I hate that search engine degradation is what’s lead me to use AI more. Instead of searching past pages full of 8 ads for a waffle recipe, I ask Copilot or something: “Give me a basic waffle recipe”.
So much computation to go back to what the web used to be great at.
I knew Google started ignoring double quotes for required text years ago, but I found out yesterday that it doesn’t even think “site:xyz.com” needs to be followed.
I was researching something and saw some Reddit posts. Clicked below it to view results from Reddit and a third of them were other websites.
Google has always respected my double quote and site: searches. Please share a screenshot of it borken, I looked online and don’t see examples. If you have the time for a silly little thing :)
There are literally tens of thousands of examples of them ignoring any and all of their operators on Reddit and Google help. You can find them easily if you look.
The examples I’ve found fall into “caveat” territory.
Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.
Caveats:
Quoted searches may match content not readily visible on a page.
Quoted terms may only appear in title links and URLs.
Snippets might not show multiple quoted terms.
Quoted searches don’t work for local results.
I would be ticked if quotes didn’t work. My screenshots do show them working.
An example of them appearing to ignore quotes came up. When they pull this, I can ignore the results below the error/red line:
I can’t reproduce but I wanna! (Prolly not kids though)
They ignore any and all of their operators if there is more money to be made by doing so.
I know Lemmy doesn’t like it, but Kagi is really great
Lemmy loves Kagi. At least this Lemming does.
Astroturfing bad
Good search good
The former is unconfirmed to be sure
I’m liking $0 SearXNG: lots of instances if you don’t host your own (for max privacy I think)
Germany/Spain hosted instance with all the checkmarks (Vanilla, IPv6, 100% uptime): https://searxng.site
If you fancy paying for a decent cause, don’t see a problem with the paid option sometimes suspiciously mentioned on Lemmy. Free trialing it saw a pleasant experience.
Bruh, you think Im a bot?
Responding to the human who typed:
I know Lemmy doesn’t like it
Explaining many Lemmings seem to like it, and attempting to explain why some may bristle at its mention
That’s all :)
You said it was astroturfing, implying I was astroturfing.
Sorry, meant it as a reply to each segment of your sentence, to clarify what I think we like and don’t like:
Lemmy doesn’t like [astroturfing], but [Lemmy likes] great [search]
I haven’t seen anybody say Kagi’s search itself is bad! Oh, I should have mentioned some don’t like the idea of paid search period. That’s another complaint.
Overall positive impressions from many users here, is what I see. “Lemmy doesn’t like Kagi” is somewhat of a mischaracterization I think.
Totally fair, sorry for the misunderstanding
I just tell AI to google stuff for me and link me to the best results…let it wade through the ads and spam.
Kagi has a really neat feature that if you phrase your search in the form of a question and add a question mark to the end of it, it’ll summarize all of the top results and give footnotes to the pages that it evaluated. It saves me tons of time!
Nope nope nope nope nope
yeah that’s why I switched engines.
You:
Google’s response:
I have to know if the bottom is a real cake or if it’s photoshopped. I hope it’s real.
Real cake. It’s fondant.
Probably children’s clay
Just google in general really
If I search for something specific I now usually ask chatgpt and describe what I’m looking for. The results are often (not always) far better.
I don’t want to click through 50 pages of unrelated shit anymore.
Surprised nobody here has mentioned Kagi yet.
Surprised SearXNG is underrated. Basically what Kagi does but open source and self hosteable.
Searx is great, but Kagi has a completely different data source set than Searx. Searx is basically just an aggregator for various search engines.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
I don’t see how it is different than an aggregator.
Kagi kicks ass! There, are you happy? I really do feel that way though. I’m very pleased with my decision to switch.
Thank you. Im going to check this out later tonight.
Stract?
