Just read a response from another Doper who said Google responses are ordered in order of their benefit to google, not their benefit to you. I have noticed this too. What’s a good alternative? I use Duck Duck Go because of its privacy claims, but have no firm data on ranking search engines. Anybody here able to offer guidance?
Easily researched in 3-4 seconds. Here’s a couple rankings:
Sorry- I was unclear! I meant ‘best’ in terms of prioritizing search results based on their relevance to the user’s query, not based on the ad revenue generated to the search engine. (Your cites are definitely interesting from the perspective of privacy. Thanks for taking the time.)
You would probably need to get one which charges a subscription fee. Neeva is one:
Another option is Kagi.
Most of the time I just do “whatever search query reddit” though and get much better results that way. Google is worthless on its own.
There days you can also just ask ChatGpt to answer questions for you. Sometimes it hallucinates a wrong answer but at least it does so quickly and without ads.
Search engines aren’t trivial things to build or run and there very few of them that actually do their own rankings. Most reuse Bing and Google results (which is mostly what DDG does, with slight modifications). There are also foreign ones like Baidu and Yandex that have different priorities and censorship obligations relative to Google. But the paid ones or AI chatbots are generally your alternatives if you don’t like the mainstream options.
Hmm, that might be worth trying out…
I find myself using Bing Chat more and more. It not only will nswer questions like ChtGPT, but it will give you the links for the sources it used.
I am finding Google less and less useful. The stupid promoted sites are sometimes hard to,spot, and clicking into them is annoying as hell because sometimes they look like a legit site, but you get 3/4 of the way down and find they were selling you something,
The gold standard that Google used to work towards is that the site you want should always be on the first page. Now if feels like the first page is for promoted crap, the second page is full of SEO manipulated lightweight sites, and the real stuff you were looking for might ocassiinally be on the first or second page but more likely you will be going to the third page to find something.
It also pisses me off that their ‘news’ page is not date sorted. Really? If I want to check the news, I rarely want to see a link from 2022, 2021, 2020 or earlier. In fact, almost always when I go to news I want to find something that was reported that day or a day or two ago. Rarely more than a week.
Can you use this without Edge yet?
Yep. There’s a Bing chat app that I use. I think there are some plugins out there that will pet you use it in other browsers.