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Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remot

Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters. If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless. If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often links to a full page of pop sci articles that are just... wrong. Google scholar of course works well. If you’re searching for news it’s basically entirely mainstream, entirely based on the last news cycle, and entirely homogenous. And of course the Wikipedia links have gotten harder to click. Keyboard nav still purposely is weird. AMP pages break UX. It’s funny because if I didn’t know so many tips and tricks I’d basically not “know” anything. I’d buy poor products at high prices, I’d believe the latest pop science, I’d only know one or maybe two mainstream opinions on news, etc. That the worlds number one information finding service seems to have rolled over to a variety of bad incentives is a bit horrifying.

ciarannolan 6y ago
Google results lately are absolute garbage without an ad blocker, and just regular garbage with one. With no ad blocker, for any query I run, ads fill the whole screen when I search. I have to scroll down to see the first normal result.
nisa 6y ago
Google News is also pretty much totally broken for a while. You have to look very hard for a way to sort by date - by default it somehow thinks articles from 2018/2019 are what I'm after and it's often not returning articles that exist, are from normal newspapers and can be found by the same query in Google - there are also no useful facettes left and sometimes there is some sort of amnesia for everything older than 2017. Not sure why they are doing it (maybe it's only broken in Germany due to even more braindead "Leistungsschutzrecht" law but something really feels off.
azangru 6y ago
> If you’re shopping > If you’re looking for anything scientific > If you’re searching for news Good thing I am using it to search for code snippets and error messages then :-)
carapace 6y ago
Switched to DDG ages ago. I was shocked when I realized "I don't use Google to google." But yeah, Google has become grocery store checkout-line tabloids.
ratfaced-guy 6y ago
Yep, google, is a dumpster fire, DDG is my main search engine on mobile and I have not missed it. However, it's still far from optimal. We need a user-driven search engine! No more of this bullshit centralized searcher and censure, we need to flip the script on who gets to decide what kind of filters we want to see. Fuck Google.
- cirno 6y ago
  Absolutely; native filtering support to exclude the domains of my choosing would be the killer feature for me that would make me switch to basically any search engine. I'll even sign up for an account there, and all the possible privacy/query logging that entails, to maintain the blacklist state. Browser userscript addons are just too clunky, screw up the number of results per page and don't work on image searches. Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.
- deckard1 6y ago
  It'd be a bit ironic if we go back towards curated search engines (i.e. catalogs of the 1990s) due to the algorithms making a mess of it. There was something magical about diving into a hierarchy of arbitrary classification and finding links to new sites you never knew existed. Nowadays I never discover new gems on Google. Only Pinterest/Quora/fake-Instagram junk.
- boogies 6y ago
  Are you looking for https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ? > Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. > Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity. > Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.

ciarannolan 6y ago

Google results lately are absolute garbage without an ad blocker, and just regular garbage with one. With no ad blocker, for any query I run, ads fill the whole screen when I search. I have to scroll down to see the first normal result.

nisa 6y ago

Google News is also pretty much totally broken for a while. You have to look very hard for a way to sort by date - by default it somehow thinks articles from 2018/2019 are what I'm after and it's often not returning articles that exist, are from normal newspapers and can be found by the same query in Google - there are also no useful facettes left and sometimes there is some sort of amnesia for everything older than 2017. Not sure why they are doing it (maybe it's only broken in Germany due to even more braindead "Leistungsschutzrecht" law but something really feels off.

azangru 6y ago

> If you’re shopping > If you’re looking for anything scientific > If you’re searching for news Good thing I am using it to search for code snippets and error messages then :-)

carapace 6y ago

Switched to DDG ages ago. I was shocked when I realized "I don't use Google to google." But yeah, Google has become grocery store checkout-line tabloids.

ratfaced-guy 6y ago

Yep, google, is a dumpster fire, DDG is my main search engine on mobile and I have not missed it. However, it's still far from optimal. We need a user-driven search engine! No more of this bullshit centralized searcher and censure, we need to flip the script on who gets to decide what kind of filters we want to see. Fuck Google.

cirno 6y ago
Absolutely; native filtering support to exclude the domains of my choosing would be the killer feature for me that would make me switch to basically any search engine. I'll even sign up for an account there, and all the possible privacy/query logging that entails, to maintain the blacklist state. Browser userscript addons are just too clunky, screw up the number of results per page and don't work on image searches. Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.
deckard1 6y ago
It'd be a bit ironic if we go back towards curated search engines (i.e. catalogs of the 1990s) due to the algorithms making a mess of it. There was something magical about diving into a hierarchy of arbitrary classification and finding links to new sites you never knew existed. Nowadays I never discover new gems on Google. Only Pinterest/Quora/fake-Instagram junk.
boogies 6y ago
Are you looking for https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ? > Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. > Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity. > Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.