searching a specific problem, on what search engine it is…
no satisfactory answer. what else is there? other than just asking questions on lemmy?
yes, which is why i add “reddit” to the end of each search. if i dont find my answer there, i come here
Cant do it anymore, they have limited it as a search trm and reddit require sign in. And also reddit is astroturfed to shit now too
Old reddit desktop mode
If you’re not finding answers you’re searching wrong, using the wrong search, or being blinded by cascading ads and sponsored content.
Or the content isn’t readily available… Many things have instructions and images out there, others just don’t. Especially when searching something niche or struggling with something not many people do. The answer would be to record that information if we figure it out and find a community online or official site to see if you can submit it but a lot of people don’t want to waste that hour when they just lost however much time trying to figure out something that set them back.
it’s literally a skill issue
So many search engines these days don’t even follow the rules you give in the search like using +/- to include/exclude terms or putting things in quotations to search a specific phrase. Your Google-Fu is now irrelevant because of this bullshit.
If you use Google, try moving away from that! Half of its results are sponsored and the other half SEO optimised crap nowadays, and there are better search engine alternatives. I would push you towards Qwant and Ecosia, because they are working together to develop a search index independent from Google and Bing (which is being trialled in France and Germany!), and they both have much stronger privacy policies, being hosted in the EU after all. They are both as easy to use as Google, no excuses for something being too “different” (it’s just a search box and your results)
Between Qwant (blue and glowy) and Ecosia (green and flat), the difference is mostly whether you prefer the look of one over the other. Ecosia is also a non-profit that uses some of its revenue to plant trees, which is pretty awesome! If you want to look at their reports, they’re easily accessible on their website. Qwant is still great though, and you will get good results from either!
Avoid Startpage (owned by an advertising company as far as I understand) and Brave (involved in weird crypto stuff, replacing affiliate links, etc.). DuckDuckGo has become a lot closer to Google in terms of the number of sponsored results now, plus they are based in the U.S.
And of course, SearXNG is awesome too, there are lots of public instances (see searx.space for a list), and you can self-host it too. It basically aggregates results from the search engines of your choosing!
Yeah, search engines are shit these days. I make posts on help forums if I can’t get an answer. Or am in various Matrix rooms where I might ask as well.
Use ai
I’ve found AI to be absolute dog shit for any technical issues I’ve tried using it to find answers for. Every time I’ve wasted 10-15 minutes reading and trying to verify it’s nonsense before I give up and just find answers the old fashioned way (or wing it and hope for the best if I can’t). It’s also crap at finding products, which you would think would be an easy one.
What’s an example of a technical issue?
I use it more to rubber duck and also scaffold or search Google and it self to link me to things that I then can read. Other times if I’m reading something and I don’t understand I’ll again feed it into it and then talk it through with it. It’s so much faster than trying to do it with search engines now
A recent one was trying to fix the overscan on a retropie I was trying to get working on my TV. Nothing it told me worked and it changed answers or provided shit that it hallucinated several times.
There was also the time where I was trying to alter a program for a macropad I have that it was just spitting out nonsense.
You’re going to get downvoted and so am I for agreeing with you because that’s the nature of the internet currently.
I often have a hard time figuring out how to search for what I want. I’ve found I can actually work through some things with ai easier than I can with a search engine and quicker than waiting for the right human to help me.
Absolutely same experience.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I find I’m at odds with a lot of things lately. I’m just miserable lol. One example is I love to learn new things. As an example I learn coding. Early on there’s great resources. Very clear videos of new content creators who have answers. Over the years everybody wants to code. Now the content creators explode. The content slowly over time becomes less useful. Now when I search I have millions of videos on the same thing because they’re all chasing the video that week else metrics were the highest, so everybody starts to make those videos. Soon searching for actually educational videos is super difficult. It’s a broken system.
AI is like that early day thing. It’s very fun to use and gets right to the heart of the problem I’m trying to solve and it’s interactive. That’s how I learn. I have a conversation. I’m sorry it’s killing the world. But I’m honestly done being a leftist hero I thought I’d be when I was younger. I’m so tired and I just want to learn stuff and I’m tired of every new thing that comes out being some evil according to the latest lefty gripe.
Look at bitcoin. It fucking sucked. Still sucks. But if any of us invested in it years ago we’d be retired. But we were all here telling each other to stay away. What did that get any of us? Pride? Digital acceptance that we all complied with the latest hater trend? We’re still poor and crypto still exists. It was just an eye opener to me that people online are holding each other back. Id rather use the tools I have to better my position. If it works then it works and I’m not going to let the faceless amorphous body of haters hold me back.
A lot of talk online is just that. All talk. Most of the people (when it’s actually people and not bots) behind these keyboards aren’t doing anything meaningful to change their or others positions in life.
No, I can find what I want and search different ways depending on what I’m after. I wanted hotels so I used a hotel website and found a room. I wanted some recipe ideas and found a few and combined what I wanted from them. I ask for a summary of how all the elements in us were made and are now part of us, the universe in each of us, and it gives information and the sources to check as needed. It works, I don’t need to feel about it, but know how to use it.
I subscribed to Kagi over a year ago. Once and a while I’ll try another engine and they’re all terrible by comparison.
Highly recommended if you can swing it.
+1 to Kagi. I still have to use Google for some local searchs, tho, but less than in DDG.
Search has gotten progressively worse over the past 10 years, and 5ish years ago it got so bad that it was a problem.
I gave up on Google as a search engine as the results nowadays seem like filler content tailored towards page rankings.
I started using Kagi about a year ago, and searching feels useful again. Highly recommended.
Or just stores. God forbid I just want a user manual for something but instead it’s 3 pages of marketplaces and then ads for the damn thing for a couple weeks.
my favorite searches are for a problem and you get plenty of forums and such with people who saw the problem but no solution.
I often times use the time filters to filter out content after 2020. (Of course only for timeless topics)
I also use uBlacklist to filter out obvious AI Slop especially those just reposting human stuff, like grokipedia. (there are also ready made lists for that) as well as highlighting great sources like wikipedia, mdn and what not.This isn’t helpful but might make you feel better. Funny song about Google. “Current state of search engines - music video” https://youtu.be/jrFv1O4dbqY?is=2IskI2DQZ4h_oPmm
Use better engines like Kagi is the answer. Startpage.com is an OK free option. You could also try Ecosia, Qwant, or DuckDuckGo.
Google is absolute dogshit now because they went all in on AI with no regard for what the user experience is actually like (same shit they pulled when they killed Assistant to try and force people to use Gemini, which is horrible as an assistant - can’t even reliably set a fucking timer and it still requires gigs of space on your phone and an active internet connection just to tell you to use the timer app, WTF?). Their search was well past its heyday, but things really took a nosedive with Gemini. Their goal is to make money now rather than correctly indexing data and helping people find things, they are not the company they originally were and haven’t been for a long time.
It’s gotten terrible over the last 5 years. AI slop is infecting everything and causing so much noise, it’s impossible to find real info anymore.
Best I can suggest is searches across Starpage, DDG, Qwant and Brave. When one fails, try the next one.
tenbluelinks.org gets you to have the web api for google. Can install it in your browser. I’ve been using it fr a year, even managed to build a shortcut (I named it “Google no AI”) in Safari on iOS and searches are tolerable on google again.
Good suggestions except for Brave.
I would also add Kagi - I usually save this one for when other searches fail.
Edit: Oh, and Ecosia is another you could use.
Google has gotten tremendously awful at the basic fundamentals of searching.
So you’ve got this stupid AI thing of theirs that thinks it’s helpful by giving you its thoughts about what it thinks about what you’ve searched for. It also brings up relatively irrelevant things.
Then you’ve got another block of some of the dumbest things that get asked. You know the “People also asked about…” section which is just an annoying rabbit hole that degrades your intelligence just by reading what’s there.
Then you’ve got about the first page plastered with ads and suggestions that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for. Forcing you to go through pages until maybe something is there.
Ain’t it wonderful? /s
