Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?

    • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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      91 year ago

      Does anyone care to explain the possible reason for downvoting this - is there something I am not aware of wrt DDG?

    • @kakes@sh.itjust.works
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      301 year ago

      I used to have to put !g (redirect to Google) on like half my searches to get the results I wanted. These days, I actually generally prefer DDG’s results over Google’s.

      • @piccolo@ani.social
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        51 year ago

        Same, especially on image searches… but Google’s quality has plummeted to a point Bing is better… how the mighty has fallen.

    • @InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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      21 year ago

      I use DDG too. When I redirect to google using !g it’s usually out of desperation and it gives me the same bad results in a slightly different order.

  • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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    301 year ago

    I’ve begun to pay for Kagi.com

    I wouldn’t say that it “blows my mind” or anything, but simply that it seems to work as expected (which is more than what I can say for Google). There’s also a “Fediverse” button on Kagi.com, so it can search lemmy.world (and more??).

    • @pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev
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      121 year ago

      I’m just annoyed by the regions issues, you’ll get pretty biased results depending in what region you select.
      If you try to search for something specific to a region with other selected you’ll find sometime empty results, which shows you won’t get relevant results about a search if you don’t properly select the region.

      Probably this is more obvious with non technical searches, for example my default region is canada-en and if I try “instituto nacional electoral” I only get a wiki page, an international site and some other random sites with no news, only when I change the region I get the official page ine.mx and news. For me this means kagi hides results from other regions instead of just boosting the selected region’s ones.

      • @Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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        91 year ago

        Yeah that drives me nuts too. Shopping results for fuckin Home Depot? I’m in Europe you stupid search engine

      • @30p87@feddit.de
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        21 year ago

        And searching for a german word always brings up dictionaries from german to english, instead of Wikipedia etc.

    • Subverb
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      41 year ago

      I’m using kagi as well and have been very pleased with it.

    • ferret
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      21 year ago

      Their scumbag CEO really soured kagi for me

          • @Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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            151 year ago

            This is one person rambling about stuff she’s hypothesising

            “They didn’t pay sales tax for the first couple of years”

            Do you even know how small businesses get off the ground in Europe? Possibly by being exempt from taxes until their profits are high enough?

            Says their financial information is impossible to find, then starts telling us exactly what that information is

            This is the same as people watching a YouTube channel and just assuming it’s gospel because they watch that channel a lot smh

            • ferret
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              -41 year ago

              It’s enough to put a bad taste in my mouth, it ended up on HN if you want to read some more critical commentary (of kagi and of the blogger)

              • @Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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                21 year ago

                if you want to read some more critical commentary

                What I read was a measured and reasoned reply from one of the founders to a small handful of keyboard warriors 😂

          • @Kuinox@lemmy.world
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            131 year ago

            I don’t get why “scumbag”.

            The blogger shitted on his company, and refuse to hear any explanation from the CEO, if anything, I find him very patient.

          • @tyler@programming.dev
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            31 year ago

            I read that when it was originally posted and it just comes across as a one-sided account from someone pissed about something, with no actual thought about the situation put into it.

    • @pelotron@midwest.social
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      161 year ago

      I just started using this and am still in the trial period but I will definitely be paying for it when my 100 free searches are gone. So many top results are exactly what I’m looking for. I can’t believe my expectations have been conditioned to the point where this surprises me…

      • @heschlie@lemmy.schlunker.com
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        41 year ago

        Yea it hasn’t disappointed me so far, I’m also still in the trial, been waiting for a search that turns crap results on G and DDG to try and put it through the paces. Though compared to G it is nice not having half the results be sponsored.

    • beefbot
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      71 year ago

      I’ve heard enough bad things about it to stay well away. Which is too bad bc it’s quite good atm! I just expect it to hoover up my data & get enshittified sooner than later & the CEO is Musk-level BSer 🤷‍♂️👍

          • @Slimy_hog@programming.dev
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            81 year ago

            Oh really? I never felt like that was convincing in any way especially since lot of the stuff in that blog is just uninformed (for example you don’t have to pay taxes in many jurisdictions until you hit a certain threshold)

            I’m not gonna try to convince you to use Kagi, but I just don’t feel like that blog is full of good reasons not to.

            • beefbot
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              11 year ago

              Correct, it was that blog And “Slimy_4og” you sound like one of the many disinformation AI bots farting around now

                • beefbot
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                  1 year ago

                  Well, it’s plausible you’ve ingested enough influence from enough propaganda sources that you yourself believe what they’ve told you, & you parrot it back out, which sorta makes you, in the limited context of one comment, functionally indistinguishable from a propaganda worker, who probably has been replaced by an AI bot bc those can do more of that work.

                  So ya can’t really blame me for the shorthand of just referring to you as one, yknow?

  • Star
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    221 year ago

    I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.

  • @Redkey@programming.dev
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    201 year ago

    Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

    Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
    Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
    Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

    • Onihikage
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      51 year ago

      The first result on Kagi search is this list which shows the movie years in parentheses so you can easily skip through just the ones from the 1980s. The other search results are more about the gag itself - first use of it by Charlie Chaplin, etc.

    • @vividspecter@lemm.ee
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      51 year ago

      slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie

      DDG results weren’t too bad, although repetitious and focused on the history of the gag, and not particular examples.

    • @RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      31 year ago

      Per Brave:

      slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie

      The classic comedy gag of slipping on a banana peel has been a staple in entertainment for decades. In the 1980s, this gag was featured in several comedy movies. One notable example is the 1983 film “Trading Places” starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. In the movie, a character played by Jamie Lee Curtis slips on a banana peel, leading to a series of comedic events.

      Another example is the 1985 film “The Sure Thing” starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga. In this movie, a character played by John Cusack slips on a banana peel while trying to impress a girl, leading to a series of awkward and humorous moments.

      The banana peel gag has also been featured in several other 1980s comedy movies, including “The Blues Brothers” (1980) and “Caddyshack” (1980). These films showcase the enduring popularity of this comedic trope and its ability to bring laughter and entertainment to audiences.

      AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts. Learn more

    • @RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      21 year ago

      Kagi:

      Quick Answer

      Based on the available information, the “slipping on a banana peel” gag has been a staple of comedy films since the early 20th century. The first known appearance of this gag on the big screen was in the Charlie Chaplin movie “By the Sea”, where Chaplin’s character “The Tramp” tosses a banana peel on the ground and then slips on it later. [1][2]

      The banana peel gag was soon adopted by other silent film stars like Buster Keaton, who featured it in his 1928 film “The Cameraman”. [3] The gag continued to be used in comedy films throughout the 20th century, including in the 1926 Harold Lloyd film “For Heaven’s Sake”. [4]

      However, the available information does not mention any specific 1980s comedy movies that featured the banana peel gag. The gag seems to have been more prevalent in the silent film era and earlier decades of the 20th century. [1][5]

      1. The Origin of the “Slipping on a Banana Peel” Comedy Gag
      2. Chaplin and the first banana peel slip in film history - YouTube
      3. Buster Keaton slips on a banana peel in The Cameraman (1928)
      4. Slipping on a banana peel - 3 versions of the classic joke - YouTube
      5. How Did Slipping on a Banana Peel Become a Comedy
  • @MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub
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    191 year ago

    DuckDuckGo as a default with Google as fallback depending on what I’m looking for. For lemmy the default search of my instance works well enough so haven’t tried external engines.

  • Scary le Poo
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    1 year ago

    I run my own searxng instance. It’s amazing.

    I also spun up my own yacy instance. It was pretty terrible. It could be good, but you would need a pretty beefy machine with a lot of storage and a lot of time for it to index for it to be anything approaching good.

    • @Miaou@jlai.lu
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      41 year ago

      Somehow I’ve never heard of searxng before. Would you say it’s better than DDG? Are the memory requirements not too high?

      • Scary le Poo
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        51 year ago

        Searxng is a search engine aggregator. It sends your search out to all the engines and aggregates the results. No ads, no bullshit, endlessly customizable.

        You can use one of the public instances. You don’t have to run your own.

        https://searx.space/

    • Dyskolos
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      11 year ago

      Which isn’t better than Google these days? They dropped immensly in quality.

  • @tyler@programming.dev
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    101 year ago

    Kagi. I haven’t had a failed search results in months, and when I do google can’t find it either so I haven’t lost anything.