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I use duck duck go. Recently someone showed me their screen where they were using google to do a search. I was absolutely aghast. The last time I used google wh
by irrational 4y ago
I use duck duck go. Recently someone showed me their screen where they were using google to do a search. I was absolutely aghast. The last time I used google when you searched for something you saw a simple text list of sites (which is how DDG still works). Instead the google results were… a disaster. You had to scroll through some much garbage before finding actual search results - a list of sites. It was like google was saying, “here, look at all this trash instead of clicking a link and going to a different site”. When did google become so bad?
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoads. SEO. i have a guy in digital marketing tell me that his friend does SEO and he does wonders with obscure keywords and shit. that friend is a freelancer and earns a good payday. When you want to insert your brand in every fucking imaginative keyword as opposed to people "searching for something", why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING"?
- charcircuit 4y ago>why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING"? Because people googling SOMETHING are more likely to buy SOMETHING than people googling SOMETHING_ELSE.
- RileyJames 4y agoIf every heavily SEO’d result was produced by a company that produced a directly relevant product, I don’t think we’d be as disappointed with the content. The truely garbage content is produced as cheaply as possible (scraped, generated from a data source or generated via “ai”) to capture advertising revenue, often via sub prime advertising networks (or a number of middleman networks). But to your point, not everyone wants to buy something, and not everyone needs to. Much of the content out there is simply trying to capture your attention and make you available to some of the worst advertising and ad networks (read scams, lead gen, fake buttons, affiliate crap).
- vineyardmike 4y ago> why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING"? Rather I think it’s because everyone who buys ads has something to sell. Search ads are “direct action”. You click a link to do something. Ads on eg. TV are more about “brand memory” - reminding you they exist. When you watch tv you’re passively taking in information, but when you’re searching you’re actively trying to click something already. It’s a better fit behaviorally.
- TheChaplain 4y agoI have family members who use google to navigate. Instead of writing facebook.com in the URL-bar, they search for facebook and click the first link...
- orangepanda 4y agoI do that. Mostly because I never remember if it was .com or .net or .dog or .io or whatever else cute tld
- ffguuficc 4y agoHonestly that is probably safer. Having a typo in the url could Easley give you a phishing link. However, I also have gotten fishing adds when looking websites up so it’s not cut and dry at all.
- 6510 4y agoFor a good while if one searched for a (Dutch) gov institution or business google shows you the (free to call) phone number as a clickable link but the anchor has a different link to a paid per minute redirecting service. I know plenty of people who found the weird 15-50 euro entry on their bill.
- Cannabat 4y agoGoogle search results and ads have been abused successfully: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-messages-calls-emails-fake-ads-to-get-money/101167848 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m... https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/scam-bank-google-advertisement-hotline-phone-number-victim-2501766 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/scam-bank-google-a... I think the only solution is education.
- kolinko 4y agoOh no, it's not. Google's ads have been used to do phishing a lot. And - at least a few years ago, it was extremely difficult to report such ads. Perhaps it has improved recently, but it used to be a plague in crypto - people getting ads for phishing sites instead of legitimate ones, losing money, and Google being unresponsive to reports.
- rvz 4y agoWho's going to finally tell them who DDG really relies on?
- neoglow 4y agoI get your point, but the fact remains that the interface is miles ahead of Google, just by not having all the garbage. The results are fine for me in day to day usage and I find that Google will not provide me with better results if I cant find it on DDG. Would it be better if they had their own indexer? Maybe...
- dotcoma 4y agoBrave, Kagi, Neeva and Mojeek have their own indexes, I think.
- irrational 4y agoI know where DDG gets the results from, but in all the years using it, it has never failed to find what I am looking for. Or, I’ve never needed to check google because DDG didn’t find what I was looking for.
- unicornporn 4y ago> I use duck duck go. You use a proxied Bing. If you want a proxied Google (what I prefer), you can use https://startpage.com https://startpage.com
- beebeepka 4y agoOh boy. I loved ixquick/startpage until 2020(?) when it suddenly stopped working and demanded I turn on JS. I did no such thing but looked around and found the company had been sold to an advertiser/tracker. It used to work much, much better than ddg:(
- FridgeSeal 4y agoI believe a few years ago startpage was sold to an advertising company.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jstummbillig 4y agoWhich is also what DDG is.
- _def 4y agoIs it?
- jstummbillig 4y agoYes? Offering ad space (and placing affiliate links) is how they make money. Difference to Google is how they position themselves in regards to privacy, and that Google actually built a search engine. Both make their money by providing ad space.
- irrational 4y agoWhere are the ads?
- hrbf 4y agoI do too. However, I am responsible for a couple of sites that Bing absolutely refuses to even index. Google has no issues with them, not for 10 years running. Those sites are effectively invisible in Bing and therefore DuckDuckGo. I’m not talking about low ranking, the entire domain is ignored. My own personal website for example is not even listed in the search engine I use. Microsoft support see the issue but have no explanation and escalate and quote “quality requirements” for weeks now. A human review yielded positive results regarding quality. Meanwhile, I see lots of SEO spam on DDG when searching for generic technical terms.
- Semaphor 4y agoInteresting, can you give an example page that’s not listed?
- hrbf 4y agoSure. A very simple one would be https://ipbl.herrbischoff.com https://ipbl.herrbischoff.com, a public blocklist page referencing a resource used by a couple dozen users. The HTML doesn't get a lot simpler than that and is entirely valid markup. It's (unsurprisingly) low ranked in Google but it's there. Not so in Bing, it's simply not there. The page exists since March 2021. Bing Webmaster Tools reads "Discovered but not crawled. URL cannot appear on Bing", giving no further reason. Also: "Last crawl attempted 01 Feb 2022 at 19:35", which means that Bing did not bother to retry for months, despite me submitting it manually on a regular basis. Clicking the "Live URL" tab results in entirely green checkmarks along with "URL can be indexed by Bing". Another example would be my personal site: https://herrbischoff.com https://herrbischoff.com. Same issue. That one is listed on Google for more than 10 years.
- Semaphor 4y agoThis is fascinating, thanks. Have you experimented on allowing the bing ad bot that you have blocked? If they have some kind of retaliatory non-crawling?
- 4y ago
- rlv-dan 4y agoTip: When on someone elses computer, type ddg.co/yourquery in the adress field to quickly search on duckduckgo
- jacooper 4y agoI think brave search is really the best alternative search engine, its actually independent.