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Comment by HeyItsMatt | Hacker News Reader

Google and Bing (and hence DDG etc) are no longer a search engines, they're "information the powers that be permit you to have" engines. Forums, blogs, and small independent websites have disappeared from indexes. Large walled garden platforms like Facebook are impossible to query.

We really need a replacement for Yahoo.

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https://www.curlie.org

https://www.curlie.org/docs/en/about.html

I certainly notice this too. I remember searching for technical queries and would find many (not SEOsplurge) blog posts or random forums where the question is discussed. Now it is just the same stackoverflow answer replicated across multiple content farms.

Peculiarly, I have found the more 'genuine' websites by using image search. Perhaps because more things fit into a grid, and I can usually gauge whether the website is genuine or a botfarm from the images its author chose.

Is this true?

If I search "presstv", the .com site of which was literally seized by the US govt, I get their unseizable .ir site as the first result. No scary warnings, no fluff.

If I search "rt", I get RT site as the first result.

Similarly for smaller sites that have caught flak or been banned for opposing US government narratives (SCF, CN, GZ, etc).

Ironically, it's "open" platforms like Wikipedia that have the lowest tolerance for political dissent. Twitter, Facebook are quite compromised as well.

From what I can tell, DDG said they were going to downrank known propaganda sites, which meant that, in practice, dissenting results would also appear.

Then, the pro-Russian-propaganda outlets got upset and started complaining about free speech. (As though exclusively showing sites from one hostile foreign government would be aligned with the intent of the 1st amendment!)

Wish there was something like Read Something Interesting (http://readsomethinginteresting.com/) but with a search index, where you could search only the blogosphere.

The first item I was taken to on that list is this: https://readsomethinginteresting.com/a/baa96b89

Which takes me to a broken article: https://www.aaronkharris.com/asking-questions

https://web.archive.org/web/20210113145204/https://www.aaron...

Sorry, I need to get in the habit of checking my comments for replies. Thank you!

.....what? What forums have dissapeared from Google? I get and search forum results all the time. This is not including of course the forums that have gone private or purposely delisted themselves

I can't surface them at all for non-programming sites. Occasionally automotive, but it's still mostly AI generated made for adsense junk. I can use site: filters on sites I know about, but I can't find anything on a page I don't know that way. Your filter bubble may be different.

I mostly use Yandex now. It's not great.

I find Brave search to be a lot better. Its result are helpful, and not filled with SEO spam.

I see tons of what you say is missing. I am in the UK, FWIW. Perhaps it depends on niche?

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