You used to be able to improve them by adding quotes too but for some reason that just pushes all the sponsored results to the top these days
Sponsored results make me irrationally angry and push me to Kagi every time I see them.
Google outright ignores their operators now. There are a bajillion examples of them doing so on Reddit if you doubt that. You can search the subject and see for yourself. They’ll occasionally honor them if there’s no money to be lost, but they’ll blatantly ignore them to show you sponsored content and sites with AdSense on them.
You can improve your google search results by using DuckDuckGo instead.
I really wanted to like DDG, but its results returned are so horribly unusable, I had to give up.
I’m usually searching for something obscure, but add in general terms for general refinement. DDG will ignore my obscure term (the thing I’m actually looking for) and give me pages of results of the general terms. Using special operators doesn’t help. Whereas Google will give me at least a few relevant results using the same search terms.
Yeah I don’t know why DuckDuckGo keeps getting recommended as much as it does.
I couldn’t find on Google, the answer to a simple question the other day. All I wanted to know was the precooked weight of a particular fast food restaurant’s patty.
I made it to page 3 of the Google results, wading through page after page of promotional content, news releases, and sponsored “news-style” articles that were thinly veiled ads.
Decided to visit duck duck go, and was greeted with search results that were even worse than Google.
I realize it’s only one example, but to me it was an example of a search so specific, its egregious that the search engines simply refuse to return a page with the answer.
To everyone complaining about DDG, what are you using? I’ve been using DDG for years now and it’s been fine for me. I have also been testing out StartPage.
I haven’t seen anyone complain about duck duck go for several years.
What about the past participle though? With Google it’s easy - I Googled it. But DuckDuckGoed? That doesn’t sound right. DuckDuckWent?
If you really want good search results, check out Kagi.
Do you use it? How good are the results on rare topics?
I’d be willing to pay for an actually good search engine, but most engines I check give subpar results to google. It’s fine to use a privacy focused search engine for easy searches, but I don’t want to pay for one that will still require me to use google for anything complicated or super specific.
There is a 100 searches trial which oddly enough is actually plenty. It was a very good experience but I wish there was a cheaper plan to be fair
