Where To Find Actually Good Search Engines? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

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I'm kind of tired of Google sending me to the same 3 sites whenever I search for something. If not the same 3 sites it's 7 others that are so generic and boring I just feel they're useless. It's always makeuseof, androidauthority, or whatever other sites that have useful information but I rarely feel like they are saying anything new.

I want to see the results from those small blogs that are sometimes linked here. I can't come up with one since... you know that's why I'm asking how to find them, but you know them; they talk about nerdy stuff and are not afraid to get technical in whatever topic they discuss.

Also duckduckgo and qwant do the same thing. If there is a way to curate the results to better fit my needs then that'd be great too!

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[-] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Have you tried https://duckduckgo.com/ . I've used them a very long time. I do not use Google search.

[-] spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

I tried it but unfortunately it's very similar to Google search just without the trackers, and sometimes the results are a bit worse (worth it for not having the trackers though)

[-] MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

This has been my experience as well with duckduckgo. I want to like it, and I do have it as my default search but I often end up searching Google after unsatisfactory results from duckduckgo.

Thanks for asking this question!

[-] reka@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

My process is:

Search DDG
If that's not satisfactory (it is IME about 80% of the time) prefix with !sp to search googles index proxied by start page

[-] HidingCat@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

DDG just uses Google's search engine, minus all the trackers.

[-] reka@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Where did you hear this? This isn't true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you're using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)

DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

[-] emma@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

"propitiatory indexing" is a delightful autocorrect :)

[-] reka@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I don't even think I've ever heard the word "propitiatory" used so TIL from my own error

[-] HidingCat@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Sorry, I must've mixed up Start Page and DDG and/or Google and Bing. Though wasn't aware that they did that much indexing of their own.

[-] reka@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah it seems way more smaller search engines use Bing than Google, I'm not sure why but I'm guessing either API costs or privacy agreements? DDG did get into hot water a couple of years ago over this because Bing was serving ads which were not private and were potentially profiling DDG users. No company is perfect all the time but they did promptly attempt to fix the issue. I do like them as far as tech firms go.

this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023

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