazing read. Thank you!
Insane. Thanks for sharing.
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A couple years ago I began getting frustrated. Last year I started to first go to Bing, google as failsafe. Now I gave up on everything so might as well go with Ecosia. When I NEED something, I’ll go with bing/bing’s chatGPT.
Pretty sure DDG, Ecosia and Bing all use the same backend?
Can confirm. I struggled to remember the name of the ancient website vampirefreaks after the concept came up in conversation and out of the big search engines only Bing’s flavor of chatGPT could tell me what I was looking for.
It started when Search Engine Optimisation became a thing, so it’s been a while. But it really went downhill a few years ago.
Don’t think any engine is immune to SEO
Feels like about 6 months or so? If I do an image search it only seems to pull items linking to a retail site. Everything is about sales and I can’t find information.
