Is that what happened?! I wondered why my quotes weren't working he other day.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Partially related, but I've noticed Google slowly adopting more and more weird little "features" that change the functionality... often for the worse. The latest is the change to the little suggested "search types" for want of a better term - e.g. when you search for a product it comes up with "shopping" to switch to shopping. These now seem to be AI generated, and much worse than before... quite often I want to do a product search but the option doesn't appear, and instead I have a bizarre selection of options most of which just repeat the search with an extra word added. Weird and annoying.
Searching for jackets: ✅
Searching for long jackets: ❌
I'm so used to having the second option be images. So now I often click the products tab or whatever option it thought up and I know for a fact that Google is gonna take that one misguided click and run a whole ad campaign on it.
Duckduckgo for the win
I use ddg and I find it endlessly frustrating. Am I doing something wrong or is there a privacy/quality tradeoff?
There's definitely a quality trade off. DDG uses bing for search results (which, at one point they were letting bing keep tracking data on you so it's debatable if they're much better than google), and bing's results are definitely inferior to google's. I don't really notice a difference unless I'm trying to find hard to find info, but it's very obvious on searches for things like troubleshooting a problem.
Duckduckgo is probably even worse for this. For example, you can't filter words with by putting "-" before it. You can find years worth of forum posts begging for the feature.
I committed to using ddg for a few years, but after realizing that I was using bangs for anything but the most trivial searches, I had to be honest with myself and just give up on it.
Oh shit... After looking it up it's gotten worse since I quit: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/04/24/duckduckgo-disables-most-search-filters-from-search/
Dang I did notice it was pretty flakey with the "-"
What's not Google and better than ddg?
I wish I knew
Google is preparing to basically replace it's old search engine with their own AI based search. I happen to be a beta tester of their AI within GDocs and GMail, and honestly I'm not impressed.
I'm typically not impressed with anything that Google puts out nowadays.
I don't know what the people working there are doing. Probably just replacing burned-out components in server farms.
You could try kagi: https://kagi.com/
Erm, why is it so extremely expensive? $60 a year and I get 300 searches a month? If you are researching something for a project you might use 300 searches in a couple of days.
It’s a cool concept, but they charge a fortune and their privacy statements are basically, just trust us bro.
Basically search engines all cost money, but you paying with your personal data with Google vs dollars with Kagi. I've only been testing it a few weeks but I think it's worthwhile. Here's what they say about it: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
I understand they cost money, but it really seems like an expensive service, I can understand high operating costs, but 1.5 cents a search is pretty high when you are searching stuff up like 25 times a day. It’s just so expensive when I can go with a non profit like ecosia and get a free search engine that also respects my privacy. And on top of that it plants trees. I imagine kagi has better results but I just can’t see it being worth it.
I know Reddit, Twitter, Meta, and a bunch of tech companies are having a rough time right now, but why is Google throwing their hat in the ring? Is making their services crappier becoming trendy? Or was it simply that AI couldn't parse the old search flags so they just removed it, hoping that AI would somehow become better in the future?