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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

As someone who only uses my phone to keep up on things between desktops, it's pretty awful for me to hear that Google is going to update the desktop index slower than the mobile one. If I'm searching for something, I'm on a desktop. I don't care about which websites are best optimized for mobile or which websites use Google's latest attempt to move the entire web to their infrastructure.

More and more, Google is demonstrating they're no longer willing or capable of meeting my needs as a search provider or a service provider, and I'm glad I don't use it anymore.

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I still remember when Google was pretty much a "grep for the Web", and wished it would stay that way. But now it seems to be a pseudo-search that second-guesses your queries, deindexes or only partially indexes old sites (which are still very much alive), censors, and does all sorts of other things which I find unpleasant and frustrating. Finding popular and new content is the easy part; unfortunately Google has only focused on that and severely neglected what I think is the main use of a search engine: finding the obscure and rare content that exists somewhere, but is hard to get at.

Unfortunately, DDG, Bing, and the others are still far behind the last time I used them. But maybe not for long...

While they can sometimes frustrate me when I'm running a very specific search, there are some features that I often like, such as the one that includes close synonyms of search terms, and includes both plural and singular forms. Makes it more of a "perl for the Web", which has its place.

https://xkcd.com/208/

I've never found a drastic difference between Google, Bing, and DDG except in one category: Searching Google websites. Bing's YouTube results are frequently terrible, for example, where highly popular trending videos are not in the top results when searched for on Bing's video search. Google indexes Google+ posts well, nobody else does. I'm not sure if that's a fault of the other search providers, or Google unsurprisingly making it difficult for competitors to index websites that they obviously can index quite easily using internal APIs.

I felt really weird the day I realized I don't use Google to "google" anymore.

I use DuckDuckGo, when it fails I'll fall back to Google, but even then it's getting to be pretty useless compared to how it was.

For example, I recently wanted to find a reference for an obscure quote that included the word "squaring" but all the search results from Google were for "square". So frustrating.

You can put "squaring" in quotations and then google will search exactly for "squaring".

I've had mixed results using their modifiers. Remember when you used to be able to do something like -something and it would filter those out? Hasn't worked for me in months.

can you remember the query you tried?

No, but "squaring bucky fuller quote" just now showed the problem.

and what is the correct answer?

Never did find it. In one of his books he points out that associating the second power with the area of a square (as opposed to some other base shape, like a triangle or circle) is a choice we make.

Consider triangles (hallucinate the bases):

    Side  Area

     1 /\ 1


       /\
    2 /\/\ 4


       /\
    3 /\/\ 9
     /\/\/\

it wasn't hard to find once i read your explanation

https://books.google.com/books?id=03fSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&dq=bu...

First of all: THANK YOU THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! It's been years, over a decade. This is awesome. Thank you.

What did you do to find it? (Is Google "punishing" me? My Google-fu used to be strong but I could not find this.)

Sure :) You mentioned it was in a book, so the first thing I did was go to books.google.com; after that, I just typed in some keywords that seemed right - you can see them at the top, I searched for [buckminster fuller triangle squaring power]

Thank you. :)

DDG failed every single technical search for me. I was putting !g to get google every time. It was at that point I realized Google really still doesn't have competitors in this field. Any search engine can bring up common stuff, say articles about the current election or celebrities, but all the others I've tried with technical content (not just software based) bring up pretty bad results.

Yeah that matches my experience, but Google's gotten much worse in the last 3~5 years in my experience, while DDG has slightly improved.

what is it you use now for search?

I'm not the parent, but I've been using DuckDuckGo heavily, primarily because of its bangs[0].

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I use Bing and DuckDuckGo somewhat interchangeably. Bing is particularly useful at work since I'm usually looking up Microsoft support issues (and they pay you to use their search in Amazon gift cards, which is nice), and DDG is obviously much better for privacy.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. "Microsoft Rewards" is apparently a real program (discussed Here https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftRewards) which even I as a MSFTie knew almost nothing about. (Not speaking as advocation or any official/unofficial capacity yadda yadda)

I also find myself "OK with" bing for when I'm doing work searches; but it does seem to be more miss than hit for my more general tech questions. Like with browsers, multiple search engines seems like the unfortunate current state of the world as each has its own pathology.

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