- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.
I love a good, informative troll.
In my recent experience, it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.
Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google’s quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don’t get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.
The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”
And super specific queries?
For me it’s programming issues. I guess devs know that doing SEO would shoot themselves in the foot.
Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?
Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.
So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.
At least that’s my guess anyway.
Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.
It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.
deleted by creator
Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It’s almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.
deleted by creator
What? Why do you think that?
No it has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone.
use Indie Wiki Buddy extension to get rid of fandom.
https://getindie.wiki/
Or ublacklist to block any site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
That works too, but indie buddy works better because it gives you a direct link to the proper indie wiki page in search results rather than just blocking Fandom and leaving you with nothing.
This extension stopped working correctly for me some time ago. It just stopped redirecting to breezewiki correctly.
Hmm. Has it updated, and have you allowed it the correct site permissions? Every once in a while it’ll ask you to update the site modification permissions.
I’ve had zero issues with it on Firefox and DDG. May vary on other browsers and search engines though.
It has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone. I have been using DDG for a decade. I noticed a distinct drop in search quality after the bing partnership.
Oh my god the Fandom wiki for minecraft uses the same little tab icon as the actual minecraft wiki but it has a fucking “are you an adult or child” popup EVERY SINGLE TIME a page loads
I hate it so much
If I’m looking up something general, like some actor or tv show, then DDG is perfect. If im troubleshooting some weird software issue then i find it doesnt always list as many results, as if it hasnt indexed as many sites.
DDG at least now means I can search random shit without it suddenly being inserted into my social media algorithms like some kind of psychological torture.
Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
If you have any tips or tricks for DDG please do share! I’m definitely getting better overall results there, but the local ones can still be a bit rough.
I’m no expert but this should be useful: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/duckduckgo-search-tricks-student/
What do you mean by “local”? If you mean finding somewhere to go for lunch or the opening hours of a store, I recommend using the maps app on your phone (I prefer Apple Maps over Google, because it uses Yelp and TripAdvisor for reviews which are accurate than Google reviews… if I had an Android phone I’d probably install Yelp/TripAdvisor).
Unfortunately DDG has been dogshit in my native language. Shame
I found that Qwant gives decent results in my native non English language, results similar in quality to Google, but way better than DDG which often just gives English results.
What are better alternatives to fandom? I see the incumbents name get repeated more often than the alternative unfortunately.
The problem is that fandom tends to vacuum up and supersede the smaller wikis, and the SEO bullshit just makes it happen even faster. The answer to your question unfortunately is “it depends on the game/show/fandom”.
wiki.gg is where most of the wikis have transferred to, terraria for example
DDG tries very hard to push Amazon and Ebay to me. They’re not even available in my country 😅
That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I’d report it to DDG.
I don’t know why they would need my location/region. They’re already trying too hard to advertise stuff to me. Isn’t the internet like, international? Other search engines I never get that Ebay/Amazon stuff, it’s a DDG feature for whatever IP I get.