There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you'd see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they're still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)

It'd be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the "top" results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).

DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn't hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.

FWIW DuckDuckGo sources the traditional links / results from Bing. Their Instant Answers info does come directly from other sources, e.g. Wikipedia.

Source: https://duckduckgo.com/...

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it's fucking awful for delivering useful links.

You're fooling yourself if you think Bing is any different, or that ChatGPT won't become the same thing. It's destiny is to be a smarter version of Alexa, only users will falsely assume neutrality it doesn't possess.

The only thing the others have over Google is they're not the primary focus of SEO, but that will change. SEO has devoured the corpse of Google search and waiting to determine what prey it should focus on next.

I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.

For what it's worth, Bing is similarly full of ads, but with a more cluttered page design and a lot of video previews. Often times I find its suggestions for related searches get in the way of actually reading the search results for the current search...

Startpage or searxng are better

Going to do a run with duckduckgo in my browser. Probably about time I move stuff away from Google anyways.

Brave Search is basically DuckDuckGo but with an independent index. unfortunately it doesn't support images yet so it redirects you when you click on "images"

Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.

I've heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service.

It's gotten a lot better recently, though sometimes I do still have to switch to Google to find stuff. I don't care that much about my search engine privacy, so I mainly use this because Microsoft Rewards nets me giftcards and such just from searching.

But privacy-conscious people should stay the hell away.

Ive had some success using phind but I'm pretty sure this is just another way of using chat GPT without an account.

Either way, before the migration I found Google useless for anything but searching for stuff on Reddit, or answering questions about video games.

Good luck going to Google these days without already knowing the answer to your question.

ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269

Wow! This is the first time I've heard about Knaben Database, but it looks handy. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.

It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.

Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.

Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.

Fuck.

Maybe OP's "search results" were the ads at the top of the google results

It also works on mine.

Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do !mcwiki diamond to search the minecraft wiki for "diamonds"

I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse

Same here - only Reddit results.

Me too. I got all reddit links when I did the same search. Not sure what's happening for OP. I also did it in the Google app om android.

Doesn't work but it does change the results??? https://i.ibb.co/...

So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff

Weird. I wonder if it's device specific.

Works fine for me too. Used an iPhone/safari

Can't reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)

For me it is still working. But ig it will go all downhill rather quickly.

It's not fake. You can look at my other screenshots. It's just not happening to you.

I hope you are asking that rhetorically.

But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.

I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it's really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.

If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.

Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?

It still returns better results for many queries than the alternatives. My ability to weigh usefulness against ideological concerns is pretty limited at times, so I'll use which search engine gives me the best results.

I stopped using google as my main search engine about 4 months ago. Duckduckgo.com is comparable in most ways, except things like maps are a bit less visually enjoyable to use.

why did they even start

Yeah honestly, it's great so far. I tried searxng for quite awhile and it did the trick somewhat, but damn SEO farms were my biggest pet peeve. The time I save is worth the money

Same results in the browser as well.

What do I need to do to prove it's not fake? Record the screen from another phone?

That seems rather risky, considering that they don't really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.

ChatGPT is not a search engine, it's a language model. It does not provide correct answers, it imitates what correct answers sound like.

The issue with LLMs that I have is that while they are great at certain tasks, they are bad at anything, let's call it factual, due to their nature.

I can for example use it to quickly draft up a email or a piece of python code, and I can immediately see whether or not the response it generated is actually what I want.

If I go ask it what the hottest day in a given country was or ask it to explain something, I have absolutely no idea whether it's bullshit or not and I will have to double check it anways.

I think the learning curve with LLMs as a tool is to be able to know when to use it and when to rely on other sources instead.

There's someone actually building this right now. It's a Lemmy search engine. https://browse.feddit.de

https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

https://www.search-lemmy.com

It's still in EARLY development so expect bugs.

Search-Lemmy is under development for this.

to to something

to do something

(Can't edit my comment in this app)

I've noticed a lot of operators seemingly not work as they're supposed to or correctly. Very weird.

For all its other flaws, Google is still quite a good search engine, even if it is worse than it used to be. It's still the definitive search engine.

You don't have many other good options, either. What are you going to do, jump to Yahoo! Or AskJeeves? Bing??