I ask because I’ve been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I’ve been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?
Edit: In no particular order, some recommended alternatives to Google
SearXNG
Whoogle
Ecosia
Brave
Dogpile
DuckDuckGo
Kagi
Swiss Cows
Qwant
Bing
DuckDuckGo uses Bing results. Also DuckDuckGo is not your friend.
I personally use SearXNG for best results. Public instance list.
That article is about their web browser. Agree that it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that their search engine is squeaky clean. Regardless, DDG results are much more useful than Google results, as the entire first page isn’t ads.
This. It was an interesting read and gives me doubts, but it’s undoubtably better than using google and I can set it to my default search engine in safari
«DDG results are much more useful than Google results» – not if one is searching in anything but english; not sure for english either (had very poor results myself whenever i tried it) but at least can’t disprove it.
Yeah although this is specifically the Duckduckgo web Browser rather than their search site. The only web browser to use is Firefox, set up the privacy and tracking settings correctly plus add in privacy extensions.
Duckduckgo website doesn’t track you in the same way, but still it is a company and should not be treated as a virtuous entity.
DuckDuckGo is not your friend
please, PLEASE, never forget that the CEO of DuckDuckGo is also the founder of the “Names Database”. it is insane to me that anyone trusts DDG. where do you think they get all the money for marketing from? i’ve seen a DDG ad on a fucking bus stop in the middle of nowhere
edit: throwing in an honorary mention for Qwant, which is an EU-based privacy-oriented search engine. i’ve been using them for a couple of years now and have yet to hear anything bad about the company. SearX is also supposedly a safe bet
My site doesn’t seems to be index. Is there a way to let SearXNG instance know about my URL?
It doesn’t crawl the sites itself, it just parses the rusults from all the existing search engines and combines them.
Ask Google and Bing to index your site.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289#request_indexing
https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860b
I honestly went back to Google after seeing every fucking link in DuckDuckGo behind MSN. Almost every alternative search has Microsoft’s claws in them.
Glad to see a potential alternative in SearXNG. Thanks for the info.
same here (concerning going back to google every time); unfortunately can’t share optimism for searxng: afaiu it’s not a search engine but an aggregator/frontend, i tend to get all the same sh*t with it no matter which combination of search engines / settings i tried. finally just gave up for the moment with an internal promise to do more testing in a year or two.
Yeah there is definitely something going wrong with Google. I noticed that the search results got much worse in the last weeks. Either it’s full of SEO Blog Spam, or it straight out doesn’t find anything. Especially for technical error messages it stopped finding results. I have to directly look on Github or Stackoverflow now.
Absolutely.
I think there’s two issues.
One is that Google’s search has gotten a LOT less useful over the last few years. I blame enshittification- it used to just search for whatever you typed in, now there’s a lot of ‘you typed X but we think you might mean Y’ type stuff that produces tons of irrelevant results. You can turn on Verbatim mode and that helps a little but it’s still not ‘just search for what I fucking typed in and not something else’.
The real advent of enshittification was when Google+ the social network came out- they removed + as a search operator and now you have to enclose something in quotes for ‘must include’. It’s been going downhill since then.
The other is that Google is either losing an arms race or simply not trying to weed out SEO spam sites. So you ask a question like ‘error 0x0000001b blue screen’ and you get pages and pages of ‘how to solve error 0x0000001b [FIXED]’ that are just ‘error 0x0000001b is a common error lots of people have, it can be caused by many things, to fix it reboot your computer and if that doesn’t work try safe mode and if that doesn’t work try OfficialDriverFixRegistryCleanupUtility.exe number one free recommended utility to solve all system problems’ (only spread out over 3 pages).
Or you get a bunch of 10 minute videos that illustrate a 20 second fix.
No thanks.
Still Google TBH. Just with more frustration.
At some point I’ll give DuckDuckGo another try…
I’ve tried Bing, but the search result page is so full of videos and other media elements that it makes it hard for me to go through the results quickly. The DDG interface is less cluttered and it supposedly shows the same results as Bing, but I find it’s much slower to load and perform searches.
I can’t be bothered to turn off my VPN and since Google Search is dropping CAPTCHA bombs on me every time I try to access it I dropped it. I Throughout the week I rotate between Startpage, DuckDuckGo and Bing. However lately I’m more inclined to use Bing Chat and ChatGPT.
Same, captcha was unbearable when using VPN so I just went to Bing. Fuck Google.
As someone who works in IT Security, the captchas are a necessary evil at this point. Without captchas, sites get slammed with millions invalid or malicious requests every hour. The sites I work with will see error traffic spike 3000% or more from credential stuffing attacks alone. These attacks are so highly distributed that simple IP tracking and banning all but ineffective anymore. And about 99.99% of the malicious traffic comes from VPNs and hosting providers. Unfortunately botnets and the people that run them are getting smarter and smarter about constructing the traffic to avoid bot detection.
tldr; the most effective tool to keep a site up and running and accounts secure is unfortunately captchas for VPN users.
Google is a trash company. although Maps and Youtube are strong products that are hard to replace. Search and email have been enshittified over last decade like no other.
maps was ruined compared to what it used to be. I can’t remember when but I found it super useful and then one day they changed some stuff and doing stuff just became crap.
@sadreality Maps and Youtube are strong products
Agree 100%