Google is bad, but people have no idea how bad search could actually get. Trying to find DPRK housing stats and DDG will only give me pages about recent canadian housing news.
Self hosted searxng has replaced it for me. Without DDG. For work, back to google. Cause it’s work, idgaf. DDG has turned to trash.
I tried searching for “reverse floorplan houses” and the entire first page was essentially AI slop and malware sites. Ddg is dead
We need a truth and reconciliation commission to find out, punish, and reverse the work of the people who took early 2010s google, which was somehow perfect, and intentionally fucked it all up
Well, the first step is already covered, at least.
Also like if you click second page, the results almost immediately have nothing to do with what you searched. It’s crazy how bad it’s gotten.
I’ve had searches so bad the entire first page is irrelevant to what you searched for and you have to go deep into several pages to find what should have obviously been the first.
DuckDuckGo is very heavily censored against leftist sources. They admitted censoring and/or de-prioritizing and downranking massively Russian sources after the start of the Ukraine conflict. So that could be a part of the problem. Yandex might be worth a try, they seem to index more non-western sources and not shove them to the bottom.
Yandex
My mind parses this as “Yandere Index”
Russian sources are typically not leftist? I can’t tell if you intended your 1st and 2nd sentences to be understood separately or together.
Kagi FTW 100% best search engine
Leftists are the only people who oppose NATO cheerleading over a war NATO aggression provoked and guess who’s going to be posting shit that is critical of that (typically Russian) (it’s leftists)
I will always suggest Searx. It’s a meta front-end, filters out all the AI garbage and ads. FOSS and self hostable but there’s plenty of public instances to try. You can customise which engines it uses, although what’s available to choose from is up to the instance maintainer.
+1
I thought about building a network of these to try and avoid rate limits. Not sure how viable that is, maybe its just a host your own type of service.
It’s easy enough to host your own, and if you’re just using it like a normal person you’re not going to hit a rate limit. Goog can’t really tell the difference between you hitting it from a browser vs. you hitting it from searx.
You could probably either proxy outbound requests through a bunch of different boxes if you really wanted to, or maybe there’s some frontend that queries public instances in like a round-robin kind of way (a meta-meta engine, I guess), but honestly I suspect that’s more work than just spinning up your own.
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. So instead I will second the Searx suggestion.
Searx (technically now a newer development called Searxng) will grab results for you from just about any other search engine but it goes a long way towards anonymizing you to those search engines and helps break their ability to fingerprint and track you, removes ads, etc. If you use invidious for youtube (you should!) or nitter for “x” (xcancel is a nitter instance), then Searxng is kinda like that but can also aggregate all the search engines for any search you do.
You can host your own private instance which I’m told is easy, or you can use public instances, which I do. I do have to admit that a lot of the public instances get rate limited a lot, so you might get a few “0 results returned” before it works, if you have it set to use for example google and bing when both have rate limited that public instance. You can set it to use other engines at that point or try other public instances. Usually it works fine “out of the box” but sometimes it does take a little tweaking to get it the way you want. Mostly this is because search engines don’t like people using searx and try to thwart it because it ruins their raison d’etre: tracking you and advertising at you. But that’s what makes it all the more worth it. And if you set up your own private instance, then it greatly reduces or eliminates many of the issues that the high volume public instances have to deal with like rate limiting, and of course gives you full control over how you want your personal instance to work.
And yes, !bangs work on it, but you should use two exclamation marks instead of one, like “!!w beanis” to search wikipedia for beanis. Dorking more or less works to the extent that it works on whatever the target search engine is. If you’re using searx to search on an engine that doesn’t recognize boolean search operators, then it’s not going to return results as if the operators do work. But it will work when set to search on engines that do recognize them.
Setup is indeed very easy, I run a local-only instance on my PC at home. Been a while since I did it but from memory I think it’s just a docker one-liner. You are right that rate limiting can be an issue and that’s part of the reason I spun up my own.
Apparently y’all haven’t heard of 100searchengines.com
If you haven’t check it before now, you’re welcome for bringing you back to results that actually show you things you’re looking for instead of complete garbage. Enjoy.
back in my day there were only 37
🤣
I’ve started paying for kagi, works pretty well
Can you dork with it?
Nice, thank you! Good to know! I’ve been looking for an alternative for quite some time.
Straight-up dorkin’ it in my search queries.
I don’t understand the question
https://github.com/chr3st5an/Google-Dorking
Advance search techniques… For reasons.
I try dorking but I feel like googke just ignores that shit now or somethinf. Ill -reddit and it’ll just show me more reddit, fuckin bastard google
Kagi is free to try, i can’t answer that from experience
Speaker got me, it does.
Same here. Kagi is a breath of fresh air and works as well as google used to work many years ago.
