this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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[–] TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world 72 points 1 year ago (6 children)

They’re somehow WORSE than duckduckgo nowadays like how? You were the search leader, people used DDG for privacy reasons but they passed you??? Did you forget why you’re a company? It’s because you were the best fucking search engine ever and you decided to sell that title for ads or some shit. Incredible how Google fell off the fucking side of a mountain they themselves built!

[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago

Yes, but have you considered, line must go up?

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 26 points 1 year ago

For me it went from "great" to "usable" over the course of a decade or so, and then from "usable" to "worthless" over the course of six months. It's a remarkably awful trajectory.

[–] hagelslager@feddit.nl 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

And DuckDuckGo lacks basic stuff such as keyword exclusion. (It's my main search engine for the last few years after Startpage got bought, but lacking keyword exclusion sucks!)

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you can -something , but it isn't full exclusion. It's generally been good enough for me. I agree the full fat version would be nice.

[–] hagelslager@feddit.nl 2 points 1 year ago

So far I haven't had any luck with -something "soft" exclusions either.

[–] rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Yea I bailed after they nerfed exclusions and whatnot but not like the others are slam dunks

[–] icedterminal@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

It's pretty wild how Google search has degraded. The push for SEO has really ruined useful results.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kagi is even better than DDG. Google is absolutely horrendous.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s interesting, but $120 a year is just too much for me.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The lowest plan is only $54 a year and it’s most definitely worth it for the results.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

300 searches a month is just way too little for my usage

[–] snowe@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you use 1/10th the searches because you get it all in the very first query your usage goes wayyyy down. even then, you aren't limited to 300 searches. you can go over, you just pay per search. and even with that if you can't do that then just default to DDG then. I found DDG to be terrible, not at all better than Bing by itself, so Kagi was something I tried and immediately fell in love with. It just works. And I don't have to worry about any of my data going anywhere at all, to any advertisers for anything, or for tracking, etc.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've done 418 searches today and it's still noon. That's ~1254 a month. Even if my searches went down by 90% I'd still be 4.18 times over.

... Kagi was something I tried and immediately fell in love with. It just works.

Does it also work with very specific technical searches? Could it for example search for the behavior of atol when it encounters an alphabetical character? Neither Google, Bing nor DuckDuckGo provide me with an answer. Google doesn't even show cppreference in the top 5.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry I’m having trouble understanding what you’re asking for. You’ve done 418 searches in a single day? That would be 12958 a month so I’m not sure I’m reading your comment correctly.

Does it also work with very specific technical searches?

That’s pretty much exactly what I use it for.

Could it for example search for the behavior of when it encounters an alphabetical character?

I’m not sure what you’re asking here.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My comment wasn’t that clear. 1254 is with a 90% reduction and the example question about atol’s behavior was just an example. I looked it up earlier that day but was unable to find it using Google.

atol is a C/C++ function that takes in a char pointer and returns a long. I was trying to figure out if it would gracefully stop when it encountered non-numeric characters, if it would skip them or if it would cause undefined behavior.

[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is ddg actually good now? I remember it feeling nearly useless waay back when it was first hitting the scene. Might have to give it a shot again

[–] jagungal@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

I'm not a power user, but I've used DDG exclusively for a while now and I often forget that I'm using it. I'd say it's a pretty seamless transition nowadays.

[–] Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You actually get the results you are looking for without the sponsored links. Sometimes you end up searching for reddit results but that's every search engine.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Not kagi. I haven’t specified Reddit once since switching to kagi. It really is that much better than DDG and Google.

[–] Nommer@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I only use Google if DDG can't find what I'm looking for. Usually Google doesn't either if DDG can't so lately I've been giving up after the DDG results. I can't stand Google anymore. The first page of results is just ads and the next page is all irrelevant nonsense.