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posted by martyb on Saturday March 02 2024, @12:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.

How do you find information online?

There are Lists of search engines.

But, which one(s) do you use and why?

Do you use just one search engine? Do you have one primary search engine and another one that you use only when your primary fails? May you use multiple engines depending on whether your search is on your desktop, mobile, or TV?

How do YOU choose?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by BlueCoffee on Sunday March 03 2024, @01:17PM

    by BlueCoffee (18257) on Sunday March 03 2024, @01:17PM (#1347206)

    I am talking about Google and Bing since most independent search engines are just front ends that run off them, including DDG (Bing) and Startpage (Google). I prefer to use DDG and SP for privacy reasons.

    Search engines suck today because they, especially google, seem to randomly ignore search terms, or OR instead of AND search terms, and even more frustrating they randomly ignore +- operators. I think they think returning 40000 results that contain 1 out of 5 search terms on each page is better than returning 40 pages with all 5 search terms. 40000 is larger than 40, so it must be better right? Not!

    On top of that they remove old results thus a lot of the history of the www had disappeared. Thankfully there is the Internet Archive.
    Too be fair, it's is probably not completely the engine's fault that result quality is declined. Webpages today are not easily indexed html, text, and images, but instead they get rendered by thousands of lines of machine generated css and javascript gobbledegook which poses significant indexing challenges to sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

    Brave search created their own search engine; they don't use Google or Bing. Just started using it this week-trying it out after Google's "google doesn't allow results that contain white people" hate scandal. Haven't directly compared it to Bing or Google but I so far I am happy with it and I find what I am looking for, except for pictures results which can be sparse. Brave has a useful page summarizer that will condense long topics for you, and I have found their AI Assist to be helpful in solving for coding issues-it'll write the solution in front of your eyes in three seconds.

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