DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
- https://www.ecosia.org/ - search with praxis, kind of mixed results but non tracking and they do good things
- https://www.perplexity.ai/ - longform answers by ai with citations plus search
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ - anti corpo search
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/ - STEM
- https://www.phind.com/ - programming
- https://knaben.eu/ - torrents
- https://annas-archive.org/ - books
Wow! This is the first time I’ve heard about Knaben Database, but it looks handy. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.
I’d recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I’d recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you’d see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they’re still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)
It’d be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the “top” results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).
You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Edit: spelling
I think Hotbot did that back in the 90’s, and it’s relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com
DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn’t hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.
Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.
As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.
It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.
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For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.
I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.
Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.
I get results using the same query you used. First result is /r/tacos
Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to sift through the SEO hellscape
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Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷♂️
I hope you are asking that rhetorically.
But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.
I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it’s really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.
If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.
I don’t use anything that’s made or based on the US. Serious redflag!
“americabad”
That is fake
It’s not fake. You can look at my other screenshots. It’s just not happening to you.
This is why targeted media and advertisement is a bad idea.
It makes it incredibly easy to test people and put them into information silos where what you see is not what I see.
Yeah sucks back in the day on nationalized television one add would run cross country, but at least then you knew it was going to be scrutinized by a wide swath of individuals. Or maybe the segregation of information was not as widely considered then.
But now? We’ve seen how platforms can engage certain people and even cause mental disability through force feeding insane garbage at them. And the rest of us get to suffer for it, while being blissly unawares as to why.
I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my “keyword picking ability”… now going back to Google feels unreal
Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do
!mcwiki diamondto search the minecraft wiki for “diamonds”I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse
My problem with ddg is that I can’t refine my search by excluding keywords, only by adding more. For example, it’s frustrating if I’m looking to buy a product locally and half the page is Amazon results.
You can do that on ddg. See this link: http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax
Bug or most likely faked. I’m selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.
Tech hate, so hot right now.
