Comment on Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing?

rem26_art@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  DDG, because they’re so heavily reliant on bing, has gone to absolute shit recently. I’m just about to quit them. Every link in the top ten goes to some M$N / microsoft-adjacent garbage.

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  • Bluefruit@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Oh so its not just me who thinks its gotten worse then. I was starting to go a little crazy man. It seems like its slowly gottwn worse over time. I wonder if its due to the amount of ai content messing up seo ratings or something

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    • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Not just you, no. Microsoft has just gone nuts with their overreach and DDG appears to be collateral damage. After ? A long time of being fine for 90% of what I needed.

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  • konalt@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Duckduckgo is awful at searching for specific memes I need. Sometimes I only remember the text and a rough description of the image, but DDG seems only to consider images with Impact TOP TEXT BOTTOM TEXT captions to be memes. I switch to Google and I find the one I want instantly. If there was a way to have the image results of Google with the web results of DDG my life would be complete

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    • Tixanou@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      If there was a way to have the image results of Google with the web results of DDG my life would be complete

      You might want to look into 4get and SearXNG

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  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah, after some years of DDG getting worse I finally dropped them. I switched to Brave and it’s surprisingly decent for an independent search engine. If you search for something that they don’t have good results for they’ll ask you if you want to get anonymous results from google as well, which means I don’t usually have to switch search engines for harder results.

    They do seem to have a much lower number of image results though.

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    • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      brave can go fuck itself

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      • sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Why? I’ve never used it, so not disagreeing, but that seems a pretty strong reaction to a search engine.

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  • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    every day it looks more and more clear that we’re gonna have no choice but pay for kagi if we want to find anything worth a fuck on the internet

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    • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      That’s the conclusion I keep coming to as well, and its kind of sad.

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  • Flightbird386@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I use -msn , which seems to help somewhat

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• subtext@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I believe they’ve said that explicit operators are much more expensive to serve than a regular search, so that’s probably why they don’t respect them. Especially a - operator.

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• skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  DDG doesn’t have their own search index, they’re mostly using Bing and maybe a few fallback providers. They’re entirely reliant on other search engines that they purchase results from, they barely do any actual searching themselves. Things like image search even come from one single source (Bing).

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