Search engines are useless

Name a single time you used a search engine to find anything worthwhile. They are even on a conceptual level just a bad way to navigate the web, and on top of that many algorithms are centred around marketing and spam and noise muddles up every result. They remove the interactive aspect of the web which makes it such a unique medium and help commercialize its very content. Stop using search engines. Replace your search engine with bookmarks and online community.

>online community You'd be better off removing the internet altogether

>>66104 And how exactly will you find those bookmarks/online communities? You most certainly did not hear about chan board and how to get to them from 'word of mouth' I'd agree that search engines have gotten worse, but I wouldn't say they're useless.

Fortunately/unfortunately depending on your perspective, search engines seem likely to soon to be replaced for general information retrieval by AI language models, have heard many people describing getting better results that way and Google itself is supposedly internally panicking a bit about it.

A few hours ago I wanted to know who said "I shall die, but/ that is all that I shall do for death" and a search engine helped me find who it was in about 5 seconds.

>>66108 How good is AI at sourcing its answers?

>>66106 Web 1.0 style: "organic" recommendations and stuff like >>63471 >>66108 How would language models replace search engines? Those are completely different use cases

>>66111 It has a tendency to make up fake sources or even make up fake "facts".

Could just make a lain version of https://rentry.org/good-sites and include links to web-rings

>>66104 Do it for more than a month and tell us how that turns out. Better yet, do research without one and tell us how that goes.

>>66104 I use search engines every day to find lots of worthwhile content (and you do too). You are taking the "new web bad" meme too far >replace your search engine with bookmarks Sure, I'll just bookmark hundreds of pages I found using a search engine and I'll never visit most of them more than once because they only provide information that I needed at one particular moment.

>>66104 >Name a single time you used a search engine to find anything worthwhile. >remove the interactive aspect of the web >Replace your search engine with bookmarks and online community. This is bait what are you even talking about? Search engines are fine. They do what they are supposed to do and nothing more. If you can't find something "worthwhile" maybe you don't know what you are looking for in the first place or grasping at straws. Please. Learn your tools before complaining. I will agree that the quality of the web nowadays is lack-luster, very sterile and that maybe search engines are too good at giving you what you want and leave nothing to gawk at. Coming from Web 1.0 perspective, sure. It was way more exciting navigating the web by clicking links and seeing what will be in it. Can't get that feeling with a SE easily. Unless you really get creative and come up with a random prompt, i guess... I am not from that era so I can't share the sentiment, but I can imagine your frustration.

>want to look up how reactive the element lead is with "lead reactivity" >90% of results on Google and Bing-powered engines are garbage about dogs and leashes It it genuinely baffling to me how the fuarrrk the dominant search engines remain dominant at this point. In addition to being a vector for information control, they have destroyed their own basic functionality for various reasons. Surely one would think there's a wide lane for a competitor to show up, provide an actually functional search engine, and quickly rise to the top?

>>66516 assume there is a better engine. How would people find you? Google? lol

>>66516 >It it genuinely baffling to me how the fuarrrk the dominant search engines remain dominant at this point. In addition to being a vector for information control, they have destroyed their own basic functionality for various reasons. Surely one would think there's a wide lane for a competitor to show up, provide an actually functional search engine, and quickly rise to the top? face the facts anon, the average person does not want a search engine to provide them information they are looking for. most people have no idea what they are looking for in the first place. I would even argue they are not looking for a particular piece of content, but rather a flow of dopamine drips through a curated string of tailored content that is very human in nature (think cat pictures, celebrity gossip, flavor of the month shows, civil/political news). Google and Bing are built for those users, the normal people, the 99%. For them, the current search engines are perfect.

>>66516 you have to actually think about what you're searching for and format your query appropriately. I use duckduckgo for mathematical research daily.

>>66104 If your issue is with the commercialization of search engines, you may find interest in. trying an engine oriented around smaller sites like wiby.me

>>66528 not OP but holy soykaf i remember that website, totally forgot the name tho. Thanks based lainon

>>66104 >They remove the interactive aspect of the web which makes it such a unique medium and help commercialize its very content what cock sucker jew soykaf are you even talking about? neither of those are good things. somehow your post amazingly figures out that search engines are just garbage now which is more than what 99% of people know yet thinks the most retarded soykaf on earth at the same time

>>66104 True, you can't. I really only use DDG at this point for searching up code problems and random geopolitical news. Other times I'll navigate straight to invidious and watch some videos (please help). >>66106 Sure, the initial spark may be "the web" like if you are a d*scord user and look up alternatives, then switch to Matrix. But most recommendations are coming from the friends you meet on there, because most people IRL don't really talk about it (privacy, based software, FOSS, etc.). >>66516 It's actually a grand conspiracy by paranoid high school chemistry teachers to punish everyone because their students like looking up answers. >>66523 Even for "those people" they rarely click on the second result.

I wouldn't say bookmarks are a good replacement for search engines, but they're a better replacement for web history for literally everyone, from the most cringe soyjak to the most based channer.

I wonder whether the use of alternative more secure search engines (searx instance) do actaully make a difference to threat of my privacy compared to just using Goolag on the machine where I am not logged to any google servicy, nor any other where figure my personal information and after each section the browser delete all data + I use a vpn. The only bothering thing while using Goolag as a search engine is the constant rejecting of cookies on each start of the new session. What I am trying to point out after all the privacy hardening the the use of such service can do no harm to someone like me and to be fair not a single search engine (I haven't try Yandex or Bing) does provide such adequate results as Goolag. The idea of using FOSS projects and avoidance of BigCorpos is strong but such project can't (yet) replace big tech giants in search for information on today's internet. Startpage is a hilarious horseshit joke. Kek.

>>66545 >I really only use DDG at this point for searching up code problems and random geopolitical news. I have no idea how anyone could trust them for geopolitical news after this soykaf. >>66570 Searx is not a search engine, it's a meta engine: its results are only as good as the engines it pulls from. And sadly if it's garbage in, then it's garbage out.

>>66572 Oh no, not Mother Russia being dishonored I like DDG because it doesn't look like soykaf and it doesn't make me do reCaptcha's like Google does whenever I use a data centre VPN

OP, you're just stupid. Search engines can be very useful tools if you use them right, for instance it is a marvel of modern technology that I can type "big tits" into google and it gives me pictures of great big bazongas.

>>66580 Must feel so snug and secure, having a completely opaque private entity decide for you what is and isn't "disinformation".

>>66582 It doesn't feel like anything at all

>They are even on a conceptual level just a bad way to navigate the web Can you clarify this? It's not clear if there's a foundational justification here or if you're just working backwards from how you wish people used the web because of the issues with modern search engines.

>>66104 >>66581 >pic rel >>66570 >startpage I thought it was an adware website when I first saw it. Their UI looks like a scam site and made me double take.

>>66592 The idea that the right keywords can help you "find" something, when even search engines have to constantly recalibrate what their algorithms think are "relevant", an arrangement that (fittingly, mathematically) ends up pleasing no one at all.

>>66592 This is think is the most solid point in the thread. OP is just sick of search engines showing you what they think you want, rather than what you actually asked for.

>>66689 I am interested in this, could you show me some examples? I tried looking up how batteries work but the results seemed fairly legitimate. Not trying to be rude, i really would like to see some of these auto generated websites.

Oh what a coincidence I was looking for search engine recommendations and this came up. Is there a search engine meant for developers and techies? Whenever I search stuff I find sites JavaTpoint and w3schools at the top. they haven't been useful for me. I want a search engine that recommends documentations first atleast.

>>66528 Also look at https://search.marginalia.nu/

OP is just a dum-dum who can't into search command operators and dorks. People like him complained they couldn't find anything with Google 10, 15, 20 years ago. My pet peeve about search engines is a valid one: they don't keep cached pages long (2 weeks after deletion of original), thus it's impossible to find old stuff online. Internet Archive does not have any search for web pages besides simple directory filter (i guess it's still useful when you know what address to look on and what filenames, but not page contents or hashes), Archive.today saves only text and pictures, and has more basic sub-directory navigation - so it's even less useful. It would have been great if Google with it's vast resources hosted their own web archive. But I guess thanks to anglo-jewish copyright system we can't have nice things on this Earth. There are however circumventions: Russian and Chinese search engines that do not adhere to anglo-jewish copyright, and there are even dedicated bittorrent DHT and public tracker indexers with lots of interesting stuff, also FTP and web directory search engines.

>>66702 In fairness to archive.today, it's not meant to be more sophisticated than internet archive, but less likely to delete things. Which it is, and for free, so I don't fault them.

>>66707 Struck a nerve, right, Schlomo? You didn't notice the angloid bashing though, what's up with that, it's cool to be racist against saxons now? OP didn't address any uncircumventable problems with search engines. You have problem with ads? Install uBlock Origin. You have problem with sites you don't want to see? Use blocklists. You want to find specific data? Use command operators. It's not the tool to be blamed, it's the uneducated user.

big problems I notice with search engines is that they're getting worse. used to be that if you searched for exact text matches you'd find what you were looking for, and if not then just zero results. Nowadays I look on like DDG and I don't even get exact matches at all. The search problem may be getting harder, more and more things going behind apps which make them harder to reach, combined with the rise of ai written websites and the continuing arms race between SEO and search aren't helping. I get the impression google these days doesn't care much about search, and where orgs do care about it its as much in the avoiding spreading wrongthink as it is in the actually getting the user what he's searching for kinda way. And the effort to getting the user what he wants is mosty dumb predictive stuff that shoots power users in the foot (maybe both feet) while probably not helping normal people out much either. systems like searx are poor patches that would need to be done a lot better to solve these problems. Its a GIGO system, and while its in principal possible to filter enough garbage that you find something good, searx mostly (at best) just cleans it briefly and puts it on a nice platter for you. the trouble with opensource search engines is multifold but a big part is that you need a lot of storage, a lot of processing power, and a lot of continual traffic to crawl with. A good full web search engine will never be run on a computer with modern normal person desktop hardware/internet, yacy is neat and its efforts at federation not totally insane but its not going to be solved with the amount of effort/skill being put in there.

what's stopping people from making their own smaller search engines dedicated to specific topics? "all in one" like google or bing always end up both chasing the dollar and trying to push narratives based on who is giving them dollars. though i guess the this idea may also fall for that depending on the topic

>>66721 You can create custom Google search engine to show results from only certain websites. If these sites don't publish SEO garbage, you won't see it at all. Win-win. Here's a CSE for Youtube for example: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=001065809822852642501:zppnfkysoek

>>66517 The real world, mr. The same way any other company would have advertised before this specific company started redesigning the landscape.

Zoomie confirmed? Before 2016 google was absolutely amazing. You could find just about any information with one search on your first try. After Trummp became popular tge technocrats panicked and decided to lock down the searches, over time they destroyed search results more and more, in a frenetic attempt to stop the guys from finding alrternative replies to questions.

>>66523 They’re really not, the big search engines are entirely anti-consumer, the only thing they’re good at is servicing curated whitewashed politically correct content, the kind of stuff you could find on television.

>>66772 I like how this is somehow more believable than the idea that people just pay to have their searches on top

>>66583 SSRIs tend to do that to folks.

>>66774 It’s not relevant what’s believable, lots of unbelievable things happen, it’s utter midwittery to suggest something didn’t happen because it’s unlikely. What matters is what happened or not, and no amount of gaslighting will change lived history.

>>66776 What happened is a combination of what you described, SEO, ads disguised as search results, and OP not knowing how to use a search engine.

>>66516 googling for "lead reactivity -dogs" works perfectly. I agree with your argument about it giving garbage results a lot of the times, but at least make an effort to use the engine correctly anon

Am I the only one that gets disgusted and very vocal when people use the term "googling"? I always end up correcting them and say that Google is a search engine and not even a fuarrrking good one at that. I also say, "You should just refer to it as searching instead as it just makes you sound less like a retard in the end."

>>66822 I only use DDG but I want Google to lose their trademark to genericization so I always say "googling". Plus "Searching" is not an internet specific word so it doesn't work as well.

>>66823 >is not an internet specific word So, you want to seem trendy and use buzzwords in social situations to seem hip and into the web. That's about as bad as saying "lol" during the 2000s to attempt to stand out among friends.

imho it isn't the concept of search engines as a whole that is like kicking dead whales down the beach in current year, because in general they are (or would be) a great way of discovering things on the web. But only the mainstream ones, like Goolag or Bing (which sane person them anyways) and the ones using the former as proxys, like Startpage and whatnot (obvious honeypots made by glowies). The reason for that is, that those sites only index a few hundert pages, although claiming otherwise. Another interesting thing I've noticed is that as time goes on mainstream search-engines are becoming more and more unable to search for complex questions. It used to be that you could search any complex question you wanted and you'd usually get fairly accurate results, but now if you search for anything longer than 2 or 3 words they completely fall apart and show you garbage that has nothing to do with what you searched. Personally I have accepted that they are beyond saving and permanently to switched to wiby (fun) and searxng (serious). >flood detected poidi nakhren

>>66822 >>66823 >>66824 >getting this hung up on petty terminology googling has the advantage of conciseness. everyone knows google, but searching usually suffices with context. Personally I probably just say 'internet search' but thats my habit and I dont hold it with any great conviction. >>66827 you have a slightly incoherent way of speaking and I'm not sure I fully follow. Its pretty clear to me that bing/ddg index more than a few hundred sites (Ive not used google in years but I'm sure it does too), even yacy does. A search engine with 50 million pages indexed is not neccisarily good though, searching isn't always an easy task. The internet is a very large place. >>66730 >You can create custom Google search engine to show results from only certain websites. is this any different from the 'search within' service google's had for ever that you can just slap onto your website ? >>66721 >what's stopping people from making their own smaller search engines dedicated to specific topics? good question. There's a couple smaller ones like wiby which got mentioned here, torch and a few other Tor searches, ahmia.fi. Obviously people have <within site> searches but those are very different. Is there demand for i.e. a weird cyb/linux+GANOO enthusiast type engine ? Apart from the (not to be entierly underestimaged) bounding problem such a service could be easily slapped together. Is there actual demand or interest though ? IDK. I guess people like wiby.

>>66772 That's not what happened. In fact that's after when DDG got popular likely DDG tainted Google results and helped break it. What actually is going on is search results are highly tailored to demographics now and they try to force synonyms to words into your search unless you tell it not to.

>>66508 >They do what they are supposed to do and nothing more. Websurfing is one thing but I do think search engines have gotten markedly worse in the last ~10 years. Its possible this is overeagerness to assume what you want, its possible this is the SEO vs search battle going the way of SEO. Its possible its just that the web itself is getting worse, fewer good websites, more clickbait amazon promotional ai generated trash. Fewer public blogs, more weird instagram/telegram walled gardens. I don't really know. But it is getting worse.

>>66839 I still personally bookmark around 10-20 new websites per day. I also haven't used a search engine in almost a decade. It's not needed if you understand your way around the web.

>>66837 >Is there demand for i.e. a weird cyb/linux+GANOO enthusiast type engine ? Apart from the (not to be entierly underestimaged) bounding problem such a service could be easily slapped together. Is there actual demand or interest though ? IDK. I guess people like wiby. i was planning on doing something like this (using gitler moe/TechnicalSuwako/kensaku.online as inspiration) with just linux/programming document and tutorial sites it's just a pain in the butt to start any project >>66774 i don't know about a site owner directly paying google unless its a mega corp doing it but sites with adsense that get a lot of hits are usually the first several results even if it has nothing to do with the search

>>66844 >with just linux/programming document and tutorial sites this sounds interesting. what do you plan to use as a backend ? xapian or something ?

>>66837 >is this any different from the 'search within' service google's had for ever that you can just slap onto your website ? Exact same thing. it uses a javascript function to render results on website's page in same style and all, but you can extract the url and visit the plain looking Google CSE page. For any given example.com website it's probably no different than appending site:example.com to a regular google search, and there's probably a way to call this query from a simple userscript, but when you have to query hundreds of sites or specific directories on hundreds of sites, whole thing becomes long ugly multiple kilobyte string of text on end user side, so it's simpler to use a programmable search engine with pre-defined parameters already set in. There are few such search engines catering to searching academic libraries for example. It's much better than sifting through SEO garbage of default search engine result. Here's a very comprehensive article on how to search information on the web, i recommend everyone in this thread reading it to understand what you were doing wrong before: https://gwern.net/Search

>>66570 yandex is great. I personally think it cuts through a lot of the corporate marketing and censorship BS of google.

>>66862 It's target audiences are in Russia, Belarus and Turkey, all ads are therefore tied to these three regions.

>>66862 Try using yandex in Russian, Ukrainian or Turkish and you'll quickly realize that you aren't dealing with an uncensored search engine, just one that censors according to a different group of government's priorities.

>>66871 People mainly use yandex for torrenting American media anyways. Russia don't care about censoring that or ever will.

>>66827 >Another interesting thing I've noticed is that as time goes on mainstream search-engines are becoming more and more unable to search for complex questions. It used to be that you could search any complex question you wanted and you'd usually get fairly accurate results, but now if you search for anything longer than 2 or 3 words they completely fall apart and show you garbage that has nothing to do with what you searched It's because the glownig search engines (all big ones) are promoting mainstream content and thought, anything that isn't sanitized is either pushed back or hidden. And vice versa. Any URL from an approved glownig site gets promoted to the front page of every search result. Those articles are only published to promote a mainstream view of something, there is no detailed knowledge to be found. >>66838 That's exactly what happened. Your ignorance or gaslighting doesn't stop that fact. It has absolutely nothing to do with DDG, which is a soykaf search engine and always has been, and is just as compromized as google is, with the CEO being a j(e)w who admitedly censors content he doesnt like

You all do know that you dont need to use just one search engine, right?

>>66104 I am a code monkey for a living, finding solutions would take more effort than I’m willing to put in for the work I’m doing without a search engine. Ya docs are good and you learn more just using those instead, but I also hate the code base I work on for work so I don’t care to put in the effort with that. Flood detected.

>>67158 >you need to use a smartphone >you need to subscribe to google services >you need to have your location turned on at all times >you need to provide your phone number to organizations and web services >you need to upgrade your hardware at least every 2 years >you need to install propiretary software in your machine, preferably device drivers. >you need netflix, disney+, Hbo max, amazon prime, spotify, etc >you need to have your goods delivered home by amazon >you need surgical sex reassignment >you need to consume product, and get excited for the next product.