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    The man who killed Google Search?

    (www.wheresyoured.at)
    1884 points elorant | 11 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 1.024s | source | bottom
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    wayne-li2 ◴[23 Apr 24 19:50 UTC] No.40136429[source]▶
    Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”.

    That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

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    sailfast ◴[23 Apr 24 20:07 UTC] No.40136657[source]▶
    Agreed - I can appreciate the sentiment and the history, but the ad hominem is not really necessary to prove the point and undermines the credibility of the post.

    I still use Google, but man has it become difficult to get to what I want.

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    1. etempleton ◴[23 Apr 24 21:10 UTC] No.40137304[source]▶
    I agree, but all of the alternatives are no better. Bing and Duck Duck Go are okay sometimes, but truly terrible other times. Google is consistently worse than it once was, but still better than the competition.

    I know search is hard to do well, but if Google is truly floundering where is the startup that for it better and not just better for a very specific niche area, but truly better across the board?

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    2. RoyalHenOil ◴[23 Apr 24 22:40 UTC] No.40138176[source]▶
    I like Kagi. It's not great for images or videos at this stage, but it is good for general search because you can personalize the rankings of the results. And they are introducing improvements all the time.
    3. stevage ◴[23 Apr 24 22:59 UTC] No.40138329[source]▶
    Kagi is great. I switched my browser to it a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Used google once in that time I think.
    4. barfbagginus ◴[23 Apr 24 23:29 UTC] No.40138597[source]▶
    I've used the duck duck Go for over 90% of my searches for The last 5 years, as a part of a boycott against Google. I estimate I have withheld about 75,000 searches from Google in that time, or about $8,000 in revenue.

    I fall back on Google only when absolutely necessary. And these days I almost never have to fall back on Google (<1% of searches).

    When I do fall back, the results are invariably crap. Quality has degraded so much that it almost never gives me a better result than duck duck go did. Often when doctor go fails I don't bother with Google at all.

    Even GPT4 driven Bing queries will give better results than Google now - mainly because GPT4 can filter spam, and has gotten a lot better about hallucinations.

    I absolutely love to see it.

    replies(1): >>40140704 #
    5. mbesto ◴[24 Apr 24 02:48 UTC] No.40139922[source]▶
    I've used DDG and wanted to like it. I used another paid one and it wasn't great (forgot name). I've been on Kagi for the last 6 months and love it.
    6. skydhash ◴[24 Apr 24 04:49 UTC] No.40140704[source]▶
    Maybe because when I started fiddling with computers (around 2009), I only got like 1 or 2 hours of internet connection (cybercafes), so I had to find books and other types of offline information, I’ve never relied on Google Search or others that much. Even today, I treat them more like a bookmark database. If I can’t remember some specific terms to get to the page I need, I don’t even bother searching for it.

    I’ve also started to hoard a stash of links and pdfs. And I have Dash for languages and framework documentation. Too many SEO farms for Python and HTML/CSS/JS.

    replies(1): >>40141119 #
    7. barfbagginus ◴[24 Apr 24 05:59 UTC] No.40141119{3}[source]▶
    Re: link and PDF hoarding

    Consider using zotero to expand and organize your library of references, if you don't already use it or something like it. It does great for PDFs, but it also captures and stores local copies of websites. Also lets you create bibliographies.

    8. StefanBatory ◴[24 Apr 24 08:11 UTC] No.40141863[source]▶
    Duck Duck Go is for example terrible for me when it comes to looking up things in my native language.

    Bing is.. fine I think nowadays

    9. ad404b8a372f2b9 ◴[24 Apr 24 11:38 UTC] No.40143115[source]▶
    Yandex is great although it's degrading daily from AI spam (linked-in being the worst culprit).
    10. DanielHB ◴[24 Apr 24 12:47 UTC] No.40143719[source]▶
    Google is still really good with image search (while duck duck go is awful at it), I guess the ads team don't really care about image search that much to try to min-max it to death.
    11. alvah ◴[26 Apr 24 09:05 UTC] No.40167276[source]▶
    I use Perplexity (mainly a legacy of wanting access to Claude when it wasn't officially available in my country, but Perplexity offered it & was available here). Search definitely wasn't my use case, but I accidentally discovered Perplexity is a much better search engine than Google or Bing in many cases (and I don't mean that in the sense that people who don't know how anything works will attempt to use ChatGPT as a search engine). Perplexity is actually really good at this & consistently brings me useful results when 2024-vintage Google can't.