Google’s results have been getting worse over time, but it seems like the last couple years, they’ve taken a steep nose-dive, completely overrun with crappy content farming.

I’ve mitigated a lot of that by doing searches for any kind of product comparison or technical question with “site:reddit.com”, but now with the possibility that that trick will become less useful over time as well…?

Yeah. What search engines are other tech folks using?

  • ᴅᴜᴋᴇᴛʜᴏʀɪᴏɴ@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 years ago

    Not enough people have said SearXNG yet, so hands down, SearXNG. You can change a lot of settings in the Docker code, so your settings are the default for anyone that uses it. If you prefer the actual default, you can save settings per browser with a local cookie.

    • pootriarch@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      0·
      3 years ago

      thanks to this post, i’m trying out searxng and then kagi, neither of which i knew. hopefully there’s a searx instance configured roughly to how i’d want. i’m not philosophically opposed to paying, but search is a delicate thing to be personally identifiable - and i don’t care what your privacy policy is, if you’re taking my money, you can connect me with my clicks

  • Maddi@pawb.social
    0·
    3 years ago

    I’ve honestly thought about trying bing search with the new bing chat. It’s just a large change from searching now. It might be a good option thought for helping to curate answers more directly.

    • Sev@pawb.socialOP
      0·
      3 years ago

      How do you mean, curate answers more directly? I haven’t really looked at bing recently.

      • Maddi@pawb.social
        0·
        3 years ago

        So with Bing chat, which is more or less ChatGPT (just a model made specifically for Microsoft), it has the ability to crawl the web and get information into one place. So if you ask for reviews of a product, it’s able to curate them and give summaries so you can get an overviews. Granted, it’s still in super early beta and will sometimes give bad information, but a bit of fact checking is doable. I’ve played around with it for a bit and it’s fascinating. It works pretty well too but it’s not always right since it’s an AI attempting to learn. Hopefully that all makes sense 😅

  • ShadyGrove@beehaw.org
    0·
    3 years ago

    I personally like duck duck go, the results are generally pretty good, and if they aren’t, it’s easy to search on other engines using DDG’s bangs. You just type “!g search term” and you can search on Google, and there’s a bunch more, like !w for Wikipedia, !aur for the arch user repo etc etc

    • CanadaPlus
      0·
      3 years ago

      How did I not know about that already? I’ve been on DDG for a years.

      • maynarkh@feddit.nl
        0·
        3 years ago

        There are a lot of bangs as well.

        Try !loblaws maple syrup as I see you’re from Canada.

        • SatyrSack@lemmy.one
          0·
          3 years ago

          And to see if there is a bang already for a website you use often, use !bang lemmy or whatever to see the list of !bangs for that site

    • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
      0·
      3 years ago

      The only issue I have with DDG is the news tab being filled to the brim with MSN.com. I get that DDG uses Bing search but it’s super annoying having to put “-site:msn.com” behind your query every so often.

  • Mustafa Albazy@programming.dev
    0·
    3 years ago

    I use a mix of google, bing, duckduck and Yandex.

    Also I have “DEVONagent Pro” which i use for academic research, it has many automation features and quite customisable, however it does take a bit of time to learn it.

    Edit: I also use “HistoryHound” which basically search into the content of my browsing history, depending on the browser local cache. Excellent tool for academics/researchers.

  • Pekka@feddit.nl
    0·
    3 years ago

    I mostly switched to Bing since the introduction of Bing chat and only used Google in case Bing didn’t come up with a good answer. For many programming questions, it was also faster to just ask Bing chat for the solution, as that would actually solve the issue.

  • maynarkh@feddit.nl
    0·
    3 years ago

    DuckDuckGo.

    Bangs are awesome, I set it as my browser bar search, and I can search for cheese discounts in my local supermarket with one search string.

    Try it, type !appie kaas into DDG.

  • Roland@beehaw.org
    0·
    3 years ago

    I use DuckDuckgo through Firefox. It’s great and there are good extensions for extra safety. Also, Firefox deskopt is so customizable, i got a neon cityscape design for the bar!

    • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      3 years ago

      Same here. I honestly didn’t notice a big difference between google and DDG when I switched. I generally found what I was looking for back then and I do now too.

  • agitated_judge@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    3 years ago

    Been using duckduckgo for years. At least for the type of content I’m usually searching for, mostly tech related stuff, it seems to me that it has always had great results.

  • C547@slrpnk.net
    0·
    3 years ago

    I really enjoy using searxng, but if for some reason I’m using something else it’s usually duckduckgo.

  • tubbadu@lemmy.one
    0·
    3 years ago

    I use startpage, that returns the same results as google but keeping you private and with no annoying ads

    • Beej Jorgensen
      0·
      3 years ago

      Startpage also appears to give me better results when I quote a search team than the other non-Google engines.