A year long study shows what you’ve suspected: Google Search is getting worse.::undefined
It’s the life cycle of tech. New innovative technology gets invented, takes the market by storm, generates millions in value, investors get their hands on it, generates tens of millions, becomes publically traded, corpos inflate its value, bills come due, technology sabotaged to squeeze out any remaining profit, tech become withered husk of its formal self in a space it occupys alone and we get to eat shit salad every time we have to use it
Member when Wired ran the article “How Google alters search queries to get at your wallet” and then pulled it after pushback, specifically claims that they had misinterpreted what Google was actually saying?
High editorial standards aside, it’s good to know they were vindicated in spirit.
I stopped using google search around 2018. The reason? Their ads were serving literal virus-infected links of scams that pretend to be real companies.
Nothing has changed since.
Duckduckgo for life I guess
I recommend reading the actual paper. DDG is actually by far the worst by their measures. Even though Google has gotten worse, it’s results are still massively superior to the competition. 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. That’s a huge difference.
I would recommend trying a SearXNG instance if you haven’t before. You can combine results from multiple sources. I use Google as my main source while also having access to the DDG-style !bangs.
I also use DDG
But whenever I need to search more in-depth, I use perplexity.ai
It makes the comparison for you and summarises, also gives links to where that info is found. Makes it way easier to find the more obscure information. But it is too slow to use for everything.
Exactly the same here.
SEO, the methodology of ruining Google’s algorithm and enshittifying everything for marketing gains.
Google’s algorithm has gotten worse, and it honestly wasn’t great to begin with (gave too much weight to the biggest sites not the best). Now they over generalize your query and flat out ignore half your keywords because it costs more money to serve a non cached result.
I am shocked. SHOCKED I tell ya!
I’m interested in self hosted web search engines to run at home instead of using Google is SearXNG a good replacement or are there other better suggestions?
Other than self hosting a search engine what are some good web search providers? Most of my device browsers list the following default options:
- Yahoo
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Ecosia
If you are going to self-host a search engine, I would recommend two things to retain some degree of anonymity:
- Don’t run it from your home
You don’t want to pass Google your IP address - Advertise it in public spaces
That way, queries don’t just come from you
Otherwise, finding somebody else’s instance would be good for both you and for them. There’s no shame in not running one yourself.
- Don’t run it from your home
There is also Kagi, a paid search engine. They recently gained some controversy due to “partnering” with Brave, but quickly backtrack on the “partner” announcement.
Yes, SearXNG is a good self-hosted replacement.
