I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.
Yeah DDG is great. The only thing I find is its not good at local results but a quick !g on the end gets me the local results im looking for.
Redirects your search to Google. You can put it anywhere in the search; for example !g how do i shot web, how do i shot web !g and how do i !g shot web will all land you into Google.
There are other 13k (yup) bangs like this. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Yahoo, Quora, most gaming wikis, etc. A few sites (like Google and Bing) have multiple bangs, that land you directly into a specific page (e.g. !bv searches Bing videos). More info here.
oh, good tip. I didn’t know about that.
you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?
Can be anywhere in the search.
“cute dogs !g” “!g cute dogs” “cute !g dogs”
Those all work the same, though clearly one is more cursed than the others. They have those for a bunch of other sites as well, for example if you want to search YouTube specifically/directly you can use !yt but I can’t kick the habit of just going to those sites first and then searching directly on there.
I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”
So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.
News orgs clinging to tradition.
i use archive.is for anything I really want to read.
most news is fluffy bullshit anyway.
It’s just that Bing/DDG seem to promote news from these sites as if they’re sponsored links… but without the disclosure.
Every search engine I’ve encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you’re looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you’re not looking for porn.
Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there’s both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.
I’d really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.
is it? that kind of makes sense, because I still use Bing occasionally while Google is completely out of rotation, although I don’t find Bing as good as duckduckgo.
edit: it is not! looks like the DuckDuckGo search engine is an aggregate of hundreds of search engines, including their own duck duck bot, excluding Google but including some Bing results.
Their FAQ hems and haws about that, but (in the past) I’ve done side-by-side tests and found identical results. Maybe something’s changed, maybe it hasn’t.
DDG often gives me results for individual words of the search but not results for all of the words in that order for which to have contextually relevant results.
I often find myself forced to brave the shitshow that is google search.
have you tried the duck assist thing yet?
If you’re trying to talk to the search engine more like a chat assistant, that sort of response might be what you’re looking for.
Fuck Duck Assist all my homies hate Duck Assist and I keep having to turn it back off again.
Whoever made it should get cancer and not have their children show up or call them back.
It’s not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.
Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every “product” they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It’s not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.
I’m very happy with kagi at the moment. Just crossed one year using it as my main search engine last week and don’t see why I would go back.
Same. Using Kagi feels like surfing the old web. The first thing I did was block all Pinterest results. That alone made every search golden. 😂
You’re not the only one. They have a leaderboard and the top 7 results are various Pinterest domains.
Leaderboard here for anyone curious
Yep everyone blocking Pinterest.
Also the most prioritized website is Wikipedia. Guess everyone wants facts in the the age of hallucinatory AI
Having to signup and login to a search engines sounds like an annoying hassle
It’s a very minor annoyance and well worth it in my opinion.
I was searching for a book quote for over a year. I tried every search engine, tried changing the terms, checking back several times every few weeks or so, but couldn’t find anything even close. I tried kagi and it was literally the very first result on my very first search.
I haven’t looked back and have never had an issue finding what I’m searching for since.
Signing up and logging in isn’t a problem imo. I wouldn’t even mind if I had to pay for searches, but I’m not going to make it a subscription service. Unless they add an option to do something like buy 1000 searches that never expire, its not something I’d considered. I do think they beat out competitors like google with their results pretty consistently though based on the trial.
I’m not gonna subscription my heated car seats but search is a service that costs an ongoing amount to provide. The subscription isn’t significant, it’s $5 a month for 300 searches (or $10 for unlimited).
I know we’ve been conditioned to expect search for free, but if we want to get away from the “the user is the product” model then I think it’s a good thing to have a subscription to a service that has ongoing costs to provide.
I don’t remember any specifics, but I think I heard there were some privacy concerns?
Then again, there seem to be privacy concerns about pretty much anything so might not be that bad…
The concerns are about the credit card you use to pay.
The argument is that they can associate the card with your searches.
As far as I know they don’t keep search data. I’m personally happy with them
Never heard any issues with Privacy, but I’ve heard issues about them using Brave search Results as part of their results.
Is it really $108/year good though for a single person (based on the tier that makes sense for me)? Just curious what other search engines you’ve used or tried and what features set it apart to make it worth spending the money on.
That really depends on your use case and how valuable web search is for your daily life.
I’ve personally tried Google, Bing, DDG, Brave search, and ChatGPT. Kagi is consistently able to find what I’m searching for more quickly and accurately than anything else, which has been very valuable for me in my personal and professional life.
It’s easily worth the cost in result quality and time saving for me personally, but that doesn’t mean the same will apply to you or anyone else.
As far as stand out features, there aren’t really any that I can think of. It just gives me the results I’m looking for without any bullshit to wade through.
You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that’s just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
I’ve been using Mojeek lately and it looks like their advanced search can do some of that.
https://www.mojeek.com/advanced.html
Reminds me of early Google search.
I have it a test with some operators from the search bar instead of using the form and it did exactly what it was supposed to. I’ll keep this on hand. Thank you.
It is, and it’s not just the search engines to blame.
The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn’t pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.
Spam sites laden with key words and massive SEO to farm advertising dollars from clicks long predated AI
It doesnt help that big search engines like google have realized people will go as far as page 2 or 3 to find the results, so intentionally worsen their search results to increase ads being served.
