First of all google went to shit, but duckduckgo has been disappointing me too.
I moved to searx and it was decent but confused me a bit and not always reliable.
But the single biggest problem on the internet for me… The yt search bar. My god I fucking hate it with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
Its not usable. 90% of the time I’m getting random Indian videos with nothing to do woth my search, shorts (which I blocked in revanced so thats fine now) and people also watch or recommended videos from my user profile.
Amazon
I’ve never gone to a website and searched for socks and been shown bicycles before.
Agreed, which I know is on purpose trying to get you to spend more time on the site and see more things that could be impulse buys.
I vehemently hate when any website hijacks my web browser’s ctrl+f or forward slash keyboard shortcuts for searching the page.
It’s completely insane to me that javascript can override web browsers’ builtin keyboard shortcuts.
I switched to Kagi a year ago. It’s free for first hundred searches so you can see what it’s like. If you like it you can pay for it. I know paying for a search Engine is very niche, but I use my search Engine for both work and personal, it’s a tool and frankly you’ve already hit the nail on the the head with everything else just being shit. Between rubbish results and poor privacy, I really am happy that I have Kagi as an option. The price per year ain’t bad for how much I use it and I’m happy my money is going to devs rather that aren’t selling my data
I also like Kagi and I think it’s the best search engine nowadays. I’m just sad because it’s based in the US.
I work in ecommerce, so the answer is “ours”. I get far too many calls saying “Do you sell x”, or “How much is y”, and because of how terrible our website’s search function is, I can’t just say “use the fucking website, that’s what it’s there for” like I desperately want to.
Used to be Reddit’s.
These days, it’s Google’s.
I haven’t used google in 3-4 years. Is it even worse now?
It’s been going pretty steadily downhill for about 10 years now, but with the addition of the AI bullshit on top of the other SEO issues, it’s basically useless now.
Ah. Even duckduckgo added ai.
Plus they dont use the best models which makes it even worse
There’s at least has an easily acceptable option to disable it
I remember reddits search function a complete failiure. Even if I entered the precise title of a post, it could not find it. But it found hundreds of completely unrelated posts.
Hidden RSS links
Definitely also agree on YouTube. I was thinking though, I never ever use tumblr’s search, because it doesn’t work at all. I’ve tried to search for specific posts, and it just does not work. That’s part of the fun of tumblr though.
Github. The
/key is usually a shortcut in Firefox (and many other software) for search. But they hijacked it to their search-field that requires you to be logged in anyway. So you can only use ctrl+f on their site.For websearch I’ve switched to Kagi and it does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less.
In general, anything that hijacks search shortcuts.
Oh you wanted to search for text on this one page? Let me show you a search bar for the whole website instead, with a search that’s strictly worse than the search engine that you came from in the first place.
some time ago i realized it’s better to find youtube videos on video.google.com.
yandex is pretty good these days but is full of captcha, luckily eTools doesn’t have much and pulls from multiple engines including it.
Anyone using Mojeek?
Their about page: https://www.mojeek.com/about/
I’ve tried but their search results in my language were bad.
Sorry to hear that. Do you get better results with SearXNG?
In addition to what you mentioned, another really annoying thing about Youtube’s search is that it sometimes gives totally different results from one minute to the next. You can search for something, then type those exact same words just a few seconds later, and you get a completely different list of videos. So if you ever do get a list of good results, you need to leave that browser tab alone and open a new one to keep those results “safe.”
When I used Brave the image search was extremely bad. I bet it still is
Discourse
Damn, I too went to this same route of Google -> duckduckgo -> Searx. While it is true searx is unreliable at times, if you enable more engines and find an instance that has anti botting features, it should be pretty solid
