Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
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I use my own self hosted SearXNG.
DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I’m looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven’t tried external engines.
Searxng
Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?
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Thank you for explaining! And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question, so that I can learn more, sheesh. Ignoring the fact for the moment that the Fediverse is becoming more Reddi-fied all the time… I appreciate you actually taking the time to answer.
I actually swap back and forth between Google and DDG. For things like local business hours, Image search and Maps, the former finds the better results. For a few things (that it may consider piracy?), Google refuses to find results even on page 10. For most other things, while the SEOs may not have entirely taken over, they at least have risen to an extremely annoying prominence.
e.g. try searching for the word “inspire”, and rather than offer you the dictionary definition, the top hit (for me right now) is the “Inspire” sleep apnea innovation - which nowhere is labelled as an advertisement:-(. I understand that the latter company would like to subvert the normal rules of politeness & etiquette and replace my prioritization so that their name appears at the very tippy-top of the search (possibly locally, or perhaps even world-wide?), but that doesn’t mean that that is what *I* wanted. Which is why more & more often these days I go to DDG first and then Google, rather than the other way around which is what I did until very recently.
But yeah, sometimes I do legit use Google search too.
And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question
Welcome to programming.dev! 😂I’ve had the same happen (technical issue, looking for a solution or workaround, get downvoted). I take it as “I’m not interested in this - don’t ever show me anything about this again” - well, just scroll on by then, not hard. 🙄
‘Honest inquiries are not desired here’, or like ‘You should have researched it yourself first’ or some such. Also do not make the mistake of expressing a personal preference for anything other than using Arch Linux btw:-P.
I can’t even recall the last time I downvoted something. It’s measured in weeks rather than hours though. On the one hand: to each their own, but on the other, people are so short-sighted they don’t see how that acts to stifle conversations - like a personal preference is just that, personal, and for something like this OP, a disagreement expressed via text comment can explain something, and we all (people receiving & offering it & bystanders) can learn from it, whereas a downvote can’t even be traced to who offered it atm (except on Kbin). So it’s frustrating to have to guess - like is DDG really a bad search engine? Then say that!? And how is it bad? Explanations add to the conversation, while downvoting just seems so… lazy.
I can’t even recall the last time I downvoted something
I’ve downvoted things which I know are wrong (people love expressing opinions on things they have no expertise on - just check out the threads on order of operations! 😂), and upvote correct things (the whole point to up/downvote is to push relevant things to the top), otherwise neither usually. Sometimes I use upvote to indicate I liked something someone said.
just seems so… lazy
Yep.
It’s true that down-voting is a form of information, in some contexts. I could even say “Who wants tacos today? Up-vote if yes, down-vote if no”, and it could be fully friendly. It is just that here, in this situation, I didn’t get it.
Ofc it’s this huge tangent from the OP b/c originally there was just a single down-vote, and I was curious if I were missing something wrt DDG, but it sounds like not, just “sometimes people prefer to use Google”. Which sounds like it would apply to every non-Google suggestion though?
And then my asking that meta-question quadrupled the number of down-votes - probably like you said, people consider this tangent not relevant to the OP - but at least as a result of it all I know I am not missing anything important… that anyone is willing to write out:-D. Which seems important, crucial even, info for OP and others to have? About the down-sides to DDG I mean.
But look how many words and messages we had to use and even number of respondents had to participate just to dig out that truth. Even a comment like “you suck, nerd!” - aside from its unfriendliness & irrelevance to the discussion - does act to disambiguate the reasoning behind a down-vote, whereas simply down-voting with no explanation sends a confusing signal with no clear interpretation (except perhaps in the mind of the sender).
This is why I may pile on the downvotes, to signal agreement, but if I am the first to take that initiative, I do at least take the time to reply so they aren’t left wondering why.
Remember the human, and all of that:-).
Kagi. I haven’t had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can’t find it either so I haven’t lost anything.
Yesterdsy I stumbled over this: www.mojeek.com Apparently has its own index.
Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.
Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.Since you mentioned not knowing if this is the right community. For any question where you dont know where it goes !no_stupid_questions@programming.dev usually catches everything. Theres also some other question coms at !cs_career_questions@programming.dev and !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev but theyre more specific. I can leave this one here though, its fine (especially since theres a bunch of info here now)
DuckDuckGo
I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG’s results over Google’s.
I’m avoiding the major search engines. If I really need a search engine, I use DuckDuckGo. Most of the time, search forms of a few websites provide better results. I’ve bookmarked search forms of e.g. wikipedia, Wiktionary, the python docs, Arch Linux wiki, github, dict.leo.org, bug trackers of software I commonly use (such as Mozilla’s bug tracker) and so on. I’m basically using Firefox’s “keyword” search feature in the way DuckDuckGo’s !bang syntax works.
Qwant
Searxng.
I run my own searxng instance. It’s amazing.
I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.
Anyone have any experience with Swisscows?
