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.
let us know if you find anything which could be better also, we're always looking for ways to improve
It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.
Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.
Another vote for Kagi here as well... except for searching for local businesses near where I live, I revert to Google for that, but I Google through Kagi so privacy is somewhat protected
I know there's some controversy but its spoiled me now, it just works
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there's not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
Kagi is great. It’s a paid service but you can try 100 searches for free.
You can use the Orion browser on iOS and set Kagi as the search engine.
The day i pay for search engines is the day i finally finish my 2020 new year's resolution
Enjoy your war against ads then. I’m not against supporting content, I just wanted a better model than invasive ads.
Kagi is pretty awesome
It's not you. Google has been getting worse.
https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
Lately I google for someone that should give me a direct, exact result. First five links are fucking paid ads.
You only tested Google and Bing.
Qwant and DDG both use the Bing architecture.
I agree though, search engines have become noticeably worse the last 2 years.
I’m pretty sure they discovered in the google monopoly case that google realized a couple years ago that a worse search experience would not negatively impact their bottom line. So makes sense
Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.
And the AI is trained on the shitty search results. It just parses them many times faster than a human reader can, which does at least make it better at getting to the fucking point. Once paid advertising is fully integrated with LLM, it will be as shitty and useless as traditional search. And then the entire world will collectively hop to the next trend so it can get hyper-monetized/enshittified, too.
It’s both.
It becomes more and more true every day.
Jesus, the "plandemic" explanation for why the Internet is dying. The Internet IS clearly dying, but this is stupid. Even if we got rid of all the bots and AI, the Internet would still be dying, because open protocols are not as exploitable as walled gardens. The value of capital in the world overwhelms the value of human labour and human interest, and all our social structures conform to the needs of capital over time.
It doesn’t really, it’s just that human activity on the internet is more and more taking place on platforms without any search indexing. 20 years ago, internet forum are where you’d go for advice online. Nowadays, it’s more and more becoming discord servers and similar, which just aren’t indexed by internet search.
The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.
Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.
Huh...Can't replicate that claim (though I would believe it happening)
On the 20th Sep. I asked my Google Home if it would be raining.
It responded that it would rain. I asked when it would rain.
Home responded with "Today it won't rain."
Like what? 5 seconds ago you said it would. No weather report reports rain. Where did you get the first response from??
And I could even replicate it (have it on video)
Whats funny and kind of sad, is that they know exactly what you're searching for, and don't give any fucks about showing you that, and instead will show you this cool other thing that they're getting their beak wet on thats like, eh... kinda related to what you typed in. Google didn't get dumber, they just don't have any meaningful competition which would force them to deliver high quality results, and instead of enshittified their results to the point where they're practically useless.
It's intentional.
Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.
A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.
PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.
theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.
I agree with you. It has gotten worse.
4get.ca
Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!
I legit had no clue what a Fumo plushie was 😵💫
I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.
Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.
Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.
I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).
There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.
So what about open source self hosted search engines? If it requires some hardware I'd gladly team up with a small group of people to finance a bigass server that just gets us our personal search engine
Any good ones out there?
Searxng, but there are plenty of instances already
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
It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
