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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

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Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#371

Post by loonster »

scim-knox-twox wrote: post #360
dmurray wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not the algorithm's fault per se; Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.

Try Kagi.com, you can rank domains however you want

What I really want is biased search results of my choosing.

$10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#372

Post by adamlynch »

I kinda wish the opposite of hypersearch existed. Let me explain.

I set up multiple browser profiles recently; work and personal. For work, I need Google. I'm a software engineer and I find that alternatives just aren't good enough for those kinds of searches yet.

For personal, I'm trying to use an alternative. It's ok most of the time but sometimes the results aren't great so then I try searching again in Google.

I'd like if there was an extension that augmented the alternative with Google results in the sidebar. If possible, in a way that preserved privacy.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#374

Post by CuriouslyC »

kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…

Honestly at this point I don't think bing sucks vs google. Bing has less random junk in SERPS for a lot of searches, and seems less gamed by SEO companies, but it isn't really better enough to make a point of switching my chrome url bar over and breaking my habit of just going to google. If things keep going like they have been I wouldn't be surprised if I switch in the near future though.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#375

Post by Havoc »

snowl wrote: post #322
Havoc wrote: post #37

Recently managed to finally de-google my search. SearXNG funneled through protonVPN

My searxng is slow to search. How long does it take for you to search?

Slower than a google search certainly, but not problematically slow

Median response time is 0.9 for most engines

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#376

Post by saalweachter »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #337
vbezhenar wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t remove literal search. Put your literal in quotes.

This stopped working reliably some time before last year.

Eh, it's not so much that it stopped working as it is that it never worked the way you thought it did.

Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush.

If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it will match the tokenized strings "don't", "don t", "don-t", "don, t", etc ... but not "dont", because that's outside tokenization.

On the other hand, snippets mostly are substring matches of the query text, so if you see a result to a literal query that doesn't have a snippet, you know it's probably one of the weird matches.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#377

Post by marcinzm »

jackblemming wrote: post #290
y42 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree. But here is the thing: My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are livi…

Good thing there's more of a market than your mom, dad, and even your brother, or alternative search competitors like duckduckgo and others would be completely screwed.

Is there an alternative search engine right now that is both good and not based heavily on an incumbent by a large tech company (ie: bing)? If not then the argument isn't disproved.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#378

Post by lvl102 »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #246

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarante…

Reddit for $10B? It’s going to be worth more than $50B by June.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#379

Post by 5560675260 »

hedora wrote: post #225
_yoqn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search. The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.

Haven't tried Brave, but I'd say DDG results are much better than Google Search. I think it's down to personal preference or something.

In my experience Brave is better than DDG for tech topics. But DDG so far is noticeably better for non-english content and image search, so I still use it as a fallback.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#380

Post by optimalsolver »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #303
nsgi wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones. Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?

So why is it that I can never find my old reddit comments if I want to refer back to them?

Try this and search by your username:

https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/

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