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Are there any functional search engines left?

phucheneh

phucheneh

Diamond Member
Google seems to be getting worse by the day. It's like a retarded kid playing Scrabble. Their logo should just be a big helmet.

DUUURRRRRR, DO SOUNDALIKES COUNT? MAYBE THIS IS A HOMONYMOPHONAGRAM FOR WHAT YOU WANTED. DUURRRRRRRPPPPPPP.

Duckduckgo seems to have been sold to an ad company.

Bing is just a slightly more functional version of Google. It does the same dumb shit, and if you happen to search for ANYTHING that can be sold for money, you basically just get ads. I want information, you piece of shit, not ads.

Am I missing something? Surely there is an option somewhere that's not completely terrible.
 
AFAIK, you're not missing anything. Google gets me the best results, but only with a long search string, forcing quotes and removing terms, and such. The option to see more from a site in the main interface seems to have gone away, too. Oh, and then there's having to turn off instant results....

But then others rarely get nearly as good results. If anyone has any options, I'd like to know, too, but overall, I have a feeling it's our economy and government-guided corporate culture, just doing its thing.

The ads I don't mind so much. It's that they make it annoying to use in some way, a new way, every several months, for no good reason...but then I try another, and the results suck, in comparison.
 
By ads, I mean actual results. Anything with a product in it, even ambiguously, just gives you Google-bombed online stores. Adding 'review' hasn't worked in years. Hell, fun fact: 'sucks' is now a synonym for 'review' on Google.

But I've always used 'my' or first-person words to attempt to find real results. Doesn't work anymore.
 
phucheneh said:
By ads, I mean actual results. Anything with a product in it, even ambiguously, just gives you Google-bombed online stores. Adding 'review' hasn't worked in years. Hell, fun fact: 'sucks' is now a synonym for 'review' on Google.

But I've always used 'my' or first-person words to attempt to find real results. Doesn't work anymore.
Click to expand...

Google's algorithm isn't really based on matching your search terms to the site's content. That's how search engines used to work in the olden days. The "magic" Google has is that they rank results based on the popularity of a site. See how Page Rank works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

It generally works pretty well, but it does have some downsides for certain types of queries and can be manipulated.
 
I don't really see the problem here. If I want to look up spiders, I just type "spiders" into google, and the first page is full of very helpful pages (and this gem) about spiders. No ads. If I don't find what I'm looking for, there are even links at the bottom suggesting related searches in case they might be more what I want.
 
Leros said:
Google's algorithm isn't really based on matching your search terms to the site's content. That's how search engines used to work in the olden days. The "magic" Google has is that they rank results based on the popularity of a site. See how Page Rank works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

It generally works pretty well, but it does have some downsides for certain types of queries and can be manipulated.
Click to expand...

My problem is that I'm always searching for information on stuff. As in, possessions. Most notably, modification and repair of all kinds of...stuff.

It blows my mind how common something can be, and how hard information is to find.

Let's go with 'fixing a TV.' You'd probably put in the brand. Maybe you even have a good guess at the problem. So you search for 'Sony TV bad inverter capacitors'...I really am being random here...believe me, I don't buy Sony products...but let's pretend every Sony TV ever dies with the same issue. A 'best' worst-case-scenario, if you will.

Your results: Sony TV's. Sony stuff that's not TV's. Wholesale capacitors. DC adapter bricks for unrelated items. Ect. Just all kinds of random crap, with one key thing in common: they're for sale on shitty websites.

And that's why 'spiders' is an easy query...and that's the problem in a nutshell: the more specific your search gets, the worse the results are. I remember when it used to be the opposite. Thanks, Google. You fucking pricks.

edit: So Duckduckgo is still good? I tried it a couple times and it seemed to be behaving like Google hijacked by malware (...back when you could actually tell if that happened). I was somehow doubting that something on my end was effecting a more obscure search engine and not the major ones.
 
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phucheneh said:
So you search for 'Sony TV bad inverter capacitors'...I really am being random here...believe me, I don't buy Sony products...but let's pretend every Sony TV ever dies with the same issue. A 'best' worst-case-scenario, if you will.

Your results:
Click to expand...

I get several different forum posts from badcaps.net, avsforum, cnet, fixya, a couple of youtube videos, and this thread on the first page.
 
It's Not Lupus said:
yeah, i want the old google search results back. all current engines suck. but at least google has its verbatim search.
Click to expand...

I want old Google back, too. Some of their search components, like Google Images, have gotten worse, as well. It seems like they only care about how things tie in with Google Plus now. Their search engine hasn't improved in years, only gotten worse. Sometimes search seems to ignore the operators or quotation marks I use. I haven't been getting results as good as I did in 2010, 2008, or even 2005.
 
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a couple years now, and I don't recall going answerless on any query. The !bangs are a huge bonus for targeted site searches.
 
Google fucked up. It's basically unusable now unless you use quotes around every single search term. Otherwise it throws in a bunch of shit you didn't actually search for, like synonyms, common misspellings, and synonyms of common misspellings.

Bing is the same but you also have to put a plus sign in front of each quoted search term.
 
Google sold out a long time ago. It's pretty sad too, I used to love how Google conducted itself, now it sold out to advertising and I hate getting constantly hounded to join and convert my accounts to Google+.

Maybe they had always sold out and now am just noticing it.
 
Nintendesert said:
Maybe they had always sold out and now am just noticing it.
Click to expand...

They had to get people addicted to their drugs before being a PITA about things. If they were as aggressive when they started, people wouldn't have gotten addicted; they'd have used something else. Now people can't live without the heroin, or that's what they think anyway. It's actually pretty easy, but a mote less convenient, and it's all about beautiful convenience, right?
 
I have good luck using the "discussions" option to look up forum and blog posts when I'm looking for information on something. I also find that straight web searches seem to turn up as much misinformation and paid "reviews" of products as it does ads. Eventually I decided to stop even using web search for product information.
 
lxskllr said:
They had to get people addicted to their drugs before being a PITA about things. If they were as aggressive when they started, people wouldn't have gotten addicted; they'd have used something else. Now people can't live without the heroin, or that's what they think anyway. It's actually pretty easy, but a mote less convenient, and it's all about beautiful convenience, right?
Click to expand...

Damn straight. 😛

I can still usually find what I really need using Google, but I might need to try a few of these other suggestions. I don't even logon to Google on my work computer (I do on my Surface Pro I have sitting next to me at work, and on my phones), so it's just about familiarity and consistency at that point.

But elsewhere, that's what I've been searching for with the recent trend in services and computing: commonality, efficiency, convenience, and familiarity. I'll continue to let Google mine what I let them mine, it makes life not only easier at times, but also can be made more enjoyable.

But I cannot lie and say I don't sometimes go out of my way to keep some things separate, or to find the one thing that does that specific task better than anyone else, even if it means breaking my information flow.

I am curious to see if I could find some very helpful tech stuff while troubleshooting at work that much easier using something else. On the more obscure things, I do find it frustrating with Google but I've always just chalked it up to the obscurity, and having too specific approach not just in text but in my mental understanding.
Today, I was trying to find some info regarding database authentication errors with a specific application (Symprex Signature Manager). There's like nothing for the terms I was using - change it up for the more generic issue (SQL Server/database authentication error for "Domain\MachineName$") and I get, comparatively, a flood of results. Granted, half of them are shit for what I specifically am trying to find, but there are various reasons for that.
 
Just to make sure, you know about boolean expressions, right? Not trying to be a dick but in my day to day I have heard lots of grumbling about search engines from people that had no idea that you can use boolean expressions, or bother to use Google's built in tools for filtering by date, language, and other variables.

The same way I hear about how everyone is a bad driver from people that regularly distract themselves some way and pay no attention to driving, yet fail to see the hypocrisy.
 
Captain Howdy said:
Just to make sure, you know about boolean expressions, right? Not trying to be a dick but in my day to day I have heard lots of grumbling about search engines from people that had no idea that you can use boolean expressions, or bother to use Google's built in tools for filtering by date, language, and other variables.

The same way I hear about how everyone is a bad driver from people that regularly distract themselves some way and pay no attention to driving, yet fail to see the hypocrisy.
Click to expand...

Yes, I do. Like others have said: At minimum, quotes have become a necessity.

The beauty of Google was that it helped END the days of 'LOL you didn't but plus signs or AND between everything, of course your search sucks.' That was also when websites had to be manually added to search engines. Dark times.

Like I said, the more specific you get, the more Google seems to say 'WHAT, YOU DON'T WANT A FREE IPAD? NO RESULTS FOR YOU!'
 
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