So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
What’s a better alternative? Have tried all major ones except paid ones and I always return to Google. Maybe for basic stuff Duck Duck Go / Bing is fine, but once you start searching for local / non-English stuff, results were underwhelming.
I’ve been using kagi for a few months (6 according to my bank). It is paid. It is great. It’s so good I’ve switched my wife to it since Google was giving her a lot of garbage (she’s a non techie) and she says “it feels like Google used to be. The answers are what I was looking for. I forgot I was using Kagi”
I want the answer to be a federated system, like YaCy. Which I tried to set up, and its results make AltaVista look good. Maybe good enough for a corporate intranet, but not the internet at large.
There are lots of articles about how they make their search results worse on purpose for more profit. They alter search queries on the server side to give results for a search which is more aligned with an advertising partner. They inject AI into search results which can be wildly wrong.
Same (AdGuard) I meant like I’d consistently get all of the first page of results linking to hyper SEO clickbait sites / AMP links / Adsense affiliates (think multi-page/gallery/click-through articles and low quality content farm sites like CNET, Forbes, Quora, etc) with a smattering of straight up keyword banks, snippet aggregator spam, and chatbot articles full of longwinded made-up nonsense with zero payoff.
Even more annoying was that Google started dumbing down all my searches, regardless of technical detail and specificity, just railroading me into simplistic drivel. Eventually verbatim/quotes syntax stopped working also, and that was the end of google’s usefulness to me.
Their market dominance isn’t because of anticompetitive practices, it’s because of customer-friendly practices. People like it, so people use it.
So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
Majority also like Google. Like it or not, they still provide the best search engine.
Lol, they absolutely do not. Their search results have turned to shit.
What’s a better alternative? Have tried all major ones except paid ones and I always return to Google. Maybe for basic stuff Duck Duck Go / Bing is fine, but once you start searching for local / non-English stuff, results were underwhelming.
https://searx.space/
My current favorite search engine. Just pick one that’s running out of your country or close to it. Hope it works as well for you as it does for me.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try.
I’ve been using kagi for a few months (6 according to my bank). It is paid. It is great. It’s so good I’ve switched my wife to it since Google was giving her a lot of garbage (she’s a non techie) and she says “it feels like Google used to be. The answers are what I was looking for. I forgot I was using Kagi”
I want the answer to be a federated system, like YaCy. Which I tried to set up, and its results make AltaVista look good. Maybe good enough for a corporate intranet, but not the internet at large.
There are lots of articles about how they make their search results worse on purpose for more profit. They alter search queries on the server side to give results for a search which is more aligned with an advertising partner. They inject AI into search results which can be wildly wrong.
Did they fix it? Last I tried it, all I could get was sponsored content and LLM spam.
I use adblock so have no reference point how it looks like without adblock. I assume you would just scroll a bit lower to get actual results?
Same (AdGuard) I meant like I’d consistently get all of the first page of results linking to hyper SEO clickbait sites / AMP links / Adsense affiliates (think multi-page/gallery/click-through articles and low quality content farm sites like CNET, Forbes, Quora, etc) with a smattering of straight up keyword banks, snippet aggregator spam, and chatbot articles full of longwinded made-up nonsense with zero payoff.
Even more annoying was that Google started dumbing down all my searches, regardless of technical detail and specificity, just railroading me into simplistic drivel. Eventually verbatim/quotes syntax stopped working also, and that was the end of google’s usefulness to me.