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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷♂️
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.
I don't use anything that's made or based on the US. Serious redflag!
Eh. I guess I understand some suspicion, but for better or worse a very large portion of the internet is US-centric. It's pretty difficult to use any major internet content and avoid US based stuff entirely.
Also from what I've seen, while these companies may be US-based they 100% have their own profits prioritized over any national interests. I'd be surprised to learn of any kind of overt nationalism biased towards the US from Google, for instance.
"americabad"
Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?
I have been using duckduckgo.com for the last few years. I definitely find it preferable to google.
That said, when I first switched over I would occasionally have a hard time finding something and swap back to google to let their algorithm that was tailored to me help out.
Would you say that duckduckgo's search algorithm has gotten better, or that you have gotten better at using it?
Google's algorithm works better at finding really weird things deep in the bowels of the web (for example: obscure programming questions around GPU shaders in a specific framework or graphics pipeline) and when searching for local things if outside the US (because Google has the notion of Region when returning search results, so for example here in Portugal if I search in portuguese for a store to buy something I don't get results from Brasil) whilst duckduckgo works better for everything else.
Personally I default to duckduckgo and only use Google when duckduckgo isn't returning good enough results, which is surprisingly unusual.
Startpage, Qwant, Swisscow, SearX
If these don't work for you, try duckduckgo but I don't recommend it as its made and based in the US.
Any app thats developed and hoated in US is a serious threat. Use any app which are developed and hosted in the EU .
brave, it is a separate database then Google and they have a discussion sub search. Qwant is a French based search that does not track you. also good results and based in the eu. metagear is a meta seaech engine that pulls results from yahoo Bing and goggle.
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