What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding “reddit” or whatever internet community to the results?
Yep, Google decided it was too complicated and removed it all. Dont know how it was too complicated, people just wouldn’t use it if they didn’t know about it. They felt “natural language” would be more useful. Bullshit, I search for “foo and bar” it’ll return me results for foo and ignore the rest
I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.
Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.
I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.
Yeah I really miss those days of logical operands. Back in the Alta Vista days I could do Boolean searches, but yeah that’s been replaced with speech recognition which doesn’t work as well. To this day I still like the Boolean search better. Newer does not always mean better. Most of the time it only means dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
More and more I have been using the Bing “chat” search. It does a search, filters through the results and summarizes the answer with links to the sites it found them on.
For certain types of search it is a huge time saver of scrolling through results to find answers on various pages.
If it isn’t open / free / private there is a % of the community that will not even try it.
Just like on Reddit lots of negative energy in some subs.
Hardly saying bing is amazing only that lately I have been drawn to trying it more since the chat based search that allows follow ups in natural language.
Google bards equivalent is only available in the US and just this last week the UK so I can’t try it out.
However over all I agree that more and more google search results have more adds and the good results pushed further and further down.
I don’t like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
Have it compile a list of sources it’s already sourced from, and keep searching for any new sources it can add. Have it list its expectations for what an expert should know about a particular subject, then have it learn about each of those points, and finally present as if it is an expert there to assist you.
I downvoted because I have literally no idea what that guy is talking about.
Bing has never been a good search engine. The results are always so terrible, plus you have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baity crap they put everywhere.
Have you tried using the Chat feature (GPT-4) to do searching? I just tried it, and it surprisingly works really well for some inquiries.
Like, use their chat AI, but as a natural language search engine. It’s integrated to Bing’s index so it can peruse it itself, so you don’t have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baits crap they put everywhere.
I recently switched to Bing after years of disappointment from Google and months of disappointment from DDG. Bing is pretty disappointing too, but less so, so far. I tried to use the chat feature a couple of days ago, but it said I have to download the app. Nah… fuck these tech companies and their apps.
The “preview” for the chat feature requires the app or edge on desktop currently but I do find myself turning to it every time I get frustrated with a google search these days.
Less disappointing is probably the best discrimination as you said.
I use the ChatGPT feature from desktop Firefox with no problems. Maybe it specifically denies Chrome, in which case I bet you could change the user agent string and get it to work.
I just tried it again on desktop and it worked, but the reason was that I downloaded an extension a while ago and forgot about it. When I disabled the extension, it stopped working.
There used to be a way to enable installing any extension on mobile FFx Dev, but I'm not sure if that still works. The desktop extension just changes the user agent string, so that might be another route to enabling it.
I downloaded Firefox Nightly on my phone about a week ago so that I can change my user agent string to get Google to stop F’ing up YouTube pages, but it doesn’t seem to work. I guess I’ll look into that extension. Do you know what it’s called?
Duck Duck Go search results are a little lacking, though, like it’s completely missing some possibilities. Looking up tech stuff for a Linux issue I’m having, Duck will miss a site that Google finds - and even if I enter the exact text of the site, it’s completely absent from Duck.
I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I’m a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.
Definitely. So many searches lately will return results that only partially match the search terms. What’s even the point of searching if you’re just going to show a bunch of unrelated results?
Even exact matches with quotes don’t seem to be as useful these days. Google tries to be helpful by matching on what it thinks I want instead of what I actually want. That plus the ads and all the other junk
Plus, I used to set my new tab page to Google, but God, it’s so bad. There’s always some stupid image for some stupid anniversary like Mary F. Dinklehorn becoming the first trans-gay-librarian in Antarctica or something (not that I’m against any of that) I just want to get some work done and not be distracted by Google desperately clinging to power.
I’m using Chrome and added an extension called Empty New Tab Page that makes Chrome open to a blank page. I had to do that because the Google home page got to be so annoying. Also removing the need to fetch content makes the browser and new tabs open faster.
They’re not trying to be helpful, they’re trying to guide you towards a product or towards content they control that they think you will be more engaged with. They also give results that will lead to more searches, and therefore more ad exposure for their business.
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of your doing your search: they got paid for the results that they delivered, and for the ad traffic of you having received it! Don't you see why this is best for them you? /s
I actually prefer Google for shopping. Just turn off your adblocker, search for a particular item you want to buy and bam your first 3 to 4 pages are retailers pushing the product with their prices listed (with a touch of scam websites that I presume pay for advertising). Anything else I add ‘Reddit’ or just watch a few YouTube videos depending on what kind of answers I’m looking for
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
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