I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for
Yeah, I’m horrified but it’s wound up being the only way to find quality amateur writing about dog breeds. Most websites in that subject matter seem to be semi algorithmic content farms that echo the same uncited information.
Not to mention, most of those websites are loaded up to the hilt on a bunch of annoying adware. You can read 2-3 sentences, then you hit ad add you have to scroll past to read another 2-3 sentences to hit yet another ad you have to scroll past.
Oh god don't give this away, or it will be ruined.
I've said it before but for me the best search I ever used was back in the day when delicio.us was a thing and everyone used it. Basically curated tags/websites, I could find really good, niche things that google would never find for me.
Basically, human powered indexing is almost always better than algo/crawler search which only surfaces popular/gamed pages - it's a fundamental flaw of pagerank type crawling.
This is also kinda why ChatGPT is good, because it's basically a model trained on places like reddit, not using link popularity or whatever. So it's basically a model which builds an index of information from actual humans. I think it's the future of search, albeit with its own anti SEO challenges.
For now we have site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, site:stackoverflow.com, site:wikipedia.com to actually get useful info out of Google.
This is my go to search hack too. Recently, I've started to see it becoming more and more ineffective. Corps have figured out that reddit is the new SEO hack. Now there's a sudden influx of 'ad' posts by corps. Lots and lots of posts with a title "Samsung's new Galaxy 28 is cool!". Minimal upvotes, no comments.
IMO it’s not just astroturfing, the general sickness of social media has spread into every subreddit now. Lots of unqualified, angry comments, or none at all. I think during the pandemic and the Ukrainian war the user base and engagement dynamics have changed. I find Reddit to be less useful for anything recent. There is a void of quality content for the last two years. It’s not just burrowed. The frontpage is only bot-reposts, ragebait and violence porn, now, and I think many sane people left Reddit or became rage junkies themselves.
When you think about it, adding "reddit" is a kind of counterpart mechanism to the rise of AI and generated content in a general sense. There's a real thirst for answers coming from real, genuine people, and adding "reddit" is the last resort we have to maximize the likelihood of it.
Hardly, reddit, in its current form, will die because of LLMs. It is too easy to get an account and post. They will have to wall the garden or trash will fill it. :(
It is amusing I uninstalled the Reddit app because I use google as an entry-point so often and it’s really a pain universal links forced me to open the app for a worse experience.
Presumably the ability for an app to register itself as the handler for links matching a pattern. So, when you click a link to a reddit thread from a search result, it opens in the reddit app rather than the default browser.
Not that I am familiar with. You could try an extension like this one, though I haven't tried it myself. It looks like you would click the link, then click the toolbar button. https://add0n.com/open-in.html
When clicking on a link in any browser, if the URL matches an app that you have installed - it will switch to the app rather than stay in the browser. So anything reddit.com will bring up the Reddit app.
Even then it’s getting worse. Google is indexing “top posts” sidebars as well as the subreddit postured for a given timeframe. It’s polluting results worse by the day.
Re: Reddit -- I'd love for YC to issue a Request For Startups around verified human identity - soon it will be hard to distinguish people from AI that posts comments, participates and then astroturfs sites like reddit. Account creation date will help as a band-aid but isn't the right solution.
I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam. Most of the time, the advice is legit.
> I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam
How exactly you do this? People sell their "organically grown" reddit accounts all the time, so they look like normal users, while just a specific post is the ad itself, then the account is dumped after that.
PlayerUp.com, Signals.sh, EpicNPC.com, the number of sites you can sell your social media account is endless. Don't expect to get too much from it though.
Not sure why reddit has been able to resist the ever present corruption of money, but I think that's also why reddit is one of the few remaining politically progressive strongholds.
I wasn't clear. The point I was trying to make is about what we're discussing in this thread, how reddit is somehow still useful for search and hasn't been completely ruined by seo and ad spam.
The thankless job and passion projects of subreddit moderators.
Most large subs will curate the content via their opinionated rules and enforce them. There's teams of humans that are basically cleaning up the garbage.
It hasn't, have you seen the new design and forceful push to the app where your data gets sold. They haven't gotten rid of old. yet but they will. Not sure about the progressive stronghold or if it's a woke heaven, that might be your subreddit
gah - the new layout drives me batty. I guess its worse when you're not logged in (like me) - it won't just display the full thread in simple chronological order. old.reddit is better though
My understanding is that the marketing is more subtle - tell a hiking story where footwear is important but dont mention the branx, wait for some one to ask, suddenly you have a product placement that looks and feels natural.
I've been selfhosting SearXNG [0] for a few months and cannot complain. It's a meta search engine, i.e. collects results from a variety of underlying search engines including Google (if enabled).
The main selling points for me are:
- No ads
- Improved Privacy
- Open Source
- Customisability (Plugins, Search Engines)
I'm quite content with the search results even though they're not quite on par with the quality that Google used to have.
+1. I was about to suggest this in my own comment.
SearX/SearXNG can also improve anonymity if you use a public instance, too. I choose to selfhost however, as the ultimate customization and ownership of the instance is more important to me than anonymity.
I find very interesting "indie" webpages frequently alongside my normal searches with Wiby results enabled. Wiby is actually fantastic.
In response to the sibling commenter mentioning its slowness: it takes some getting used to, but honestly waiting a couple seconds versus half a second for results isn't a big deal with the wealth of relevant information it gives. With about a half dozen engines enabled, I'm getting like 3-4 second response times, and that's on DigitalOcean's second lowest-tier VPS.
DDG/Bing are ridiculous with ignoring your search terms, even with quotes. I had enough. Google often has a whole page or almost a whole page of clever-widgets before any actual results, not to mention my ethical objections to their behavior and the SEO spam.
Kagi works great, I like the fact that I'm paying for it and my interests are primary in the relationship.
Same. I basically gave it a try, and stayed with it. I sometimes feel I should make more use of the advanced features, like lenses, but I'm pretty happy with just regular searches, too. Reminds me a lot of how Google used to be.
Kagi’s been fantastic. I started using them out on principle, but it’s a legitimately good search engine. I almost never find myself going back to google, and when I do, Google’s usually not finding anything either.
The only thing keeping me away from Kagi is that they are US-based.
Having some presence in the EU would contribute to peace of mind that your personal data is more or less under jurisdiction of the GDPR, and that there's at least _some_ pressure to actually keep their word on privacy (as small as that pressure turns out to be in practice).
Maybe not the search queries themselves, but at least keep the user information (payment data, personal preferences, etc) within the EU.
For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums.
The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expert and active community and looking at cutting edge knowledge bases. I suppose it's what the academic and scientific communities used to be before subsidies and blue church ruined it.
1. Google has their fingers in a lot of pies. You want to short Google search, but a short on Google is also shorting all their other businesses, as well as shorting future ventures and shorting the possibility that their management will pivot business strategy away from search.
2. Shorting in general leans toward being a short-term strategy, because most forms of shorts are costly to maintain because you're paying interest on loans, option premiums, etc. Futures are probably the cheapest way, but then you're susceptible to short-term fluctuations: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
If there's one thing I'm 100% sure of, it's that letting your in products go to crap does not necessarily decrease your stock price.
With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.
It takes a long time though. Meta is a great example. People pointed to stock price as proof that whatever they were doing works.
But after a while, they realized that Facebook is screwed and pivoted away from the branding of Facebook. The Meta announcement was merely confirmation that they had indeed gone to crap, and that's what made shares plummet.
It's also why I'm not a major supporter of data-driven decisionmaking because the data used to make decisions can come in too late. A common mistake is to annoy users with things that make money, and then observe that money is coming in. But at some point, users leave en masse because they're just sick of how things are. By the time you get the data, the cash cow is terminally ill.
Someone should tell Reddit if they fixed their search they might supplant Google search... they could become the front page of the internet or something.
I'm still just appending `reddit` to my Google searches to try to find results written by human beings, although I am not optimistic that this technique will work for much longer (or perhaps even 100% of the time now).
The vast majority of it may still be written by humans, but they may not all be impartial humans; companies pretend to be end users and shill their products via reddit comments.
Torrent trackers (but not tpb usually).
Just search some books on the topic you are interested in and that's it.
For example, I used to have 2 medical problems which I have successfully solved using this method.
One medical problem of mine I have solved completely and what about another I can prove you there is just no cure (despite of some doctors promise me that they can do it for $$$).
That was a lot of reading but no other search engine on Earth can really search any medical stuff and no forums allow to discuss medical problems without a stupid censorship kind of "somebody might hurt yourself if he found this discussion by some wrong reason so we ain't allow you to discuss your medical stuff here".
I've also found that the best way to avoid search spam is to ignore the web entirely and go to well-reviewed books about my topic of interest. I tend to search for books on Amazon or Abebooks, check out the reviews, and then buy them if the price is reasonable, order them at my local library, or download them from LibGen if they're hard to get or too expensive. It takes longer, but the quality of information is much higher. For example, I was learning about wine recently—the web is full of SEO-optimized junk about wine, but there are many excellent books on the topic. Snippets in Google Books are also quite useful if I don't need a full book.
Maybe Facebook? I believe there are a ton of semiprivate support groups for different health conditions. But I guess one might need a starting point to be able to find a relevant one since they are specialized.
Heh I’ve found that the overlap between “medical” anything and charlatans/mysticists/anti-vaxxers is pretty high on Facebook. This may or may not be a feature, depending on the individual.
rutracker.org with my ability to read Russian as my mother language did as much for my education as rest of the Internets. But you may meet some English content there as well, or not language-depended content like music.
Someone should build a nerdsnipe engine. It posts your question on an appropriate forum, uses ChatGPT to formulate a bogus response, then sends you all the replies angrily correcting the first answer.
Kagi. Been paying for 5-ish months or so. The ROI is huuuge.
Between personal and work use, I do 500-700 searches/month and I find what I need very quickly about 90% of the time.
Also benefits my cow-orkers as they don’t have to listen to my incessant bitching about “suggestion engines” and other nonsense that the likes of Google & friends have become.
Beside the lack of ads and tracking, other features like pin/rank/block of sites are super useful at streamlining results.
I've reverted my expectations about search engines to what they were in the early days, dusted off my old research skills, and accepted that I'm going to have to do some work myself. I still use Google, but its ability to approximate a reference librarian is diminished.
I'm almost always looking for technical stuff, so I go right to the source. StackOverflow, Reddit, arxiv. Best of all is still hyper-specific dedicated forums where they exist.
For shopping I use Geizhals, Idealo or huge sellers like Digikey.
Sadly they do not seem to have all the papers. ArXiV is missing completely, e.g. searching for „Attention is all you need“ does not return the paper which has been published on NeurIPS
I looked myself up. It listed a bunch of facts about me: # of papers and citations, fields of research, names of students and “advisers”.
Except every one of these facts was hilariously wrong. I recognized the names—they were all coauthors on some paper. Obviously they use cornpooters to decide what are my relationships to these coauthors, and present the false output of their program as if it were fact.
Don’t use this junk. Unless your goal is to be ludicrously misinformed.
Search is losing the arms race. I think we'll need to revert back to the model of manually curated and moderated listings, a human-approved island, surrounded by an endless sea of autogen noise.
There was a point in time where ddg was letting you contribute specific information to the results. It would have been cool if this had continues. An example of this would be say a way to return results specific to allrecipes or imdb etc.
How are the bangs time savers? They drop you into the search interface of whatever site you're searching, which is fairly universally bad.
If I try a search like "Django connection pooling !r," I'm dropped into Reddit's search interface, and the top result is "My pool has water while not being conected to my water system" from /r/RimWorld.
It's not useful for exploratory querying, but it's very useful when I know what I want to find on a specific website.
For example, I want to see the latest videos uploaded on youtube by channel I like. I type in "!yt channelName". Or if I want to go to letterboxd to check out a movie's reviews. "!letterboxd movie"
It's not much of a timersaver, it's literally just saving the step of going to youtube.com and then searching. But I love tiny efficiencies like that
strange, i got https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Django%20connection%20poolin... when using that search. i think ddg bangs work best when set as the default search and you just type into search bar or right click on highlighted text then search. using vivaldi but chrome should be similar.
I was like that a few years ago when I started using it. With time I realised that my query was just not returning the expected results in DDG so I'd just add the !g as a reflex. That rarely helped though but I kept doing it for a while until I lost the habit. Now I just try different queries in DDG and it may not be miles better than Google but it's definitely not worse.
For kicks I just went to Yandex and punched in Offspring Self Esteem mp3. Probably the first song I ever downloaded an mp3 of back in the 90s.
First result, some Russian site with a big download button, boom downloaded it. (I, uh, own it legally, of course. yeah.) Zero hassle. Can't believe this works in 2023. I've been under a rock.
Yandex has become my first choice to search for articles and documents outside of academic journal articles. The results are better curated than Google and often shows things Google misses, especially with unpublished documents.
What do you mean by "safe"? It's a search engine, it just returns you search results. If you are worried about JS/tracking... well, Google and others are already tracking you. I use Apple devices, so Apple knows everything about me as well. If you are worried about the links you may click when yandex returns you search results, there is nothing special about yandex, same rules apply as in the wild wild web: double check what you download (e.g., do not double click "rihanna-song1.mp3.exe" on Windows!)
He may mean "is it infested with malware"? Historically there were a lot of warez or porn sites based in Russia and East European countries which were.
Even if Putin himself could read your searches, would you care? I guess don't use Yandex if you're a Ukrainian soldier but otherwise what are you worried about?
Yes, there’s no telling how states like Russia secure that information, disseminate it to other paying customers, leak info about high value citizens to use as kompromat etc.
That’s a double standard because you could swap yandex and Russia with google and US and also have a very plausible scenario of what’s happening right now.
Google. It's fantastic. Gets me the information I'm looking for in 1-2 queries, tops. Often the answer is right on the result page without even needing to click into a bunch of crappy sites.
Having decent google fu never stopped being important, you can still find what you're looking for just fine most of the time if you know how to ask google to find that for you.
'Google fu' is a myth - it's just to make us feel good. Google ignores pretty much +"anything" it wants to. (thank god it doesn't igore site: yet)
What would be awesome is to have a REAL _search_ engine back, like Alta Vista - with a proper search language, and not some NLP that tries to guess what I want.
Imagine being able to search a database with only keywords, vs SQL queries - thats pretty much the difference between something like Alta Vista and NLP/Google/Bing
I still remember when Google search first came out and it seemed like magic. Now that magic has long worn off. If it weren't for YouTube, which Google didn't even create, Google wouldn't be in my life at all. I think that's significant for a company that at one time used to be so dominant.
My default general search is DDG. If I'm searching for hobby-related stuff then I search Reddit, if I'm searching for work-related stuff then I search HN and SO. It seems
Maybe different definitions of Google fu? I can't recall the number of times coworkers claim to have googled something for half an hour that I manage to find on the first or second attempt. Maybe you overestimate the skill of the average Joe?
google fu is not about + or -, it's about knowing what terms to include and what terms to omit, including sometimes not including the actual thing itself.
Again, its keyword matching vs having a real query language.
Alta Vista let you do things like "john near smith" and it would match "smith, john", "john, smith", etc.
But it would NOT match "John had a very long conversation with smith about the problem"
I have no idea how to answer that, because it depends on what I'm looking for, and involves making sure I have the terms that go with the subject I'm looking for.
Google has now become what search engines were like before Google came. I remember putting plus signs and quotes to get a query to return even a modicum of descent results.
I either use a website I built that subscribes to a host of RSS feeds (https://datente.com), or find stuff via friends' links on LI/Twitter/Facebook (and then add 'good' sources to my Twitter followers, or RSS aggregator), or from HN (and then add to Twitter or RSS), or from people sending me texts/IMs
I use DuckDuckGo with Firefox Android + ublock on my phone. DDG is great for simpler queries.
On my desktop, I use Google. My query usually ends with "reddit". If there's a subreddit for the topic I'm trying to find out about, I'll use Reddit's subreddit search feature (as horrendous as it is).
For work - Google. I sometimes use site:stackoverflow.com. Recently, I've also tried asking ChatGPT for simple code snippets.
Yep. I started getting captchas on every Google search, not sure if it was due to iCloud private relay or WARP. I’d rather spend a bit more time tweaking DDG than completing a captcha.
I started learning Google Search operations, and now I almost always append "site:news.ycombinator.com"/"site:reddit.com" for stories and ideas, "filetype:pdf" for work or research papers etc...
I would say it works very well as I discover a lot of things, the problem I'm now facing is keeping up with all these awesome materials
I've been using Brave Search as my default the past ~6 months (previously I was using DuckDuckGo). I think Google is better at the "instant answer" part and its index really shines in some types of searches. Nobody talks much about it anymore but Google Books is amazing, no other search engine has that massive library at its disposal and for really specific topics, a result from an obscure old book is exactly what you need. But that said, I prefer Brave's layout and the quality of the first 2 pages is better for most everyday queries and programming questions. Brave's "Discussions" card is great: it presents threads from forums and Reddit, which gets me to an actually useful thread much faster than opening a bunch of tabs from a Google site search. There is also an interesting feature called "Goggles" for boosting or removing a specific list of domains, for example a list of sites popular on HN. It sounds like a cool idea but to be honest I never use it.
Adding hacker news or reddit to the query is a good trick. Especially if you use that to try to find a book reccomendation on the topic your interested in.
ChatGPT is a great resource too. It's just one step in a multi step process though. Anything you get you want to go back out to the internet and verify, but that goes for random reddit threads too.
It's only 4 days since we had [0] "Ask HN: What is your replacement for Google search", the answer then was the same as now, I pay for Kagi because it's excellent.
In general, I let a lot of stuff find me via aggregators like Reddit and HN. If I’m searching for specific things, I’ll often go to a specialized site like Stack Overflow. But if I don’t know exactly what I’m after, then it’s the “search Google, put a couple key terms in quotes, repeat” dance.
I've mostly reverted to 90s-style browsing: there are some sites that I check regularly, and I'll follow outbound links if the title seems interesting.
I still just run queries on Google. If I know it's a stackexchange site I'll just go directly to the site in question.
Other [everyday] stuff:
It depends. Sometimes I Google it, sometimes I do Google / Reddit search.
In short, Google ain't that broken for me. Sure, I hate that the top results are usually ads but it's not that bad to motivate me to change. I'm just not logged on to Google when I search for stuff.
And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie.
> And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie.
I'm guessing this is mostly in jest but I doubt most people, even privacy conscious people, really search anything that interesting, it's more about the idea of being able to build a long-term profile of someone based on search history. And anyway, the less "normie" you are, the more shameless you are, I'd argue.
Heck, there's a lot of reasons to temporarily want some degree of privacy or at least a little isolation. If I was going to search about a medical issue, I'd at least use private browsing, because I don't want advertisements about it to flood me.
For years I used to prepend site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com to Google searches but these are tapped out now as the communities have fully reverted to the mean along with heavy censorship. Currently it’s all through networks like clusters of people on Twitter who work in a niche or even 4chan hearsay to keep on top of things.
i've been using https://presearch.com/ for a little over a year roughly. it's a search aggregate, which pulls from a custom list of search engines. you can set it up to include or exclude engines from their list of about 100 large sites or add your own.
when i do a search, i scan the initial results page and if nothing pops out immediately, i click an icon for a more specific search on the appropriate engine, like wikipedia, reddit, stack exchange, etc.
there's some kind of cryptocurrency reward thing too but i couldn't care less about it and it seems a bit scammy but all crypto seems like a scam to me.
there's usually an ad or two for the first result. it's clearly marked as such. annoying but i've been trained to ignore the first couple results by google already so they are basically invisible to me.
i'm sure this sounds like i'm shilling for them, so i'll add that i do not work for them. i do not work for anyone right now. have a nice day.
One thing I've noticed is that it seems certain results (bandcamp as an example) strongly prefer a certain word order in the search term. For instance, I can search artistalbum and not get any bandcamp results but they do appear if I search albumartist. So, sometimes just changing word order in your query can make a significant difference
For general searches, I use Kagi, even though it's not actually better than Google. The main advantage it has over Google is that (for now at least) it isn't Google. For anything even vaguely related to a product I could pay money for, I abandon all search engines and use reddit. For any topical search, I just go to Wikipedia, or use !w.
Good youtube video here that covers a lot this, quite an interesting watch even if it just confirms what you have already been seeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48AOOynnmqU
People talking about wanting to search like it's the 90s (AV etc) - I remember before they became a thing you could buy thick "yellow pages" of curated web addresses in the computer section in book shops...
I use DuckDuckGo 99% of the time, and the 1% I still need Google for, it's 50/50 if I'll find anything useful that I couldn't with DDG. Also Google's search UX these days is a dumpster fire.
Not an answer to the question by any means (now I find new stuff in Reddit), but recently I've noted that when you search something enclosed in double quotes with Google, for the second page it will remove them
Agree with the fact that google web search is now garbage.
I almost always use simultaneously yandex+google.
In google I always set a max limit date, usually 2 years back.
On the other hand, theres now plenty of terms where I think, “theres no way I will get specific results with something so vague” and just resign to living in ignorance.
What kind of things are you looking for? I've been using Kagi (a paid search engine with a free tier) and quite like it but tbh it is only marginally better than google at the moment.
I've also been trying to ask questions on forums more when I can't find answers (or blog myself) that way people in the future can find the.
>> LP is the worst thing that ever happened to search, other than SEO and content farms
I just wish someone would bring back alta vista with a larger crawl index (or even just a 'specialized' crawl index for tech stuff). The search language was awesome for geeks. Trying to make search engines more appealing to 'casual users' has basically left 'power users' high and dry.
