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.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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    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.

  • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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    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.

  • vxx@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • moseschrute@lemmy.world
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      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

    • darreninthenet@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 days ago

      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

    • sumguyonline@lemmy.world
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      Thank you. I needed this. The “free” search engines have tainted my experience of this world. Frankly, I hate it here. I’m ready for the inevitable “Apocalypse”/" Alien invasion" that stops the absolute incompetence that permeates our society. Whether you understand it or not, I beseach upon you my blessings, may your days provide success in your endeavores, and bountiful returns to your entire home. Bless you for sharing.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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      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.

    • sandbox@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.

    • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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      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.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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          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.

        • zante@lemmy.wtf
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          If you’re using ddg without !bangs - you’re only having half the fun.

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          !w Wikipedia

          !imdb IMDb

          !gi Google images

          there’s tons more. if ddg is the default search engine these bangs save you the time to go to the site first and click the search bar. basically changing your default search into a specific search.

      • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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        3 days ago

        Holy shit the bangs work at the end of the search query too!? I’ve always painfully pressed Home on my keyboard to add a !g whenever I realise I had better searched this on Google

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        oh, good tip. I didn’t know about that.

        you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?

        • reev@sh.itjust.works
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          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.

      • MTK@lemmy.worldOP
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        That’s how I felt until about a month ago, now ddg is really useless

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.works
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        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.

        • zante@lemmy.wtf
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          Agree. It’s an important part of media literacy these days.

          For political news, I’m only interested in what was actually said, not what is reported to be said .

        • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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          It’s just that Bing/DDG seem to promote news from these sites as if they’re sponsored links… but without the disclosure.

          • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            I’m pretty sure here in the states, a site is obligated to identify ad content and sponsored content, so when a big company like Microsoft or Alphabet is doing it (Bing and Google) it makes me wonder if there’s been a recent carve-out or relaxation of the reg.

            That makes the return adversarial to the end-user, hence the point of the regulations.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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            bummer.

            I see all the labeled sponsored links on Bing, but I generally get high quality results outside of those.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        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.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        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.

        • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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          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.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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            it must have done by now, then, I get different results from identical prompts in DuckDuckGo and Bing although both are usually relevant.

            “DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.”

            are you having trouble finding something specifically or you just don’t like the quality of the search results you’re finding in general?

            definitely if you’re still on Google, stop using it.

            It’s completely useless at this point.

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        that’s weird. the search results should still prioritize your search as is over variations, but not limit it. do you try searching in quotations to force the specific search exactly?

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        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.

        • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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          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.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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            haha, whaaat why?

            I just saw it for the first time today, it seems to mostly quote incredible sources rather than amalgamating responses.

            you got some issues huh, poor fella?

            • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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              I’m sorry I hurt your feelings and made you want to defend an LLM that approves copy pasted wikipedia snippets, but maybe you should go eat some ass?

              • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings”

                I feel only pity for you.

                reading your comments is like watching a diseased guinea pig nibble on its own scabs.

                “an LLM that approves copy pasted wikipedia snippets”

                duckduckgo’s llm tool offers relevant information from credible sources.

                that is good.

                Good luck unbunching those panties.

    • Hasherm0n@lemmy.world
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      Lately I google for someone that should give me a direct, exact result. First five links are fucking paid ads.

  • Subverb@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • VantaBrandon@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    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.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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    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)

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    My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?

    • JollyG@lemmy.world
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      I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.

      What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Roccat Kone Aimo micro switch gives me “500 best mouse 2024” and such BS and that’s it.