I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for
Yeah, I’m horrified but it’s wound up being the only way to find quality amateur writing about dog breeds. Most websites in that subject matter seem to be semi algorithmic content farms that echo the same uncited information.
Oh god don't give this away, or it will be ruined.
I've said it before but for me the best search I ever used was back in the day when delicio.us was a thing and everyone used it. Basically curated tags/websites, I could find really good, niche things that google would never find for me.
Basically, human powered indexing is almost always better than algo/crawler search which only surfaces popular/gamed pages - it's a fundamental flaw of pagerank type crawling.
This is also kinda why ChatGPT is good, because it's basically a model trained on places like reddit, not using link popularity or whatever. So it's basically a model which builds an index of information from actual humans. I think it's the future of search, albeit with its own anti SEO challenges.
For now we have site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, site:stackoverflow.com, site:wikipedia.com to actually get useful info out of Google.
This is my go to search hack too. Recently, I've started to see it becoming more and more ineffective. Corps have figured out that reddit is the new SEO hack. Now there's a sudden influx of 'ad' posts by corps. Lots and lots of posts with a title "Samsung's new Galaxy 28 is cool!". Minimal upvotes, no comments.
When you think about it, adding "reddit" is a kind of counterpart mechanism to the rise of AI and generated content in a general sense. There's a real thirst for answers coming from real, genuine people, and adding "reddit" is the last resort we have to maximize the likelihood of it.
It is amusing I uninstalled the Reddit app because I use google as an entry-point so often and it’s really a pain universal links forced me to open the app for a worse experience.
Re: Reddit -- I'd love for YC to issue a Request For Startups around verified human identity - soon it will be hard to distinguish people from AI that posts comments, participates and then astroturfs sites like reddit. Account creation date will help as a band-aid but isn't the right solution.
I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam. Most of the time, the advice is legit.
Not sure why reddit has been able to resist the ever present corruption of money, but I think that's also why reddit is one of the few remaining politically progressive strongholds.
I've been selfhosting SearXNG [0] for a few months and cannot complain. It's a meta search engine, i.e. collects results from a variety of underlying search engines including Google (if enabled).
The main selling points for me are:
- No ads
- Improved Privacy
- Open Source
- Customisability (Plugins, Search Engines)
I'm quite content with the search results even though they're not quite on par with the quality that Google used to have.
+1. I was about to suggest this in my own comment.
SearX/SearXNG can also improve anonymity if you use a public instance, too. I choose to selfhost however, as the ultimate customization and ownership of the instance is more important to me than anonymity.
I find very interesting "indie" webpages frequently alongside my normal searches with Wiby results enabled. Wiby is actually fantastic.
In response to the sibling commenter mentioning its slowness: it takes some getting used to, but honestly waiting a couple seconds versus half a second for results isn't a big deal with the wealth of relevant information it gives. With about a half dozen engines enabled, I'm getting like 3-4 second response times, and that's on DigitalOcean's second lowest-tier VPS.
DDG/Bing are ridiculous with ignoring your search terms, even with quotes. I had enough. Google often has a whole page or almost a whole page of clever-widgets before any actual results, not to mention my ethical objections to their behavior and the SEO spam.
Kagi works great, I like the fact that I'm paying for it and my interests are primary in the relationship.
Same. I basically gave it a try, and stayed with it. I sometimes feel I should make more use of the advanced features, like lenses, but I'm pretty happy with just regular searches, too. Reminds me a lot of how Google used to be.
Kagi’s been fantastic. I started using them out on principle, but it’s a legitimately good search engine. I almost never find myself going back to google, and when I do, Google’s usually not finding anything either.
The only thing keeping me away from Kagi is that they are US-based.
Having some presence in the EU would contribute to peace of mind that your personal data is more or less under jurisdiction of the GDPR, and that there's at least _some_ pressure to actually keep their word on privacy (as small as that pressure turns out to be in practice).
Maybe not the search queries themselves, but at least keep the user information (payment data, personal preferences, etc) within the EU.
For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums.
The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expert and active community and looking at cutting edge knowledge bases. I suppose it's what the academic and scientific communities used to be before subsidies and blue church ruined it.
1. Google has their fingers in a lot of pies. You want to short Google search, but a short on Google is also shorting all their other businesses, as well as shorting future ventures and shorting the possibility that their management will pivot business strategy away from search.
2. Shorting in general leans toward being a short-term strategy, because most forms of shorts are costly to maintain because you're paying interest on loans, option premiums, etc. Futures are probably the cheapest way, but then you're susceptible to short-term fluctuations: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
If there's one thing I'm 100% sure of, it's that letting your in products go to crap does not necessarily decrease your stock price.
With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.
I'm still just appending `reddit` to my Google searches to try to find results written by human beings, although I am not optimistic that this technique will work for much longer (or perhaps even 100% of the time now).
The vast majority of it may still be written by humans, but they may not all be impartial humans; companies pretend to be end users and shill their products via reddit comments.
Torrent trackers (but not tpb usually).
Just search some books on the topic you are interested in and that's it.
For example, I used to have 2 medical problems which I have successfully solved using this method.
One medical problem of mine I have solved completely and what about another I can prove you there is just no cure (despite of some doctors promise me that they can do it for $$$).
That was a lot of reading but no other search engine on Earth can really search any medical stuff and no forums allow to discuss medical problems without a stupid censorship kind of "somebody might hurt yourself if he found this discussion by some wrong reason so we ain't allow you to discuss your medical stuff here".
I've also found that the best way to avoid search spam is to ignore the web entirely and go to well-reviewed books about my topic of interest. I tend to search for books on Amazon or Abebooks, check out the reviews, and then buy them if the price is reasonable, order them at my local library, or download them from LibGen if they're hard to get or too expensive. It takes longer, but the quality of information is much higher. For example, I was learning about wine recently—the web is full of SEO-optimized junk about wine, but there are many excellent books on the topic. Snippets in Google Books are also quite useful if I don't need a full book.
Maybe Facebook? I believe there are a ton of semiprivate support groups for different health conditions. But I guess one might need a starting point to be able to find a relevant one since they are specialized.
Someone should build a nerdsnipe engine. It posts your question on an appropriate forum, uses ChatGPT to formulate a bogus response, then sends you all the replies angrily correcting the first answer.
Kagi. Been paying for 5-ish months or so. The ROI is huuuge.
Between personal and work use, I do 500-700 searches/month and I find what I need very quickly about 90% of the time.
Also benefits my cow-orkers as they don’t have to listen to my incessant bitching about “suggestion engines” and other nonsense that the likes of Google & friends have become.
Beside the lack of ads and tracking, other features like pin/rank/block of sites are super useful at streamlining results.
I've reverted my expectations about search engines to what they were in the early days, dusted off my old research skills, and accepted that I'm going to have to do some work myself. I still use Google, but its ability to approximate a reference librarian is diminished.
I'm almost always looking for technical stuff, so I go right to the source. StackOverflow, Reddit, arxiv. Best of all is still hyper-specific dedicated forums where they exist.
For shopping I use Geizhals, Idealo or huge sellers like Digikey.
Search is losing the arms race. I think we'll need to revert back to the model of manually curated and moderated listings, a human-approved island, surrounded by an endless sea of autogen noise.
Google. It's fantastic. Gets me the information I'm looking for in 1-2 queries, tops. Often the answer is right on the result page without even needing to click into a bunch of crappy sites.
Google has now become what search engines were like before Google came. I remember putting plus signs and quotes to get a query to return even a modicum of descent results.
I either use a website I built that subscribes to a host of RSS feeds (https://datente.com), or find stuff via friends' links on LI/Twitter/Facebook (and then add 'good' sources to my Twitter followers, or RSS aggregator), or from HN (and then add to Twitter or RSS), or from people sending me texts/IMs
[+] [-] zelias|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carterschonwald|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvarsj|3 years ago|reply
I've said it before but for me the best search I ever used was back in the day when delicio.us was a thing and everyone used it. Basically curated tags/websites, I could find really good, niche things that google would never find for me.
Basically, human powered indexing is almost always better than algo/crawler search which only surfaces popular/gamed pages - it's a fundamental flaw of pagerank type crawling.
This is also kinda why ChatGPT is good, because it's basically a model trained on places like reddit, not using link popularity or whatever. So it's basically a model which builds an index of information from actual humans. I think it's the future of search, albeit with its own anti SEO challenges.
For now we have site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, site:stackoverflow.com, site:wikipedia.com to actually get useful info out of Google.
[+] [-] harshalizee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjauvin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmericanOP|3 years ago|reply
Stupid product strategy to ignore Google!
[+] [-] pricci|3 years ago|reply
edit: it's better to use site:reddit.com/r/ to remove some spam from /users/
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekanes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdudek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzek69|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borplk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deafpolygon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SMAAART|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emrah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satoqz|3 years ago|reply
The main selling points for me are:
- No ads
- Improved Privacy
- Open Source
- Customisability (Plugins, Search Engines)
I'm quite content with the search results even though they're not quite on par with the quality that Google used to have.
[0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
[+] [-] seanw444|3 years ago|reply
SearX/SearXNG can also improve anonymity if you use a public instance, too. I choose to selfhost however, as the ultimate customization and ownership of the instance is more important to me than anonymity.
I find very interesting "indie" webpages frequently alongside my normal searches with Wiby results enabled. Wiby is actually fantastic.
In response to the sibling commenter mentioning its slowness: it takes some getting used to, but honestly waiting a couple seconds versus half a second for results isn't a big deal with the wealth of relevant information it gives. With about a half dozen engines enabled, I'm getting like 3-4 second response times, and that's on DigitalOcean's second lowest-tier VPS.
[+] [-] pkulak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewbitt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user3939382|3 years ago|reply
DDG/Bing are ridiculous with ignoring your search terms, even with quotes. I had enough. Google often has a whole page or almost a whole page of clever-widgets before any actual results, not to mention my ethical objections to their behavior and the SEO spam.
Kagi works great, I like the fact that I'm paying for it and my interests are primary in the relationship.
[+] [-] anyfoo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roughly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noisycarlos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quectophoton|3 years ago|reply
Having some presence in the EU would contribute to peace of mind that your personal data is more or less under jurisdiction of the GDPR, and that there's at least _some_ pressure to actually keep their word on privacy (as small as that pressure turns out to be in practice).
Maybe not the search queries themselves, but at least keep the user information (payment data, personal preferences, etc) within the EU.
[+] [-] nerddadnear40|3 years ago|reply
For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums.
The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expert and active community and looking at cutting edge knowledge bases. I suppose it's what the academic and scientific communities used to be before subsidies and blue church ruined it.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|3 years ago|reply
That's probably not a great idea for two reasons:
1. Google has their fingers in a lot of pies. You want to short Google search, but a short on Google is also shorting all their other businesses, as well as shorting future ventures and shorting the possibility that their management will pivot business strategy away from search.
2. Shorting in general leans toward being a short-term strategy, because most forms of shorts are costly to maintain because you're paying interest on loans, option premiums, etc. Futures are probably the cheapest way, but then you're susceptible to short-term fluctuations: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
EDIT: alangibson also makes a good point.
[+] [-] alangibson|3 years ago|reply
With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.
[+] [-] AmericanOP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ace32229|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throw_away1525|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rationalist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eimrine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suddenclarity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asraelite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolenthedeep|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwungy|3 years ago|reply
A curated search like the original Yahoo! would be nice. Goofle hides a lot of my preferred sources.
[+] [-] throwaway28385|3 years ago|reply
Between personal and work use, I do 500-700 searches/month and I find what I need very quickly about 90% of the time.
Also benefits my cow-orkers as they don’t have to listen to my incessant bitching about “suggestion engines” and other nonsense that the likes of Google & friends have become.
Beside the lack of ads and tracking, other features like pin/rank/block of sites are super useful at streamlining results.
[+] [-] marmetio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rene_d|3 years ago|reply
In 19 out of 20 cases the first link is what I need, for both private and work related searches. Very fast, no ads.
[+] [-] alangibson|3 years ago|reply
For shopping I use Geizhals, Idealo or huge sellers like Digikey.
[+] [-] mharig|3 years ago|reply
What really bothers me is that Google Scholar returns more and more crap.
[+] [-] nvln|3 years ago|reply
Others -> Chat GPT with cross checking with DDG and Wikipedia.
News -> Twitter, Google News with extensive cross checking.
[+] [-] leeches|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicksil|3 years ago|reply
https://duck.com
[+] [-] danwee|3 years ago|reply
I usually search for books, movies and mp3s. With Google is kinda hard (or impossible) to do the same.
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warrenm|3 years ago|reply