4 ms·
I now realize that I have almost completely stopped using Google in it's most common setting. ie. just search for the thing you are looking for. I use google a
by screye 6y ago
I now realize that I have almost completely stopped using Google in it's most common setting. ie. just search for the thing you are looking for.
I use google almost exclusively to improve search on other websites or for special syntax based searches that are far easier to implement than good general purpose search.
Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries. Otherwise, it use it to open Maps, YT, HN as a landing page.
Research and news both are usually acquired from a curated list of sources I visit directly, with no involvement from google.
If it is something specific then I will use "quotes" to find that exact thing.
Outside that, google scholar and maps are amazing, but I don't think DDG is trying to compete there.
The idea of searching for something with only a vague sense of what it is, has almost completely stopped. For generic searches the 1st page results of medium pages and single pager MSM articles are both useless and shallow. It isn't Google's fault that popularity and quality are orthogonal to each other.
If I genuinely cared about my privacy, I would seriously consider trying DDG out. However, I have surrendered all my data to corporate overlords and don't think there is much point in struggling anymore.
- maxov 6y agoI think your assessment of the shallowness of 1st page Google search results nowadays is spot-on. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this situation get worse over the past ~5 years, to the point where I have to skip a few pages of search results and really dig deep to find high-quality content and writing. Unfortunately, SEO sites like Medium that “democratize” writing seem to be a big contributor to this problem. The lowest common denominator there is not very high, yet shallow articles seem to get tons of exposure to search engines. Not to say there’s nothing good on Medium, I follow the people whose writing I like, and I like them quite a lot. It’s just lost in the noise. I’m curious if you’ve found alternative sources (except HN, of course). Is DDG any higher quality? I feel like the ideal for me would be something balanced between a search engine and content aggregator - I would like to search for what I want and get high quality results, but avoid the echo-chamber effect emerging from the use of upvotes as a ranking method as much as possible.
- toyg 6y ago> Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries. You could probably use bangs for that... https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=reddit https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=reddit https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=stackove https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=stackove just prepend your searches with them, e.g. the following is equivalent to your SO search: !sod something to search