- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.
I love a good, informative troll.
In my recent experience, it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.
Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google’s quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don’t get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.
The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”
And super specific queries?
For me it’s programming issues. I guess devs know that doing SEO would shoot themselves in the foot.
Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?
Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.
So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.
At least that’s my guess anyway.
Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.
It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.
My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.
It’s bad enough that I’m about to switch back to Google.
It depends on what your searching. For me programming questions are way better on google.
Also searching obvious questions like a country’s population, google still does its job there too.
Try Startpage. I have just started using it so I can’t tell you how it compares. I also need to look up who owns it. But I have been told it has the same privacy qualities of DDG.
use Indie Wiki Buddy extension to get rid of fandom.
https://getindie.wiki/
Or ublacklist to block any site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
That works too, but indie buddy works better because it gives you a direct link to the proper indie wiki page in search results rather than just blocking Fandom and leaving you with nothing.
DDG tries very hard to push Amazon and Ebay to me. They’re not even available in my country 😅
That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I’d report it to DDG.
It has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone. I have been using DDG for a decade. I noticed a distinct drop in search quality after the bing partnership.