this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 91 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We all need to stop using this as our default search engine

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (16 children)

What do you suggest? Because even Mozilla uses Google for its search.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Which is just bing with a few extra editorial changes that aren't really transparent.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Kagi... It's so good you forget Google.

And what do you mean "even mozilla"... There are money deals between these Google and mozilla. Google pays mozilla a lot of money to set Google as default search.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

It is so good that when I use Google on someone else's computer, I'm surprised at how bad Google has become.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

It's a paid service, so it'd be a bad default for a web browser. Not saying it's a bad search engine; saying that it's a bad search engine default for the every day folk who just installed a web browser.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I agree. I would recommend duckduckgo for a free search engine.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

https://searx.neocities.org/

Right click the address bar to add it to your search bar

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

As the default as it pays for web development. You can change this to DuckDuckGo in settings and I strongly recommend that you do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

I really like startpage, but I'm pretty sure it's just Google with some tweaks

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you don't mind having to occasionally refresh the page due to search engine timeout, a public Searxng metasearch engine. I use one just to straight up bypass having to go to any specific search engine. Also allows me to see results from both gøøg|e and b*ng without having to go to either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

https://searx.space/ has a listing with responsetime for the sites.

i use www.gruble.de, has worked without issue for the last month or so.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Bruh, it asks for login. No thanks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why don’t you google it? /s

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

startpage, had the Best results for me in the last couple of months, much better then google. and the anonymous view feature is handy and neat

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I'm using qwant as my default now. It does well for most searches, but for map related things I still use google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

i'm using a mix of ddg startpage and occasionally yandex, and its been good so far.

if you have more good suggestions drop em here.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The time has long passed whereby we need to remove Google as the effective governing authority of the internet. As with most things online, a good idea ballooned into a net negative for nearly everyone else. This fact was obvious decades ago. There needs to be actual competition and government need to reassert itself as more than a rubber stamp for business growth.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Proclaimed Xenomor, as he addressed the federation.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Annoying stuff, but I've suspected for awhile.

My personal blog is life changing, but y'all will never find it, at this rate. /Sarcasm

More seriously, a decade ago my personal blog was the number one article on the Internet for like 3 deeply esoteric technical topics. Neat.

At some point, that stopped happening. I didn't give it serious thought, because those articles were never meant for anything but my personal reference, anyway.

But it made me wonder what was going on with the algorithms.

On one hand, I figure people can just go to stack overflow. Except, I don't participate in SO, because they're a bunch of tossers. But then, I figure someone else can just copy my write-up into Stack Overflow. Except, no one does, anymore, probably because they can't find my blog either.

Again, my blog is mostly useless shit. So maybe the algorithm was just doing it's job. But I've wondered for awhile if the Internet wasn't just plain better a decade ago when search actually worked.

Whose blogs was I missing out on? Now I find stuff like that through Mastodon, but it still isn't targeted topical search, yet.

I need to get in on that web ring action going on.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

None of the most obvious searches I tried came up with my blog, but I did find some better resources (to me, than my blog, which admittedly I don't care to find since there's nothing new there for me...) on blogs that it did find. It looks like it's doing the kind of search I used to rely on. Pretty cool!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Yeah, honestly it would be fascinating if you wanted to go search for the specific terms that you think should bring that up, and then compare how deep your blog is in the results on a bunch of different web search pages.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Was your blog mobile friendly?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I like to think I kept on top of that, yeah.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

That's good. I asked because Google wiped out all non-mobile search results for mobile devices. This happened in 2015 so I was thinking the timeline kinda matches.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

When I look up the name of my blog, it shows up. Unlikely for it to come up if people look up just the title I think. Maybe I'll give it a try

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (4 children)

The excellent podcast “Search Engine” has a couple recent episodes covering this, the history of Google and how it became the core of the internet, and their bullshit AI shenanigans. Highly recommend.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I'm not familiar with podcasts. Where can i find these?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is a joke right, you're waiting for someone to tell you to "Google it?"

Well done.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

+1 for Google recently killing their podcast app.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do you have an iPhone or an Android device? Folks usually access them on phones! They’re just basically audio stories, fictional or nonfiction, informational or INCREDIBLY STUPID, but hilarious.

If that sounds fun, I can recommend some things!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (11 children)
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

There's a lot of places to listen to them. I just search "search engine podcast" and a bunch of places show up.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

It still burns me that a McKinsey shrill runs it now.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't think those rankings themselves are the problem, at least not the ones mentioned in the article, the issue is a lack of transparency and configurability.

"isLocalCovidAuthority" makes a hell a lot of sense but if it gets boosted to the front then google should say "We are prioritising this result because we deem it trustworthy source of relevant information": If you make an editorial decision, actually stand by it.

"isSmallPersonalSite" also makes sense, but what about giving users the choice of prioritising or deprioritising it instead of making it for them?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Bringing the right webpage to your computer is no passive task as thousands of editorial decisions are made on your behalf by a secretive group of Googlers.

Several SEO experts tell Gizmodo the leak lists 14,000 ranking features which, at the very least, lay a blueprint for how Google organizes everything on the web.

Google has previously denied that it uses some of these ranking features in Search, but the company confirmed these documents are real, albeit, in its telling, imperfect.

“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo.

King and Fishkin also noticed the ‘isCovidLocalAuthority” and “isElectionAuthority” in their writeups of the leak, both pointing out the importance of search engines in elevating quality information.

“It’s a non-statement that doesn’t address the leak, provides no value, and might well have been written by an AI trained on the past decade’s most soulless corporate messaging.”


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