I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it’s just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.
Elmer can go Fudd himself. Store brand non-toxic craft paste is just as flavorful an half the price.
People still use Google?
This is what I call the linux bubble. People who use linux and are used to alternate solutions, which may offer better performance than the norm. Then they surround themselves with other like minded people. So much so that they begin to forget that they are using alternatives rather than the norm. Despite what benefits they gain from alternatives, some people can’t grasp that they are, in fact, alternatives.
Twitter has 368 million monthly users. I find it to be a cesspool of hate, racism, and right wing agenda.
So you would think mastodon or bluesky would have equal or better numbers.
Bluesky has 9.7 million monthly users, which includes a huge recent boost because of brazil ceasing twitters ability to operate. I think that alone was 2 million users.
And mastodon has 975,000 monthly users.
So yes, despite it’s flaws, twitter is still the default in microblogging. By a LOT. But I’m sure the feeling around here is “who still uses twitter???”.
Everybody. Same way everybody uses google. Same way everybody uses instagram. And it’s not even close to being close.
The fact I’m most flabbergasted about is that only a third of people use password managers by default. An independent American surveysource: bitwarden over 2000 “random” Internet users shows 34% use a password manager. The randomness of this survey is probably skewed, which would make the total percentage even lower in actuality.
You can’t actually believe the default search engine in most configurations isn’t used.
You honestly though the most used search engine has been abandoned by everyone? Maybe share what you’re using instead of just being pretentious?
The results are usually the most clicked, not necessarily the factual links. Others have recommended kagi. I haven’t tried it yet. I remember when the internet started and you had to use them all!
I’ll have to try kagi some time
EDIT: subscription based… Idk, definite maybe on that one.
Is that the one that costs money? You can’t have a true incognito search if that’s the case.
True Incognito mode is a myth, it only stops keeping a history in the tab of that browser. Everytime you use a browser to go to any site ever, the browser logs you went there. So does your ISP and the site your connecting to. No matter which mode or browser you use, if you go to Google, then Google knows you went there and logs your searches.
The closest you can come to browsing the web anonymously would be with a mix of dedicated privacy OS like Tails and either a VPN or Tor as a middile man, but that assumes those proxys are not corrupted. Free VPNs make money by selling your “secret browsing” habits.
The internet is nothing more than wires, if you connect your wire to someone elses, every intermediatary knows.
True, but worth reading their about page and privacy page. Not saying it’ll stay this way, but the way they are running is something that makes more sense then being sold as a product to Google. And you aren’t getting much of an incognito these days with all the fingerprinting they are doing.
I will admit kagi search isn’t the highest performer, but it’s viable. DDG, Start page, etc. Might give you more privacy, or not (hard to tell with DDG these days), but it might be worth trying a different model for a while.
I miss the days when the internet was truly free, but in lieu of that we have to have something better. Kagi is a start.
You can’t have? Or you can’t be sure?
Because you certainly can have. Just because you pay, doesn’t mean they will log your searches. In fact Kagi claim they don’t. And since their only income comes from paying users. If anyone ever found out they’re lying about that, they’d quickly loose a big chink of subscribers and income. As well as get sued for fraud. So it’s rather unlikely they do.
Unlike every other search provider, Kagi is the only one with a business model that ensures it’s users are the customer, not the product. When actually using it every day, that’s quite obvious in the results. Even when you search for a company directly, it’s Wikipedia entry is usually the first result. The the company site is the second.
I’ve used Kagi’s free trial. I’d turn to it when nothing else was helping and it did really well, but recently it hasn’t been helping either. It’s probably still fine for most things, but I’m often searching niche developer/programming things that are too burried under SEO/AI spam to find anymore.
FWIW, the default “programming” lens works quite well in Kagi, you can also create your own lens if you have a set of websites from which you routinely search info, and there are tons of bangs already (which can also be mapped to lenses BTW). In addition, you can downrank AI/SEO stuff when you find it (it is downranked by default in kagi), so that over time your results are quite clean.
I was just about to try Kagi out and then ran into this post of a bunch of different search engines. Dogpile is not on there, so maybe I need to look it up now!
Yeah, last month I finally had enough and DDG has been alright
The problem with DDG is if it doesn’t find results it just ignores your search terms and throws whatever shit it wants at you.
Oh my god, I feel this so much… Also, I think that recently got even worse, as I recently found myself switching between DDG/Google and finding both extremely bad for my query
I know it’s being overly recommended in here, but kagi pretty much gives you exactly what you want. I’ve had very few times it’s been unable to give me my search in the first few results. Others swear by SearXNG
does it also straight up ignore special commands like -whatever i could swear you could use that on many sites and it worked as "exclude this "
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
- ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
- duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
- any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
- marginalia.nu - specifically ‘random’ - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
