Like most internet users I used to use Google to search for information but now the quality of the results is abysmal and I no longer find it useful most of the time.<p>I've tried other search engines (Bing, Yandex) and the results are a bit better but still nowhere near the old Google. Kagi is a thing but I'm not sure if the quality justifies $120/year, especially since I don't earn my salary in USD.<p>Putting "site:reddit.com" helps a bit but there's plenty of stuff that simply isn't there, so it's not a solution either.<p>LLMs are a bit better with the quality of the searches but hallucinations are a thing so I need to verify the information myself so I am back to square one.<p>Is there anything else I can do to find information easier or to improve the quality of the searches?
If you know the below mentioned, then just ignore. Otherwise give it a try.<p>There is one thing, that many people either forgot, or never knew: how to create a search query. Nowadays most people put in a human question: "how to bake bread", "how to use a red toilet seat", "what happens to today around the corner".<p>However even to this day, search engines gives better results if instead this, you try to imagine the results, and search for text that you think appears on the correct result: "bread recipe", "toilet seat user manual", "concert Tuvalu 2024 november"
I'd say "-site:reddit.com" helps a lot. And also "-site:youtube.com" and some others :)<p>Admittedly, I usually do the exclusion in my brain and not actually via the search query.<p>I don't know where the hype comes from, which says that reddit posts are particularly smart and useful. Maybe just from their own marketing, which is repeated over and over in social media by these 'smart' guys?! It's completely not reflected by my practical experiences at all.<p>When I accidentally end on a reddit thread and read some posts, I'm always like "Well, and that's it? What a waste of time..."
While I still mainly use Google to search for terms online, I am increasingly using the free version of Perplexity for more advanced topics or general questions.
Perplexity is an LLM like Claude and ChatGPT, but instead of relying on the data it's been trained on, Perplexity gathers a whole bunch of sources (websites, youtube video transcripts, etc.) related to your query, and then uses the contents of those sources to generate an answer.
So while it may not be as smart as Claude or ChatGPT on certain topics, it does seem to hallucinate a whole lot less.
And at times when I'm not given the answer I'm looking for, or when I want to make sure it's not making things up, I simply browse the list of sources it used to generate its answer.
I’m afraid there’s no silver bullet.<p>Marginalia can be useful, even if the index is quite small compared to other search engines: <a href="https://search.marginalia.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://search.marginalia.nu/</a>
What are you trying to find? It's not the quality of search that has declined but the quality of the web itself. What used to be interesting blogs are now ad-filled SEO garbage. Good content is now more and more behind logins and paywalls. So much of the rest is bot generated.<p>Search as a concept is useless unless you know <i>exactly</i> what you are looking for and know that it will be in the top 3 results (for example a company's official website or a wikipedia article).
If you're getting a ton of irrelevant results, it's helpful to find a word common to them and exclude it from results; I don't have an easy way of measuring how many relevant results are excluded but if you choose it well it'll help. Similarly, find some list of all the operators for a given search engine and try them out.<p>I've found searching multiple indexes can be helpful, especially ones that seek different categories of thing out. For instance if I can't find something using Google, Marginalia can be surprisingly helpful. A list
of sites to try is available here: <a href="https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/" rel="nofollow">https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...</a>.<p>Also, often finding some discussion of something that seems <i>close</i> to what you want and might discuss it briefly and seeing what it links to will help. But that's from mostly looking at academic stuff, which has copious citations that often won't show up in a search query for a term, but can be found in the likes of JSTOR or LibGen/SciHub.<p>Also from academic stuff: if you can find directories of things related to what you want (eg 'old books about the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey,' to take a real question I had), often a more general term ('old books') and then searching those websites (HathiTrust, Internet Archive, etc) directly will find things.<p>But that's for someone who primarily runs into trouble because I'm researching obscure subjects and probably are less applicable in other areas.
Oh man, I feel you. Searching for good info these days feels like panning for gold in a kiddie pool—every once in a while, you strike it rich, but mostly, it’s just wet disappointment.<p>I’ve been down the same rabbit hole (tried Kagi, got sticker shock, and yep, LLMs are great... until they start making stuff up). One thing that’s helped me cut through the noise is sharpening my critical thinking skills—it’s like giving your brain a search engine upgrade. I wrote a newsletter - just started - post about this (with some hopefully helpful tips), so if you’re up for a quick read, check it out: <a href="https://bottedconversations.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-the-superpower" rel="nofollow">https://bottedconversations.substack.com/p/critical-thinking...</a>.<p>Let me know what you think, please! Always looking for better ways to avoid the search engine struggle bus!
Pay. Simple. The enshitification is a direct result of the free business model, where the users of the service are actually the product, and the advertisers are the real customers. Even if kagi feels too expensive, you are still voting with your wallet by choosing a service that you pay for and showing companies that they can focus on building good products for the people who use them and are willing to pay for them. FWIW, the same is true of social networks, but they suffer from the additional complexity of needing enough people to use a service to make it worthwhile.
search operators (<a href="https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/" rel="nofollow">https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/</a>)<p>in particular:
site;
intitle;
- (to exlude search terms);
* (wildcard matches);
before/after:<p>In addition on Youtube using any search operator also seems to get rid of most of the "for you / you already watched.." crap that they for some reason decide to shove into the middle of the search results.
I regularly use Ecosia, Dogpile, Qwant. Saving D.D.G for simple tasks.
Wikipedia displays a Timeline List with active engines highlighted <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine</a>
Could you provide example search queries that return bad results? My solution is to ask generic stuff from LLMs (and rarely youtube) and read specific on vendor's website. HN search works good as well.
Google still works for me. I don't know if it's because I am in the EU or because uBlock Origin gets rid of the promoted results, probably both.<p>Also, if you are searching for something time-specific then "after:" and "before:" work great.