I’d like to start a thread for people to share what they’re using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.
I’m doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my “stack” has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.
My (shitty and getting worse) solution:
- DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG’s relevance has been shit for its entire existence
- StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
- currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it’s not easy to set up if you don’t use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with
The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn’t return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.
BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.
I’d love to hear suggestions.
tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines
I’m gonna comment on my personal experience with a few search engines.
Ultimately I ended back up on
DuckduckgoStartpage. I think perhaps we should go back to web directories instead of search engines.still a ddg user myself but theres how you solve your startpage problem
Oh thank you. Now I don’t need to use an American search engine.
We could use the fediverse the find answers today as well? If we could index and search across all instances and threads?
I have no idea what you just said.
OK. Will keep it simple: build a search engine around the fediverse (lemmy etc.).
Instead of using Google to find results on reddit…
That is not equivalent to a web directory and is a function that can already be effectively done with duckduckgo and startpage.
EDIT: Nevermind, Startpage at least doesn’t allow wildcards.
No its not equivalent to a web directory. I just proposed an alternative.