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Google's search is borderline useless these days – what alternatives exist?

22 points by jtode ↗ HN
Basically Google's search results are never not trying to sell me something anymore, and where I used to be able to get useful results by pruning the query with -whatidontwant modifiers, these days I just can't get the info I'm looking for, most of the time. And I can pretty much always tell nowadays who has paid them to be what they do show me.

Duckduckgo is great from the privacy standpoint but they don't do any better at finding stuff, in my case anyways. But nowadays they don't do any worse either, so for the moment I think I'm switching my default engine to them, but I'm expecting just as much pain there, I just won't also feel vaguely violated and enraged.

There are certain things that people need to have which are incompatible with the profit motive, it seems to me, and being the source of canonical information about literally everything is one of those things. What can be done about this attempt to corner the market on reality?

13 comments

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latexr
Brave Search[1] provides every feature I want from DuckDuckGo (ostensibly respecting privacy and bang syntax) with superior results for regular searches. The one complaint I have is that I can’t set it as Safari’s default search, though that is Apple’s fault.

I’ve seen people on HN raving about Kagi[2] (paid) but I have not tried it.

[1]: https://brave.com/search/

[2]: https://kagi.com/

rolenthedeep
Brave search is okay and gets me through 95% of what I want.

If I'm looking for something old or obscure, or extremely specific I'll try DDG or startpage.

Brave seems to have a much smaller index, and their parsing of quotes and other switches seems to work about as well as Google (which is to say, not at all). They also mix in Google results when their index fails, which mostly just means your search is contaminated with Google's low quality results.

anenefan
If you're being served google's basic search page, duckduck is head and shoulders above the lame google offerings. I use duckduck, but occasionally I slip the search query back to google in the hope that the switches I use to use heavily with google, might perhaps work ... most of the time I'm disappointed and yeah that's why I moved. Quoting rarely is noticed, and no longer works as it should, verbatim selected removes timing of results, if I edit the url as I used to quite often, I'm now met ... was met with google's "you are a bot" ... was as in I don't see that page any more, but nor do I get to continue. Google is handy for working out what some shortened youtube link is though. Google no longer searches images from me, so that's now yandex. Qwant is still about, and might find additional material. Startpage removed their advanced search but it still searches though. At the very end if you still haven't found the right answers, try Searx.
gardenhedge
Google has only be usable for me if I include site:reddit.com in the search query. Even the auto populated suggestions include "site reddit" (which doesn't work the same way) so I believe it's a very popular trick.
dilippkumar
My experience with kagi.com has generally been positive. I don’t use them often because I browse exclusively in Safri in private mode - the search defaults to Google and there isn’t a good way to switch it to Kagi for me.

Give it a try. I often find what I’m looking for within the first few results.

cmer
Another +1 for Kagi here. It’s quite amazing.
kbrkbr
I use duckduckgo as default, but whenever I need just and exactly some specific keywords, then I use startpage.com.

They seem to be the only ones not assuming I am stupid and/or do not know what I want.

MilnerRoute
Microsoft is a corporate giant in its own right, but they do have their own search engine, Bing, if you're just looking for an alternative.
DoItToMe81
DuckDuckGo is just Bing with more link filtration. I find myself having to use Yandex to seriously search for anything.
namlem
Bing is way better for anything related to sex, drugs, or politics. Google applies aggressive ideological filters to their search results these days.
Cwizard
I add site:reddit.com, or simply ‘reddit’ to many of my subjective searches (when I am looking for opinions). It’s not a good solution, but it is better then using Google most of the time.

I hope Google sees this and improves there search engine. If they don’t I hope someone else will.

marymkearney
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I've been meaning to post this question too.

Google's "About" page still states, unbelievably, "Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." https://about.google/

Here Google, I fixed it. "Our mission is to organize YOUR information and make it universally accessible and useful TO OUR ADVERTISERS."

Ner0x80
I used duck duck go until they started censoring info... Now I use brave.