Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts. I don’t really care about the movie, but I am terrified by the prospect that google now ceased to function on this basic level. Why is this happening?

I understand the explanations of seo and other stuff like spam content. But why are there NO relevant results at all.

I wouldn’t mind having to start wading through results at page 2 or even 10 but now it utterly fails to find even the most basic things.

Things you found on the first attempt even just a year ago. Now they are effectively hidden.

To me functionally the entire internet has now vanished. I cannot access anything that I am searching for. Might as well not exist at all.

Has anybody found a way around this?

Is this on purpose? Is this an attack on the free internet, herding people to just the top 5 sites like facebook, youtube, tiktok, and so forth?

Are there search engines that still work?

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
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    Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

    Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

    But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.

    This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.

    And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.

    • diffcalculus@lemmy.world
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      OP: “that movie, with the director”

      Google: “… here’s all the movies?”

      OP: “noooooo”

    • caturra@lemmynsfw.com
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      This is starting to look suspicious. I have seen several threads redacted in a similar way in the last days, and all of them don’t disclose the search term. When disclosed in comments everybody answer, it works ok for me. Common factor, in all threads there is advertising for paid kagi search engine. Connecting the dots, I think this is just a marketing campaign spamming lemmy forums (and probably others)

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        This should be higher up… This whole topic is such a big nothing burger. OP and everyone jumping on the Google sucks bandwagon most likely just suck at using a search engine or run into shitty AI articles (which you can’t really blame on your search engine of choice either…)

        I personally have 0 issues to find whatever I’m looking for in 3-4 searches at most. Skill issue rather than algorithm issue imo.

      • Kevnyon@lemmy.world
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        I scrolled the comments and some comments are about some paid search engine, definitely seems suspicious and especially when OP didn’t give us any of his search parameters.

      • girl@lemm.ee
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        While i do think people are exaggerating that google is useless, and the kagi push on lemmy is suspiciously strong, I do still hate what google has become. It lies to me almost every time I ask it what movie an actor has been in.

        google claims Alan Tudyk is in Andor when he isn’t. There are one or two articles of people suggesting that he might end up in Andor, but nothing official. Google pulls from the rumors and says “yep, he’s clearly in Andor”. The way i search this is by typing just an actors name then clicking the “movies and tv” option.

        google search

        imdb for andor

        imdb for alan tudyk

        I refuse to pay for a search engine. DDG is alright, not great, but at least it doesnt lie to me.

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      I mean, they probably used quite a few permutations, if they really did try for anything close to an hour…

    • Kevnyon@lemmy.world
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      I tried " movie woman assassin cold war" and one of the first results was “Atomic Blonde”, which is what I was trying to get at. I then searched “movie two guys solve a murder comedy”, the first link was some IMDb list about comedy/murder films that also had a bunch of buddy cups cop films on it and number 19 on that list was “The Nice Guys”, which is what I was getting at. I would really want to know what this guy searched for because I refuse to believe he spent an hour searching and didn’t find it. I don’t remember the last time that happened to me honestly. Even the two times I tried just now were pretty generic (especially the second one) and yet I found them quickly.

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    The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

    I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

    For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.

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      Kagi is very good and I’m happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It’s not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it’s gone bad

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      It’s a machine learning epidemic. Now that blogspam can be automated in a way that Google can’t even look for without penalizing a ton of sites because people write in a similar style to ML tools, search is basically fucked in its current form. Back to human hand curated webrings.

      Also Kagi sucks worse than Google and DDG for a lot of things. I still pay for it, hoping it gets better, plus they have a lot of useful tools.

      Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.

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      My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?

      Oh I got this. You have to put it into diagnostic mode, and then it will flash lights at you, giving you the error codes in binary. I’m not kidding!

      For more info you can lift up the top of the machine by unscrewing some screws on the back. There are lots of screws on the back, but only three or four of them attach the top. If you lift the top up you can push the drum back and then slide your hand into the space between the drum and the frame. There’s a ziplock bag in there with the service manual, and it’ll tell you how to spin the knob to enter diagnostic mode. On my Maytag I have to spin the knob R, R, L, R, not to quick, not too slow.

      I was blown away when I learned this all. I was having a problem with my clothes not drying, but still the components seemed to be working. I was getting a specific error about one component, but when I tested it it was fine. In my case the problem was where the wires from that component plugged into the control board–it was just slightly loose! So I pushed it in and everything is nominal.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      I have a feeling it’s not unrelated to the billions-in-false-charges-for-ads-slash-youtube-ad-debacle.

      Tl;dr: google made a billion dollars charging for ads no one saw and then discovered that happened. To avoid being sued they panicked and ensured ads were seen, which had lovely knock-on effects for most of the interwebz.

      Remember “anti-trust” laws? Yeah me neither.

    • Flax@feddit.uk
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      Having to join an entire discord server to just find out or download one thing is really, really painful

    • that guy@lemmy.world
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      That’s because everyone thinks they need to post all of their information to discord to get validation instead of maintaining open web accessible blogs that can be archived

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      It is entirely a google thing. Reddit might’ve helped google hide its limp as it was declining, but it’s google that encouraged websites to write blog spam for SEO, by their very creation of their SEO algorithm. Google has indirectly shaped the internet in this manner.

      I remember crunching the numbers with Kagi a couple months ago and most of their plans aren’t worth it, not unless you actually use it at the specified amount. However maybe the packages have changed now, I remember it being something like $5 for 300, $10 for 700 and $27 for unlimited.

      It also doesn’t block you when you run out of free searches when you have a package, instead they charge you like 2c per search. So you have to carefully feather your usage to maintain the value - don’t use it enough and the cost per use is high, use it over your limit and the cost per use is high. Frankly, I don’t want all that hassle, particularly with something I’m paying for.

      With your new numbers, the $5 package is 1.67c per search, and you’d need to more than 600 searches for the $10 package to beat that rate. However, assuming 2c per search after your 300 in the $5 package, you would hit $10 after 550 searches. So, if the 2c per search is correct, you should upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan only if you’re doing more than 550 searches.

      • FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
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        I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.

        I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.

    • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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      I started using Kagi a few months ago and have been really happy with it. It’s completely replaced Google search for me. I think it’s saved me a lot of time and helped me avoid a bunch of advertising I otherwise would have been exposed to. Not being incentivized by advertising money like Google is really makes a difference I think. With Kagi you are the actual customer and search is the actual product, with Google search you are the product and the customer is whoever paid Google to insert advertising into your search results.

      • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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        Someone has to pay for it one way or another. It’s just a matter if you want to pay with money or your personal data being supplied to advertisers.

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      So far I am really like kagi. Makes sense to pay for something you use every day, without which the extensive resources on the internet would be basically useless.

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    I’m really surprised that you couldn’t find a Hollywood movie in an hour. Can I ask what the movie was? Was there a specific question you couldn’t find the answer for?

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    I’ve finally switched to DuckDuckGo because of this. Even though only about two months ago I said here somewhere that it’s garbage. Google just managed to convince me that they’re more garbage.

      • radix@lemmy.world
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        But without the chatgpt spam that has overtaken bing the last few months.

    • ebits21@lemmy.ca
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      I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.

      DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.

      • 🐑🇸 🇭 🇪 🇪 🇵 🇱 🇪🐑@lemmy.world
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        The only downside of DDG is that it doesn’t have a decade or two of algorithm data to personalise your searches and sort of “learn” what you mean with certain terms.

        Not like I miss it too much. It’s just a mild culture shock to suddenly having to be more clear with my searches

        • Scrollone@feddit.it
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          That’s a good thing, in my opinion. I miss when Google results were the same for everyone.

        • jennwiththesea@lemmy.world
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          It just occurred to me that this ability to communicate with a search engine, that everyone used to call Google-fu, was exactly this! It didn’t already know (or think it knew) what you were getting at, and it’s took some practice to figure out how to finesse the results.

    • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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      I’ve been using Bing and choosing Google only as a second resort or for any shopping I do. If Google wants to be an ad filled shopping mall, I’ll treat it as an ad-blocked shopping mall.

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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        In that case you should be using DuckDuckGo; it uses the same database as Bing, without the tracking of Bing, and with the ability to use ! commands to pull in results from other places (!g=Google, !w=Wikipedia, etc.).

        • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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          When I’m specifically shopping for things I expect to be tracked and advertised to. I’m just selectively deciding who gets to advertise to me.

    • CobblerScholar@lemmy.world
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      Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had

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        I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
        Same problem as with Google, and then some.
        Carefully craft search string and submit.
        Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
        Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
        Don’t find it.
        Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
        Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
        Same results.

        Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      Ddg is my default, but I still find myself having to resort to Google when the query is not dead simple. The engine is good enough for most cases, but overall Google is just better imo.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.

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    What happened is SEO got good and money got made and fortunes got made and greed has taken over.

    The internet today is the equivalent of the first and last 10 pages of the old yellowbooks. Why do you think AAA Auto is called what it’s called?

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    I refuse to believe you haven’t been able to find a Hollywood movie after an hour? That sounds more like an issue with you than Google

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    Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool… now it’s just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.

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    While it’s fun to bash on Google, this might have been a more productive discussion if you had provided your search query and perhaps a sample of the results

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        Did you maybe misunderstand what the commenter was asking for? We kind of need to know the search parameters and results before anyone could actually tell OP where they went wrong. Search engines are still search engines, even if you have to scroll through 6 ads to get to the results

        • frankenswine@lemmy.world
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          Google does not display the same results for the same queries among different users, they display highly personalized stuff. Web search sadly has become almost unusable when you opt for anonymized use of the internet

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    The biggest issue I have is that half my results come back as videos. Video results should be in the video tab. I don’t want to watch a half hour long video just to find out how to make a healing brew in ark.
    One paragraph would convey the information 10x faster than any video could

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      I fucking despise video results.

      But most of them are from YouTube, which surprise surprise, is owned by Google! So they don’t give a damn, it’s promoting their products in spite of the wishes of their consumers.

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      It’s wild that in the few instances where the generative AI feature would actually work quite well (summarizing lists of distinct instructions), it often pushes long-form video instead.

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      Exactly the same for shopping results. There’s a designated tab for that as well but often half of the first page tends to be a link to Amazon, ebay or promote a product

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    I just registered an account here specifically because I’ve noticed it a ton recently and I wanted to reply to this since it’s been on my mind. From my experience, google’s quality has been going down in general for a while now, but very recently (the last few months or so?) it hasn’t been just unusable in a figurative sense, it’s been quite completely literally useless to the point of basically being broken.

    I really wish I could remember some specific examples of what I was searching for, but I’ve had more than one experience where it felt like if it couldn’t find something on reddit or wikipedia (which I usually have to give it some assistance anyway with the site: filter), it was like that thing just didn’t exist. It was just pages and pages of what looked like fake AI generated articles that were only maybe slightly adjacent to the topic I was searching for. If it happens again or I can remember a specific case I might try to update my response.

    Disclaimer: I use bing 50% of the time depending on which browser profile I have open. No real specific reason here, just that I didn’t bother updating the search engine settings on all profiles. Ironically, bing, which I had always regarded as inferior, does manage to give better results in some cases, but even still I feel like the quality has (somehow?) managed to go down as well.

    Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing. The results are kind of wonky a lot of the time, but at least it’s not so much fake unrelated garbage.

    I do have an adblocker on all the time. Perhaps that’s related. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my experience is so shitty given that I’m clearly not their target audience, if we’re just talking about advertising.

    Just this morning I noticed that ChatGPT (which I usually hate using) was giving me better results than google. Not just in a little way, the experience was about 100x better. Theory: they’re trashing their search engine product to try to force people onto their “AI” products. Probably not that far-fetched. If they really want to push one product over the other you can either make one product a lot better than the other or make the other product a lot worse.

    • wheels@lemmy.world
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      unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing

      Just so you know, DDG does have its own webcrawler (DuckDuckBot). It takes results from that, and the Bing API, and other sources, to generate results.

      Also, they pay Bing for results from the Bing API (which as I understand it gives configurable access to the Bing index) and so even the results that do come out of Bing are quite different than you’d get compared to just a “frontend for Bing”.

    • MashedTech@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, with chatgpt you can search for “thing that was link thing but not like other thing and I think it had these traits” and if it’s not extremely obscure it can find it for you.

    • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
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      Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing.

      This is correct, there aren’t many, and we recently passed 7.7bn pages. You can actually help with any wonkyness through feedback, but also we have this page which we trial new algos on; there’s a large update sat on it currently.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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    Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts.

    That’s just not believable. What was your search criteria?

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      I’ve had this happen more often recently. An hour, or multiple hours, isn’t unexpected anymore with search engines (not just Google, but Google is the worst offender).

      It’s incredibly frustrating.

      My job & hobbies involves research 20-30 hours a week, over the last 15+ years. It’s been a gradual decline in quality and usability since 2016 or so. I started complaining about it on forums and reddit, and not many people noticed, or thought the same. Only in the last 5 years or so have I seen others take notice, and even make articles about it.

      It’s a real thing, and those of us that do a lot of research for real information that isn’t just today’s news feel it first.

      Search engines like Kagi are a light at the end of the tunnel, they tends to actually work.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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        An hour, or multiple hours, isn’t unexpected anymore with search engines

        I’m not debating that search engines are not as good today as they were in the past, but I got to push back hard against the OP, as well as yourself, as far as the temporal measurement in hours, for trying to do a single search.

        That’s just not believable. You and the op have to give some real world examples of that.

        • UnityDevice@startrek.website
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          They’d tell you what the movie was, but they’d have to search for it and don’t want to waste an hour.

          Jokes aside, I believe them, I spent close to an hour recently finding a YouTube I knew existed but I could only remember vague details. Ended up having crawl back months though my YouTube history in the end.

          It used to be that you could just describe a movie to Google like "movie where " and it would be really good at finding that movie even if it was some obscure one. Now if you’re trying to find that one movie you saw years ago where you just remember one scene, be prepared to spend that hour.

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            I don’t believe them. And I don’t believe that it’s to save us an hour, but because it’s hyperbolic

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    willing to bet google is garbage now because of all the AI-run “blogs” that post unhelpful idiotic filler “articles” on every topic under the sun

    edit: i despise this shit so much that i made this dissection of a bullshit AI article: https://i.imgur.com/Hr1wffj.png

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      1 year ago

      I don’t get why everyone espouses ddg but shits on bing when bing is the underlying source.

      • vonbaronhans@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        That explains why my DDG searches have been less than helpful… it’s just as unhelpful as Bing. I usually find myself trying other search engines, but run back to Google when I can’t find anything relevant to the problem I’m trying to solve (most of my googling is tech help stuff).

        • Xabis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Exactly.

          As much as I’ve seen threads here on lemmy complaining about how terrible Google search is, Bing isn’t any better.

      • JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        DDG is hit and miss for me, its my main SE but if i dont get results i want i switch to google. I have actually searched a website with almost the exact URL (when i wasnt sure about the end of the address) and it gave me zero results for that site, so it definately has its shortcomings.

        And bing is fantastic, for video search… Porn.

    • laverabe@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been using SearXNG over Duckduckgo lately. It’s a free (as in freedom) aggregator that searches all the engines. It’s not perfect but you know 100% you are not being tracked.

      The results are closer to a true old school search of the web. Sometimes it works better, sometimes not as well. It’s best to pick a local instance that has quicker speeds since the main site can be a bit slower than local ones.

      This distributed web stuff is really taking off. I like it!

      • Archer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        After hearing it for a decade plus I still don’t know what “free as in freedom/free is in beer” actually means

        • laverabe@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Free beer, like you get a free beer at a party or event, it’s no cost. Free software that costs nothing but is closed source.

          Free as in freedom means the user has full access to the source code and is not subject to unknown code like in proprietary software.

          Freedom as RMS sees it: https://lemmy.world/post/8134208

          • Welt@lazysoci.al
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            1 year ago

            The phrase is “free as in SPEECH/beer”, because it doesn’t make sense to say “freedom” - especially since that has all sorts of other connotations, especially in the USA. Everyone should be able to understand that free speech doesn’t mean a speech that you listen to at no cost to yourself. It means the ability to express yourself without censure. And beer… everyone understands that, and who doesn’t love free beer?

          • wheels@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I always get confused by this analogy because my mind goes to beer representing open source (the ingredients aren’t secret, and you can brew it yourself if you want to). “Free Coca-cola” would work better, like you’re not paying for it right now but only one company knows how to make it.

        • Yeller_king@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Free as in freedom means it doesn’t infringe on privacy (or any other rights) and free as in beer means no financial cost.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          It’s open source. The line comes from the early days when people were still arguing over definitions and free vs. open source and GPL vs. BSD, when the concept was new enough to the general public so that they would confuse “free software” for “freeware”: Closed-source software that doesn’t cost any money. By now all that has died down (unless you’re the FSF) and the acronym “FLOSS” was invented, which sidesteps the double meaning of “free” by adding on “libre”. Really they should’ve gone for GLOSS: Gratis, libre, open, source software. If you have a choice in marketing between shiny and dentist, always go for shiny.

          (And for the nitpickers yes searxng is AGPL which makes it libre, not just open).

          Oh, and speaking of, haven’t looked at it in a long while, there’s yacy, a peer to peer search engine.

      • TheIllustrativeMan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Another vote for DDG. I honestly didn’t realize Google had gone to shit, because I haven’t used them for anything in the last 5 years (which is wild for me to think about, because I used to be a huge Google fanboy in the G+/Hangouts/Google Now/Nexus era).

      • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It doesn’t allow keywords to be excluded from what I have been able to figure out, and some other minor issues that sometimes makes google easier and quicker to use. Most of the time that is a non-issue however.

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s funny how when I jumped to DDG a few years back, I felt like I was sacrificing the quality of results for better privacy.

      These days you get the best of both.