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Comment by johndifool | Hacker News Reader

"this is another reason I dont use google anymore"

What are the alternatives? I am trying that too but can't find s...t using duckduckgo and the gang.

I would be curios to that as well, I currently use duckduckgo the most. I have been getting more and more used to how it searches so I have become better with it. I still don't find it as good as the old google, but I honestly cant find what im looking for easily on google anymore.

I usually am researching obscure rare things that only a few websites in the world are talking about and before I could easily find it just by using the combo of key words in google. Now in my experience forget that, it will focus on one key word and give you every huge website that has used it in some article etc.

I lack the knowledge about the algorithms etc that they use, but as far as someone who searched a lot of things and used to enjoy googles actual search engine I just personally find its moving backwards.

Sorry I couldn't be more help :) If you have any good suggestions let me know!

Oddly, the google seems to be working much better for me if I use whole sentences (How to..., Where can I...). This is really annoying.

I am using DucDuckGo as there is currently no better alternative. It is not great, but it serves its purpose. Also, you can add "!g" before any query. This will search on google instead :)

This matches my experience, keyword based searches no longer provide anything of value, but natural language sentences lead to far better results.

isn't duckduckgo just bing anonymized?

DuckDuckGo (Bing) and Startpage (Google) work fine for me 90% of the time. To keep things mixed up, my new browser tabs use Startpage, while DDG is the homepage. The !bang syntax at DDG can be especially handy, and Startpage provides a proxy for every link. Both search engines allow you to set up a personal URL, or cookie, with your custom settings (appearance/features/privacy/etc.). Simple and handy, not a giant Orwellian beast that's tracking my every move.

Like others have said, Google doesn't seem all that great these days (better flush that browser cache before searching!). The 10% of the time that the others don't provide adequate results, Google doesn't either. I've gone from instantly hopping over to Google when the alts don't provide good results, to adjusting my terms a few times before finally trying Google.

Google still works best when I want to buy something, which isn't surprising.

Thanks for the information, as a non "tech" person I always appreciate someone taking the time to spread a little knowledge about these topics around.

DuckDuckGo seems to do just fine for me.

What can't you find?

A recent example was an obscure laser etched item, I used to just be able to put the 3 words together and bam I could find website containing it. Like very few people talked about it etc and no one was doing the same thing so it should be an easy find. Now when I search it I get tons of laser etched this or that yadda yadda but its as if its only keying on that word and ignoring the fact that not one of these top/all posts even contains the other words.

Yeah, I'm seeing that too.

Google doesn't seem able to find anything any more.

Just seems to pick from a few bigger sites with word hits, then order those results by the other words.

Used to be you could put a + in front of the word you are actually interested in and have a better chance.

But now that only searches google plus pages it always turns up nothing.

did you try verbatim mode?

I did not, but I just looked into it now and found some information I was unaware of, so thank you.

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