We all need to stop using this as our default search engine
What do you suggest? Because even Mozilla uses Google for its search.
Duck duck?
Kagi… It’s so good you forget Google.
And what do you mean “even mozilla”… There are money deals between these Google and mozilla. Google pays mozilla a lot of money to set Google as default search.
It is so good that when I use Google on someone else’s computer, I’m surprised at how bad Google has become.
It’s a paid service, so it’d be a bad default for a web browser. Not saying it’s a bad search engine; saying that it’s a bad search engine default for the every day folk who just installed a web browser.
I agree. I would recommend duckduckgo for a free search engine.
Hopefully they’ll do a freemium service at some point like Proton does
Right click the address bar to add it to your search bar
I’ve been using Searx for a couple of weeks now. It seems to be working well.
As the default as it pays for web development. You can change this to DuckDuckGo in settings and I strongly recommend that you do.
If you don’t mind having to occasionally refresh the page due to search engine timeout, a public Searxng metasearch engine. I use one just to straight up bypass having to go to any specific search engine. Also allows me to see results from both gøøg|e and b*ng without having to go to either.
Thanks sound interesting.
I really like startpage, but I’m pretty sure it’s just Google with some tweaks
Kagi.
Bruh, it asks for login. No thanks.
startpage, had the Best results for me in the last couple of months, much better then google. and the anonymous view feature is handy and neat
I’m using qwant as my default now. It does well for most searches, but for map related things I still use google.
Why don’t you google it? /s
Lol absolutely it’s the only way.
i’m using a mix of ddg startpage and occasionally yandex, and its been good so far.
if you have more good suggestions drop em here.
Well since google is the whale, anything but google would work to reduce their market power.
I know Lemmy likes to hate on AI, but my default search engine is http://perplexity.ai and it’s great
According to Perplexity, that’s just Google Search with some OpenAI sprinkled on top… So yeah, I’m gonna hate on it lol.
What I like about it is that it’s trained on lots of different sources (including, but not limited to Google, and Bing search results). It then strips out the ads, SEO blog spam, and other nonsense and tries to return the most relevant info for my query. It is leagues better than pure Google. Also, it uses its own LLM unrelated to OpenAI.
A bit unfortunate that I got downvoted for having an opinion and sharing it.
You are part of the problem
The time has long passed whereby we need to remove Google as the effective governing authority of the internet. As with most things online, a good idea ballooned into a net negative for nearly everyone else. This fact was obvious decades ago. There needs to be actual competition and government need to reassert itself as more than a rubber stamp for business growth.
Proclaimed Xenomor, as he addressed the federation.
Annoying stuff, but I’ve suspected for awhile.
My personal blog is life changing, but y’all will never find it, at this rate. /Sarcasm
More seriously, a decade ago my personal blog was the number one article on the Internet for like 3 deeply esoteric technical topics. Neat.
At some point, that stopped happening. I didn’t give it serious thought, because those articles were never meant for anything but my personal reference, anyway.
But it made me wonder what was going on with the algorithms.
On one hand, I figure people can just go to stack overflow. Except, I don’t participate in SO, because they’re a bunch of tossers. But then, I figure someone else can just copy my write-up into Stack Overflow. Except, no one does, anymore, probably because they can’t find my blog either.
Again, my blog is mostly useless shit. So maybe the algorithm was just doing it’s job. But I’ve wondered for awhile if the Internet wasn’t just plain better a decade ago when search actually worked.
Whose blogs was I missing out on? Now I find stuff like that through Mastodon, but it still isn’t targeted topical search, yet.
I need to get in on that web ring action going on.
wondering if your blog comes up in https://search.marginalia.nu/?
None of the most obvious searches I tried came up with my blog, but I did find some better resources (to me, than my blog, which admittedly I don’t care to find since there’s nothing new there for me…) on blogs that it did find. It looks like it’s doing the kind of search I used to rely on. Pretty cool!
Yeah, honestly it would be fascinating if you wanted to go search for the specific terms that you think should bring that up, and then compare how deep your blog is in the results on a bunch of different web search pages.
Was your blog mobile friendly?
I like to think I kept on top of that, yeah.
That’s good. I asked because Google wiped out all non-mobile search results for mobile devices. This happened in 2015 so I was thinking the timeline kinda matches.
When I look up the name of my blog, it shows up. Unlikely for it to come up if people look up just the title I think. Maybe I’ll give it a try
It still burns me that a McKinsey shrill runs it now.
I don’t think those rankings themselves are the problem, at least not the ones mentioned in the article, the issue is a lack of transparency and configurability.
“isLocalCovidAuthority” makes a hell a lot of sense but if it gets boosted to the front then google should say “We are prioritising this result because we deem it trustworthy source of relevant information”: If you make an editorial decision, actually stand by it.
“isSmallPersonalSite” also makes sense, but what about giving users the choice of prioritising or deprioritising it instead of making it for them?
money
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Bringing the right webpage to your computer is no passive task as thousands of editorial decisions are made on your behalf by a secretive group of Googlers.
Several SEO experts tell Gizmodo the leak lists 14,000 ranking features which, at the very least, lay a blueprint for how Google organizes everything on the web.
Google has previously denied that it uses some of these ranking features in Search, but the company confirmed these documents are real, albeit, in its telling, imperfect.
“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo.
King and Fishkin also noticed the ‘isCovidLocalAuthority” and “isElectionAuthority” in their writeups of the leak, both pointing out the importance of search engines in elevating quality information.
“It’s a non-statement that doesn’t address the leak, provides no value, and might well have been written by an AI trained on the past decade’s most soulless corporate messaging.”
The original article contains 1,476 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
