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Comment by sollewitt | Hacker News Reader

Google needs the competition. Search it's getting more and more laden with ads, and I have found the kind of specific technical searches it used to excel at are increasingly on page 2 after articles and videos and product listings.

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Not to mention the dozen poorly-formatted Stack Overflow and GitHub issue aggregators that show up before the actual Stack Overflow and GitHub results.

Ah yes, I noticed that recently. To add insult to injury mine are poorly translated in French.

hell, it ain't just ads, it's outright malware at this point. i had to look up some shit about my printer, and hoo boy, searching for that churns up even more of a cesspool than i get when trying to search specialized windows topics. those don't turn up anything useful most of the time, but it's at least benign--a wall of posts on official MS forums where the top answer is some "top community contributor" yeeting out a "my friend, have you tried rebooting and reinstalling drivers?" copy-pasta response to any conceivable question

the printer stuff is something else. i put some fault on canon here for pushing me to unofficial sites because their official shit requires you to download a fucking exe to deliver a PDF manual (cmon, wtf, how can your docs delivery pipeline be THAT bad), but the unofficial stuff is some ninth circle of hell

the first was some bog-standard infini-redirect ad fraud crap, but the second was uh... well, i was impressed to the degree that the indian tech chop shop "YOU ARE INFECT DIAL 1-800-LEGIT-MICROSOFT TO CLEAN COMPUTER" site was able to shut down a fully up-to-date copy of firefox, somehow eating all my other tabs, grabbing hold of my mouse pointer in strange ways when the window was in focus AND preventing the windows "close window" button from killing it.

task manager was still able to execute it but damn, that was some ARTISTRY put into making the fraud site as clingy as possible--puts 90s-era malware sites to shame, and this shit kicks around on right on the first page of google search results for a printer manual query, not some shady-ass porn site you'd drunkenly click through to via 3 levels of ever-sketchier ads

people ranted and raved about goods of questionable quality gaming amazon reviews, but eh--honestly, most of those i've bought were fine, if not artisanal high-end shit--they just engaged in a lot of dubious "get free shit for a good review" growth hacking tactics that are A-OKAY THATS JUST HOW YA DO BUSINESS when it's some SF startup pulling the same crap in a different form. it's weird how seemingly nobody gives a fuck that a lot of google searches will boost things that are far worse--offering purestrain fraud on a platter is fine, selling mediocre flash drives and kitchen gadgets with inflated reviews is THE HIGHEST OF CRIMES

I love your writing style and attitude. Craving more.

it's rather divisive, seemingly--50/50 whether it gets upvoted or nigh-instantly -1 and flagged. lol hn, WE MUST WRITE VERY FORMAL TRADITIONAL ENGLISH HERE

Diversity would definitely be positive, the web is too important to have it indexed and sorted from one perspective only. Would prefer half a dozen engines and perhaps all enabled to provide results to metas who could further offer more diversity.

You can use/host searx (https://searx.space/) or yacy (https://yacy.net/) to go one step further.

Yacy is about as useful as searching the internet with grep. You can search "Facebook" and the first 20 pages are foreign spam blogs that have the word facebook on them.

And Searx is only useful in English or so it seems.

They're definitely not great but they're a good place to start.

way back in 00s, Google felt exactly like grepping the whole internet, including niche blogs, minus the spam (for the most part).

Somewhere in between, Google stopped caring, and we have what we have today.

There's these alternatives also, all privacy focused but mostly reliant on other engines for data: https://www.eu-startups.com/2020/09/5-european-google-compet...

I made the switch to a Searx instance from Google about 3 weeks ago and it's been great for me (now I just get Google's results in Searx with added privacy).

Dark mode to save my eyes, setting my own personal preferences for which search engines to use for results, Cached results link and proxied links, a files search engine...

The only difference is that I wasn't already heavily invested in other Google products. e.g. Gmail, Lots of saved Maps POI, etc.

For someone who is heavily invested, I'm not sure if the switch to Searx is worth the lack of convenience.

Part of that, I think, is just that the SEO industry has matured so much any random person can quickly climb the rankings by short-circuiting Google with basic SEO, taking over space which should've gone to more quality content instead.

Yes. Apple hardware is a business model but the search engine business is a hefty one.

Why would it be any better than Bing?

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