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Step 1: Don’t use google
Step 2: Learn how to write a proper search query.
Step 3: realize you're trying to solve your problem the wrong way
Even that is becoming less useful, now that Google is full of sites that are primarily focused on SEO instead of actually providing a useful service to the user. Even on proper searches, the top three or four hits will be spam/irrelevant/blatant AI-generated SEO to get ad views.
What does a proper one look like? I knew that there was a correct way to do it but I never understood what it was
It really depends on what you're searching for, but avoid searching complete sentences and try to keep your keywords very specific to what you want.
Don't sleep on Boolean operators, they're helpful as well.
Got any viable alternatives? Duckduckgo just doesn’t cut it for me.
You can always use !g ‘bang’ on the searchbar which will open results from google
You can also try searx, or searxng
I committed to using ddg for a couple years, but after having to use bangs for everything but the most trivial searches, I had to be honest with myself and just go back to Google. Google's definitely a lot worse than it used to be, but in my experience it's sadly still the best of the mainstream search engines.
Never heard of searx though, I'll have to give it a try
Give kagi a shot, it has worked great for me
I’ve heard of them before but the pricing seems pretty steep. I now see they also have a free trial plan, I’ll check that out.
Thanks!
No problem! Make sure to test the universal summarizer also, it has been extremely useful for skimming scientific papers and documentations (you can also select "discuss further" to ask specific questions about the material).
I also felt that the price is too much, until I started to actually think how much I use and rely on search engines in my life, and suddenly the cost doesn't seem all that high. Granted I'm fortunate enough to live in a high-income country.
You can always use !g ‘bang’ on the searchbar which will open results from google
You can also try searx, or searxng
I’ve tried searx some years ago but couldn’t find a stable instance and didn’t want to host my own.
Oh, that sucks, if you like google and understand the risks, then yeah by all means use it, what I do personally is use duckduckgo as it provides good results 90 percent of the time, when it doesn’t, i just type ‘!g’ on the search bar and it redirects me to google search results