Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

    • mioko@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.

      • httpjames@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Kagi is a premium search engine that aims to have the highest quality search results. They use algorithms to surface up more indie content, like blogs, and downrank tracker-heavy pages and blog/SEO spam. The difference between Kagi and Google is night and day.

      • refugeered@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.

        https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.

        https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.

        But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.

        • SMT42@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.

          But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach

          • alejandro@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I use Kagi and never pay more than $10/mo even though I use it a lot. I think most people don’t know how much they search in a month, so the pricing can be confusing.

            I have the early adopter pro plan, which gives me extra searches (1500 instead of 1000), but for reference, I averaged 1044 searches/mo over the past 6 months (not counting this month). So if I had the standard pro plan, I’d have paid $10.66 per month on average.

            The unlimited plan seems excessive to me, unless you’re playing with the API or something like that.

      • itsJoelleScott@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.