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chneu

I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG.

All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol

Google is way too "personalized".

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Brave search is also quite nice: https://search.brave.com/

I find Google to generally have some of the worst search results of modern engines with one exception - Google tends to be good at digging up results from things like forums/message boards that don't end up getting listed on other search engines.

I don't entirely understand why this is because other engines also have them indexed and work fine with something like: 'site:news.ycombinator.com anna's archive' [1][2] but yet those posts will basically never show up on the main results, regardless of how far down them you go.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.co...

[2] - https://yandex.com/search/?text=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Google hides the most relevant results on the 3rd page. It was confirmed in trial disclosures a few months ago. Their concern isn’t public search.

Seems to not be empirically true.

Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results. If you actually click through at 100/page, you'll only get 3.something pages of results. Despite what is says at the top re: results. Those results are not accessible.

Bing only returns 900. Kagi only 200. Deep search and surfing is pretty much gone on all major search "engines".

> Google only ever returns a maximum of <400 results.

That's perfectly fine. If I'm going to use a search engine, I'm not willing to sift through hundreds of potentially relevant results. I hope I find what I'm searching for in the first page, or at best in the first 3 pages or so.

What's not cool about Google is that now it hits you with AI slop with dubious quality right at the top, followed by a page of sponsored results, followed by some potentially useful results, followed by an entire ocean of spam traps and clone sites and really shady results with exotic never-seen-before TLDs that leaves you wondering whether clicking on a link will get in a hostile database. That's what's not cool about Google: is that you can't use it to search the web anymore.

It's not Google's fault alone.

SEO manipulation for example, that could be tackled by our legal system similar to existing slander, unfair competition and advertising regulations. But unfortunately, most representatives are not digital natives but old digital buffoons, and the post-2000/Gen Z kids never gained an understanding of what actually makes the web tick.

As for the TLD explosion, we definitely need a completely new setup for ICANN. The trouble all of that has caused, just for a measly 250k in fees for each new gTLD, is insane.

Doesn't https://www.google.com/search?q=your+search+query&ei=...&sta... give you page 3? Or at least, try jittering it a bit and compare to frontpage results.

> &start= parameter. This parameter controls which result number the page starts with. Google displays 10 results per page by default. For page 1, start=0 For page 2, start=10 For page 3, start=20

Edit: after the 3rd page

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/1436/united-st...

For fun what Gemini says: “The notion that Google explicitly admitted to "deprioritizing good results to sell more ads" is a common interpretation of these documents and expert testimony.”

> Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/1436/united-st...

That's a 230-page pdf. Do you have a more specific citation?

I passed the PDF to Claude and asked it to check if there is any part of the document that states that google deprioritizes good search results in favor of advertisement. Here is the output from Claude:

Yes, the document contains highly significant factual findings by the Court regarding how Google deprioritized organic search results in favor of advertising. The most significant findings: The Court documents that the positioning of Google's AI features (AI Overviews, WebAnswers) on the search results page reduced users' interactions with organic web results - deliberately.

Relevant text:

"Some evidence suggests that placement of features like AI Overviews on the SERP has reduced user interactions with organic web results (i.e., the traditional "10 blue links")."

And:

"Placement of features like AI Overviews on the SERP has reduced user interactions with organic web results where Google's WebAnswers appears on the SERP"

Important note: these are not "admissions" in the sense of Google voluntarily confessing, but rather factual findings by the Court based on evidence presented during the trial - which is legally even more binding.

All that claude said there was that they made people interact with the blue links less, by using AI and stuff.

None of that confirmed the claim that they hide the most relevent results past page 3. I guess I have to read the thing myself

I switched to Kagi a while back and ended up buying their annual subscription for unlimited searches. It's such a breath of fresh air, like a search engine from an alternate universe where Google just focused on search instead of adtech.

The fact that Google seemingly returns results worse than Kagi, Startpage and Ecosia is just strange, given that Google provides search results for all three of them. Both Kagi and Ecosia uses other sources as well, I don't know about Startpage, so that's certainly part of it, but it still feels a little strange.

From using Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Bing, I'd also argue that Bing is simply a better search engine at this point.

Don’t Ecosia/Qwant have their own index now?

Do you find Bing better through Bing proper, or just as good through DDG (which uses the Bing index)?

Last I read the Ecosia/Qwant index is only used in German and French, so I think Ecosia is still running their weird Bing/Google/Other mix.

Bing felt about as good as Ecosia, until Ecosia started to mix in the Google results. At that point Ecosia became they better search engine. Bing vs. DDG, I'd say about the same. I stopped trying to use Bing once they rolled out all the Copilot nonsense. Now the UI is unusable and cluttered.

DDG is okay. Startpage is quite good. I make a virtue of regularly shifting between search engines (not Google). Sometimes they are not so good, some times very good. On average Im sure my search experience is better than using Google.

I believe Kagi uses the Yandex index as their base as well.

Based on what? Have you read that somewhere?

Yandex is one of Kagi's index sources. They used to publish a list of their sources but have changed it to a generic "we use multiple sources" because they got so much shit for using Brave (because of its founder’s bigotry) and Yandex (because of the ethical dilemma of paying a company headquartered in Russia which in the best case pays taxes and in the worst case has Kremlin/military involvement). This has been a contention debate for awoke, you can search their forum and discord for more details.

You can turn off personalization. (Operating under the assumption that most people search for facts, I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.)

> I personally don't see why one would ever want personalized results.

The same short combination of words can mean very different things to different people. My favorite example of this is "C string" because when I was a kid learning C I was introduced to a whole new class of lingerie because Google didn't really personalize results back then. Now when I search "C string" Google knows exactly what I mean.

I won't bother defending Google-style personalization as it exists for their search results, but since collisions in terminology across fields are common, it's not that hard to see how actual, thoughtful personalization could be useful. Someone searching for "Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature. Opinions may also differ over the usefulness of sources, even for people ultimately interested primarily in facts; I find Kagi-style personalization (make your own domain list) very useful, but across Kagi's userbase Reddit is simultaneously one of the most lowered, most raised, and most pinned domains: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

> Kafka" is going to want very different results based on whether they're thinking of software or literature.

Speak for yourself. I've worked in several "Kafka-esque" software organizations.

Arguably Google SERPs are getting closer to The Trial.

Anecdotally I find myself appending 'reddit' to search terms very frequently. It's effectively shorthand for "I want to read about peoples direct experience with this thing", and reddit is huge and well crawled by search engines. It's astroturfed to hell especially around political topics, but I feel like it's easy to tell when discussions about random products are authentic.

Location based personalization is pretty useful - if I search for 'Bob's Discount Linguine' I want the one in my neighborhood.

Lots of niche things (like programming) also reuse common english words to mean specific things - if I search e.g. 'locking' it's nice to get results related to asynchronous programming instead of locksmiths because google knows I regularly search for programming related terminology.

Of course it's questionable whether google does a good job at any of this, but I absolutely see the value.

I just add another keyword to narrow the search result. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted results based on anything other than the query.

Can you show me what results you see for “locking”? I see dancing move in all profiles I have.

Wow you're right. Locking dance moves and videos.

Weere you expecting to see padlocks or doorlocks or what?

I expected to be “personalized”. I’m definitely more into programming than dancing. I see 0 personalization tbh. And I tried a few different peoples phones.

Oh I see, locking in the programming sense, yes. Either not every search term is personalized for your context, or else this particular search is being applied to some other demographic. But that's weird because "locking" doesn't also show door, windows, filing cabinets.

Anyway if you search for "programming locking" you get relevant results.

Google didn't used to do this. Anyone got a rough idea when this started?

I was defending personalization in general, not saying that google is doing a good job of it now (see last paragraph of my first comment).

Personalization would be good if it meant recognizing that I dislike blogspam, SEO'd pages, advertisements, and assuming my location.

I often find myself searching for information that's not from my locality. This sort of 'location personalization' frustrate such efforts so much that I rarely 'google' these days. What's the point of having access to the internet if that access is going to be restricted like this without consent? If they want to make my search experience more relevant, they should provide me an option to limit my search, rather than callously assume my intentions.

It's much more egregious on the Android play store. Many apps like banking, transportation and online shopping apps are geolocked for installation, sometimes even without the developers' request or knowledge. What if I'm flying over there in two days, or just want to help someone who's already there? And even when I'm there, I have to prove my presence by supplying the local credit card details! Nothing else is enough - not GPS, not cell tower IDs, not the IP ranges or whatever else.

This is just outrageous because I can't even get a device that I paid for, to work for me. This is just sheer arrogance at this point - a wanton abuse of their co-monopoly privileges. However, I'm not under any delusions that they're here to improve my digital experience. These corporations profit by restricting their "users'" experience on an otherwise fully open internet.

Search results are still location-specific even if you disable personalization.

For the better part of a decade it seems that every verb or noun I search for, all the top search results are some movie or TV show named after that verb or noun. And I've watched exactly two movies in the past two decades (Star Wars VII when it came out, and Alien just last week).

Sometimes I consider actually enabling personalized search just to get to the things that I'm actually looking for.

Some people search for shopping, or business details, in which case personalization can improve (or disimprove) result relevance based on knowing where you currently are, what day and time it is, what you tend to order etc. etc.

And some people search for songs/images/videos/books/articles.

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