I was just talking to some people about this. I use to be the guy who researched everything now I feel stupid AF because finding what I'm looking for feels impossible at times. Hell there's times where I search something and Google even says "there's nothing to find".
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
612 points (96.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36173 readers
421 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's garbage full of seo spam and malicious links
Yes, and that's why I switched to Kagi
I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi's 100 free searches, and decided that it's worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.
I don't blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.
load more comments
(3 replies)
When I'm on a VPN connected through the US, absolutely. When I'm not on a VPN, also yes, but not nearly as bad.
I recently tried switching to DDG for my browsers default searches... Instead of Google. It's wasted so much time.
The others are significantly worse. Even using very specific search terms for threads and content I've already gone to.
Bing was nice for porn for a while... Not so much anymore.
Yes.
Yeah, here's a fantastic recent article about it:
The Discussion Forums Dominating 10,000 Product Review Search Results - Reddit's dominance and the downsides of that https://detailed.com/forum-serps/
Big time.
Yes. It varies by topic, but on many topics now it's 100% useless.
Yes, I unironically use bing now because it yields better results
I use Google with modifiers like plus and minus, quotation marks and most importantly with uBlocklist. This way I can hide seo bullshit with a single click
You *think you use Google with modifiers, but now your modifiers are even modified or nulled by Google
load more comments
(3 replies)
What I will find interesting since it seems I find better content on stuff like lemmy. I wonder if we will go back to the model of webrings and human aggregated with a mix of user generated links search like yahoo used to be to combat the AI wasteland that is current search. With a web of trust model.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I haven't used Google in years in favor of DDG, which had a degraded search already, but I have noticed the YouTube search is super unreliable now as well, but it seems to be getting better the last few months
It is rather terrible.
Yep, and now you have to scroll through ads and the AI bs. I switched to DDG a few weeks ago. It's mostly good, my biggest issue is that Firefox on Android always takes several seconds before loading the page. Gotta do what ya gotta do for uBlock Origin though.
If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.
Man all this positivity for Kagi feels astroturfed. No offense if you're actually not a paid shill, but everywhere I go it seems too flowery to believe.
I mean they give you 100 searches to try before asking you to pay so the opportunity cost to find out is pretty low.
I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.
+1 to what others have said ... Plus I think lemmy is still way too small for "paid shills" in any case. It's okay to like a product you've spent money on, presumably that's why you're spending the money 🤷♂️
Edit: Granted, the original commenter does have a very small lemmy comment history (at least as seen from my instance ... maybe larger if you take the time to load their profile on their home instance)
load more comments
(2 replies)
It feels like it but it's really not. We're actual users who genuinely like the product because it's catered to nerds like us.
If you too are a nerd, I can highly recommend just giving it a try. If you look for it, you'll immediately notice many things that Kagi just simply gets so damn right.
load more comments
(10 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)