I append "site:Reddit.com" (I know, I know) to basically every search I perform. It's the only reliable way at this point to see things written genuinely by real people.
That used to work until reddit started a war against it's own moderators and made a lot of people leave to Lemmy.
Reddit is in a slow death spiral I believe.
It works but it’s way shittier. I ended up paying for Kagi.
I've used ecosia for the last few years I rate it pretty good.
Mojeek has been an interesting alternative. I do find myself using google as a backup when I’m not getting what I need, but Mojeek does tend to present very different results.
I don’t think any other search engine, including DuckDuckGo, has its own web crawler like mojeek does. DuckDuckGo is security based, but still google in the end (similar to how most browsers are actually chromium). It apparently also uses a different term algorithm so you have to readjust how you search because it doesn’t do anything predictive or “smart” in its searching for results.
I've honestly been on DDG for years; I very rarely hit Google anymore, unless I need to map something because DDG maps suck.
I have been having better luck with goddamn BING, ffs. Do you realize how embarrassing that is, Google?
Nah google definitely still works, it just doesn’t work well or as consistently anymore.
All these companies paying for SEO bumps to remove or highlight their content fuck with results, just like the Reddit protests did. It’s a real mess because google is more of an ad company than an SE company
For me depending on what I’m searching for, I’ll use chat gpt or similar AI with internet access/training or may use google or other SE and use site modifiers to keep results to a somewhat related domain.
I’m really interested to see what people like when it comes to search engines. Duck duck go, Brave, yandex, bing, google, they’re all different states of shit tbh
Even if they give good results they’re scraping your data to sell or use chromium and is therefore antiAdblock anti user, etc.
Has anyone created a firefox plugin that allows you to filter out search results based on snippet and URL rules? That would solve the problem on most search engines as the unwanted results are usually repetitive and obvious.
Not exactly what you're asking for but uBlacklist is a plugin that lets you blacklist websites from showing in your search results. I've only been playing with it for a few days but it seems to work great for Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing. Qwant is a little wonky.
My experience with Google search had degraded dramatically in the last 6mo. Just isn’t pulling up relevant results. Sometimes not even close.
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