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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

X still appears above the fold in a special section on Google with custom previews.

Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky.

It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.

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Btw if you set your browser default search to anything other than Google searching for people works much better. No customized bumping of X based links over other options when searching for people.

Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much better results await.

I had to switch to DuckDuckGo for work, AI stuff was too annoying

At least the AI stuff can be disabled. Duckduckgo allows you to store settings in the URL too, if you're the type of person who disables cookies and localstorage. Edit your search URL to: https://duckduckgo.com/?k5=1&kbe=0&kbj=1&kbg=-1&q=%s

kagi.com is a superior search engine compared with all three, to the point where I pay for a license for everyone in my company to use it.

The kagi assistant is also nice, only responding with AI when you add a question mark to your query, with the option of opening the query in a separate web search RAG w/the LLM of your choice

Interesting, maybe it also shows quality of search. I know that these are barely relevant compared to google, but Bing, Ecosia, etc. are showing Bluesky link.

For years I've tried switching full time to DDG and always found myself typing !g so much that I gave up and went back to Google. For the past year and a half or so it's finally stuck and I cringe it I'm on a different device and accidentally get a Google result. It's become everything it wasn't at launch.

We need the "scientists find X less useful" study for Google.

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