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Comment by r_singh | Hacker News Reader

I use hn.algolia.com as a more reliable source to look for info & opinion on a lot of things a lot more than I use google.

I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.

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With all their efforts to block copyrighted stuff their engine has really gone downhill I swear, and this was years ago. I hardly ever find anything I'm looking for, that or we've hit a stage on the internet where people don't ask any questions on Stack Overflow and just google and monkey patch it all together.

A lot of the stack overflow questions are moved to domain specific slack/discord/spectrumapp communities. Effectively making them harder to search, more gated and incrowdy than regular websites

Another invaluable reason for IRC log bots. Maybe we need Discord logbots too? I am no fan of Slack for open source projects / free communities though.

> I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.

I switched to DDG on my phone and it’s good. Recommend it.

I’ve been using DDG full time everywhere for a year and it was really good but has become pretty bad in the last few months. I begrudgingly have to open Google more and more. Not sure what is up.

Yup, it keeps treating all search terms as optional. My searches all "look" "like" "this" now, and it still omits stuff. Infuriating. Respect my search query.

DDG isn't a competitor, it's a meta search engine, that just uses Google and Bing under the hood.

The history of search engines is more complicated than most people realize. There's nothing weird about a search site using a different engine than you expect. Someday it could use different ones, or someday it may deploy its own.

I think other than Google that pretty much every site has had engines change over the years. IIRC Microsoft had a search site before Bing, for instance, and IIRC AltaVista changed search engine quite often as it struggled to retain relevance. In general, it's not really the engines that people are upset about, it's the parasitic stuff attached to it at the gate entrance.

Also I'm pretty sure it doesn't use Google. Last I knew Bing is used.

That’s not true?

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