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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

Went to my default search (DDG) - Basecamp is the first result on top and then third result. Wikipedia page about them is also on top to the right side. Disabled adblocker - surprise surprise, got same results :) .

Opened Google without adblocker - now that's pathetic - two ads on top from Monday and Teamwork companies, then third result is Basecamp. Wikipedia result is below the fold, 8th result.

This is one of the reasons why I dropped Google as main search engine two years ago and opened it maybe five or ten times this year (for non-english highly sepicific queries). Google search is simply not the top one now and privacy concern too.

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Try searching for building materials, The entire first page is pretty much just ads. I did a local search for garden tiles, 9 actual search results, somewhere between 7 and 22 ads (depending on what you count as "one" ads).

In many cases Google is just an online ad catalog, not a search engine.

It's been this way ever since they delisted product pages, at the same time they started charging for "shopping" tab listings.

Idk if it was a coincidence, but it seems like that exclusion filter was (and is) overly aggressive.

IMHO, this spawned the era of fake reviews and crappy commission websites. Google forced multiple layers of un-needed middle management, which of course spawned multiple layers of advertising. (Search ads to find reviews site. Banner ads on review site. Commission links to get to actual product page. Instead of just search and click product page.)

The same perverse "layering" system seems to have happened for recipe sites, although I'm not sure why. Search results list tons of home chefs, reviewers, and the crappy sites that think adding 3 paragraphs of shitty narrative improves the quality of their knock-off recipe.

I went to my default search (Google with uBlock origin) and same thing. That combo works pretty well for the moment.

May I ask what you use instead now? I've tried replacing Google search a few times but was never successful.

They mentioned DDG which is duckduckgo.com

Once nice thing about DDG is, if you really need to hit another search engine (I've noticed Google does a decent job when I'm searching for the resolution to a highly technical/specific issue), you just use the bangs, like !g for Google.

They have 13,099 bangs[0] at present.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

And there are a lot of other tricks[0] based on Instant Answers[1].

0: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-search-tricks-work-duckduckg...

1: https://duck.co/ia

Solarized DuckDuckGo made me switch... here's a shareable link with the custom colors: https://start.duckduckgo.com/?kae=%23073642&kj=%23073642++&k...

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