As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.
I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.
Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.
It’s positively maddening. Especially since that Spez has turned Reddit into a walled garden experience now, I no longer want to rely on Reddit for answers. Google is just a mess of garbage blogs full of link rotted ‘answers’.
Most of which are AI generated
I no longer used reddit daily. But I still use it (without an account) mainly for research. Reddit no longer exists. It’s just a databse of answers like stack overflow to me.
Interestingly I even relay even less and less on searching reddit through google. I use bing ai and bardai since their dataset upadates daily.
I don’t have access to Bard (Canada) and I don’t use Bing nor Edge, but ChatGPT is usually pretty good at telling me what to look for or giving me an answer that’s close to the real thing or has the right keywords. However, it’s really often just wrong enough that people replacing a search engine with it and use it for information is kind of worrying…
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Yeah, Duckduckgo, but I find accuracy a bit questionable. It’s not as predictive as Google. If you have suggestions though I’ll def try them.
Apparently Bing is great for porn but I wouldn’t know.
DDG is just Bing anyway
DuckDuckGo is shit. It doesn’t even understand basic syntax like quotes for some reason. I would rather have it only give me a few results to my query as opposed to showing me unrelated nonsense. Through the years I will occasionally try to give it a chance, but I can never find anything useful with it.
Then everyone tells me “well, I just use DuckDuckGo to search Google using !g”. Well what the heck is the point of doing that? Now I have to type two extra characters to search the exact same search engine I was using anyway.
The point is to only use Google when DDG doesn’t give the results you want.
I agree with you. I just never get very useful results from it.
There is a new search engine https://trystract.com/ that is in Beta. It is interesting in that it’s open source and has a ‘Discussions’ feature that returns some Lemmy results. As it’s a Beta it’s pretty hit or miss right now.
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