this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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There’s plenty of good, free and non-invasive search engines. Give Qwant a try!
I seriously can't deal with google search anymore, I swear I can't find anything.
It's like it replaces my search terms with something more common (sometimes even completely unrelated) and runs the search with that. It's fucking ridiculous. Keyword search doesn't work at all anymore, and writing fucking sentences like it suggests you to leads to completely shit results. I just don't get it.
I noticed a change like this some 10 or so years ago. It used to be pretty simple, just an index search. And it was pretty reliable, you just had to get the hang of it. But I noticed they changed something because that didn't work so well anymore, so I switched up my search style to be more like you would expect people new to computers to have. Kinda annoying, and not as effective, especially for edge cases (some obscure searches) but for those it seemed to somewhat fall back to the old method.
But now, nothing works anymore. Honestly it fucking infuriates me sometimes, I can't find anything. If you want something specific, fucking forget it. More than three specifications and it shows you just 5 results??? What the fuck is with that? And not good results mind you. any less specific and it shows you generic, not applicable answers. I tried everything, it's useless beyond the most general questions.
So yeah, I kinda went off on a rant there, but the point of the comment is, is qwant (or any other alternative) similar to old google and can actually search by keywords?
The problem is SEO.
You can't just use keywords anymore because every site out there is actively exploiting that system. Being the search engine everyone uses inherently means everyone will try to cheat to be overrepresented. It's an adversarial system now, which forces an arms race between the search engine and web sites, meaning a search engine has to constantly evolve to stay ahead.
They've failed to do that and I definitely don't like the end product now, but there's nothing they can do to be what they were 10 years ago either. The web has changed.
Ahh Goodhart's Law strikes again.
All of them do this to some degree unless you quotation mark the shit out of search terms but in my experience Qwant is better than others at this. If they didn’t do it at all many common search terms would be very hit or miss. This is my obviously just my opinion and your mileage might vary.
The biggest downsides you need to prepare yourself for in every other search engine are lack of Google Maps integrations (they’re so far ahead of everyone :/) and no Reddit results. The first one is offset by just how shit Google is now. The other is more tricky but I believe Reddit is so astroturfed that it’s no longer useful except for some niche communities. I do Reddit searches via Redlib so that spez gets none of my data.
About reddit - I was just looking up different search engines and stumbled upon this. So apparently reddit blocks other search engines. But honestly, that's not even that bad. Reddit's been astroturfed to hell and even the non-product placement content is AI generated garbage.
Quotation marks worked as a patch for a short while in google, but even that has been nerfed the last couple of years. Honestly I'm just looking for a search engine that doesn't return results for what it thinks I want, but returns results that actually contain the keywords I searched for.
But from what I've seen, it's slim pickings. I'll give Qwant a try tho, thanks!