• Rhaedas@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I’ve found I miss the old days of searching. Granted there was certainly far less to look through, but back when there were many different search engines trying to find the best algorithm to use, you could get programs that would query all the ones you added in the list and then sort them out, removing duplicate finds. First page always had great results. Although I admit I’d often just go use Hotbot and get solid hits too. Google later absorbed Hotbot’s database.

      • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        People still use Google? I thought many of us, and specially in tech using platforms like this, left it behind years ago. But maybe not as many as I think.

          • Sho@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Duckduckgo has worked wonders for me, the app has a search widget as well.

              • TenorTheHusky@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                DuckDuckGo can search using almost any search engine anonymously. Want to search Bing? !b query. Google? !g query. Scratch this, I remembered wrong what those do.
                I do believe there’s a setting to aggregate the top results from several different engines as the default search algorithm.

                • cosmic_slate@dmv.social
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                  1 year ago

                  !g and !b doesn’t anonymously do anything. It literally just opens up Google’s and Bing’s website with your query.

                  • TenorTheHusky@kbin.social
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                    1 year ago

                    Ah, you’re right, my bad. I could have sworn I remembered a search syntax on ddg for searching different sites with an anonymous query - apparently ! operators are not it

                • Senex@reddthat.com
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                  1 year ago

                  DuckDuckGo has a problem with booleans. I had to give up the Duck because of this. I’m using Mojeek, MetaGer and SearXNG these days.

            • stringere@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Don’t forget about bangs for searching alternate sites: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs !w = wikipedia, !e = ebay, !zillow = guess, !r = reddit, etc

              Just put your bang in front of the rest of the search you want to do on that site: !g why doesn’t Google use bangs? !ddg Why does Duck Duck Go use bangs?

          • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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            1 year ago

            Kagi is not only decent but much better. It’s fantastic. I switched when it was new and never looked back.

            Try a few searches with both Kagi and Google and you should see quite different results.

              • GizmoLion@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Lol that’s a wild concept. $5 for 300 searches… so now when I go down a rabbit hole I have to count my searches.

                Also, that gives them perverse incentives. If they make searching just a little frustrating they can get more searches out of you = more money. That’s not right.

        • marmo7ade@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Alphabet’s market cap is 1.5 trillion dollars. How do you suppose their stock is worth so much if people are not using google? Ads are their primary source of revenue.