Yeah honestly. The Google ad-based search system created a set of incentives that just destroyed the internet! I miss the days when people created their own fun little quirky websites like Ian’s Shoelace Site. That used to be every site on the internet!

The Google habit is hit the third link, scroll to fourth paragraph, your answer should be around there somewhere.

Try Brave Search, Duckduckgo, Startpage, or Searxng. For more detail on these recommendation (that I definitely did not just steal), check out the Privacy Guides page, or The New Oil for a different, albeit overlapping, set of recommendations and take on search engines.

No kidding. Just earlier today, I was looking for a kind of niche tool used to wrap pallets in plastic, and I found nothing on google about it. It kept showing me everything BUT what I was looking for.

On bing, I found just about all of the information I needed about it. Turns out it’s niche partially because it’s made in my province, which I also found out from bing. Almost no one knows what I’m referring to when I mention it. It combines the technology of machine wrapping and hand wrapping, and it makes warehousing much easier sometimes. I wanted to recommend it to someone. Thanks Bing!

No joke, Bing Chat is considerably better at finding answers than any search engine I’ve used in recent years. I don’t even bother googling things anymore. Just ask the AI.

deleted by creator

me too

I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

Yep the whole Internet feels like a dying mall. There are still some places I go for specific needs, but I’d say my casual browsing of any kind just keeps getting smaller.

Nah man, duckduckgo is good, there’s other alternatives and searx unified them all

I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).

kagi is paid search, I like the idea of that. why do you recommend kagi and not another paid search provider?

More like content farming right?

Let’s say I want to find an aftermarket built-in air jack kit for a car. Nevermind why, but let’s say it’s what I want to find.

So I look up car air lift jack. Google spits back a grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, a stack of videos of floor air bag jacks by people trying to sell them, Another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, then finally a couple of the kind that go on a car, and godammnit another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, finally sponsored posts for floor jacks or the wrong kind, Amazon ads for the same thing, ads for brands of the floor jacks, and more, more, more, makers of the wrong thing, lowes, home depot, walmart…it’s all wrong.

So the very next words out of your mouth are “Well, you used the wrong search term!” No, not really, but let’s try getting rid of “bag”, because that seems to be a big incorrect return on the search. So in goes “-bag” to the search term. What does that get us?

The exact same fucking thing. “-” is meaningless anymore.

So that’s google now.

Want help with a tech problem?

Wade through a stack of a dozen shitty youtube videos 10 minutes long each (because google pays more for ad space, longer videos have more space, so those get pushed to the top, and a problem that would take a paragraph of text to solve now becomes a shitty video with blather, subscribe, previous videos, like, other videos, and 2 minutes of actual help), a bunch of sponsored links to tech makers that have shit to do with your problem, and SEO sites like solveyourtechproblem.com or wefixitgood.com or whatever BS name for sites that consist of boilerplate help like “did you turn it off and on again?” Maybe after all that you’ll get an out of date reddit or github list of posts that don’t have anything to do with your exact issue. So you put it in quotes, that should work, right?

“It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search” says google.

Why? I dunno. Not enough returns on the search to cram ads, sponsored links, shit for sale in?

Google is shit. I’ve switched to DDG. It has it’s own frustrations, but at least I don’t have to put up with Google cramming every ad and sponsored link in front of me along with garbage SEO sites. Google’s heyday has ended.

I’ve been doing a lot of searches lately about running, picking shoes, overpronation, training schedules, etc.

Straight google searches (ones that would have returned worthwhile results even ten years ago) are all trying to sell me something, or are AI generated content filler garbage.

I have to add “reddit” to every search in order to get real information from normal people.

a lot of people are using reddit and youtube to search for thing now

If I have a basic question I usually find myself going to chatgpt now.

Same, DDG fails with local results here in the Philippines, I found myself adding “g!” to my searches more often

I’ve been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).

I’ve been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.

Searxng is I think

Ecosia for planting trees

It’s just Bing with extra steps.

SearXNG has maximum privacy and results, but it’s a bit too complicated for the average person. DuckDuckGo has worse results than google because of Bing base, Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo, but it has as good results as google. Brave search has good results and is not reliant on other search engines.

I love the idea of paying for services I use, but I didn’t get many useful results from Kagi.

Out of curiosity, do you live in the US?

My main problem with DDG is that it doesn’t show the dates of results. A lot of the time, I need to know that to get the information I need. I used it for a couple of years, but I was constantly forced to go back to Google or Bing to get the information I needed.

I found Kagi earlier this year and tried it out, and it’s as close to perfect as you can get, IMO. I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s like being back to “the before times” when Google was king, with the addition of many other features. It’s a paid service, and I’m more than happy to do so for something like this. No tracking, a ton of features, very well designed, and results that never fail. I’ve shared my account with family and friends, and everyone has mentioned how good it is after trying it.

Sorry if it feels like I’m a shill for it, I’m just super happy with it and really feel like everyone deserves to know about it.

What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.