I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
      0·
      9 months ago

      Not sure on the shady part, but I have stopped using them simply because they give me the same crap as Bing. Web search is almost dead, I’ve been thinking of trying one of the paid options. I’ve read good things about kagi

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        9 months ago

        i don’t get this, i get perfectly fine search results with ddg…

        i get finding the results slightly worse but dead? stop it with this absurd hyperbole

        • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
          0·
          9 months ago

          Depends what you’re trying to do. Looking up a movie? Easy. Looking up niche documentation/issues or error codes just feels hopeless compared to how it used to be.

          • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            9 months ago

            i mean i have no real issues finding info about various linux errors, is that not niche enough?

            or have i just never seen the glory days where a google search would automatically fix your issue and bake a nice cake?

        • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
          0·
          9 months ago

          Free web search gives me a whole page of SEO pages, cached reddit content that’s been deleted when you click it, or one of like five tech giants and their crap.

          Unless you are very specific and already know what site you are looking for it is extremely difficult to simply find information now, if you just want an answer you locate the relevant reddit or discord community and try your luck there, or ask a LLM to give you an answer because you can’t wade through the sheer amount of non- and disinformation out there now.

          Of course, the LLM is also trained on this bullshit and not actually smart, so at best you get an idea where you can look for the information it regurgitated if you make it cite its sources, and do your own research from there.

          Are you really telling me this is somehow not much much worse than mid 2000s-2010s internet, where you typed something into google and it almost always found that exact thing you were looking for?

    • lad@programming.dev
      0·
      9 months ago

      I’m still using it but it was fun when they had something along the lines of “your privacy is safe with us. Also, wanna leave your email?” 😅

      I am thinking of migrating to Kagi now, because search in DDG is often meh

    • b000rg@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      So iirc, they were caught suppressing/promoting results to push the Russian narrative at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. I’m not sure if anything else has come up since then though, and I’ve continued using DDG, just not for any sort of news or information on current events. I mainly use a search engine for dev stuff anyways.