I'm completely fed up with Google. They took away my ability to get more than ten hits per page, and there's now so much damn cruft on the results page (AI, ads, shopping, videos, etc. etc.) that it often has only six or seven actual site links. It's maddening because I often have to go way beyond ten (or six) results to get what I want. That now takes forever.
But what should I replace it with? Bing is also limited to ten results per page, so it's out. DuckDuckGo has an infinite number of results and no cruft, which is great. That's probably my choice. But what I'd really like is an advanced search page. Google still has this, but DDG doesn't. And it would be so easy to add!
Obviously I can make do without this, but it sure is handy. Any recommendations? Either for good search engines in general or for search engines with advanced search?
Do I get to be the one to share the good news? Take a google search and, in the URL, add &udm=14 at the end. You will get an entirely cruft-free Google search page!
People have even made a page that will add it for you, or it's easy to make a custom search (eg, in Chrome) that will append udm=14 for you.
https://udm14.com/
Here's the page describing how this works: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
Wow. Thanks.
Amazing!
Tested and confirmed, in excess of expectations.
That rates a damn sticky-note on my monitor (until it becomes a habit), which happens maybe half a dozen times a year!
A thousand blessings on the critter of your choice!
I've been using this for a while in Vivaldi, and it works great.
Kagi.com is very popular with the tech community. But, it is paid. They do offer some limited free searching with signup.
I second Kagi.com (had used Neeva before it was acquired and shuttered). Not a member of the tech community. Has terrific results. And the advanced search options you're looking for. It is paid though (but ad- and tracker-free as a result).
They also offer a Mac browser called Orion built on Safari's Webkit. Difference is that one can install Firefox and Chrome extensions. uBlock Origin still works well on Firefox although it will be (is?) hobbled on Chrome.
I switched to DDG a while ago because I was tired of Google being creepy and serving me ads and YouTube recommendations based on stuff I searched for, thus making queries based on idle curiosity feel far more serious than I wanted them to be. Then again, I'm not a data journalist or doing anything particularly advanced, so my needs are pretty simple.
You can tell it not to do that.
...It's somewhere in your search settings page.
Another upvote for Kagi; awesome product. I hope this is the beginning of the trend of People Paying for Stuff. I mean, you do anyway, but as is now generally acknowledged, the so-called 'free' stuff will be crap much, much more often than not. It's time to get with the micropayments model.
Another Kagi vote.
It is roughly as good as Google was 7-10 years ago for my purposes. Absolutely worth the $10/month for me.
It seems like they've found an interesting niche, being too small to be worth targeting for "optimization". I guess we'll see how long that can last.
FWIW, the company is incredibly responsive. I've filed two bug reports, and the slower fix was in place the next day.
If you click the "Web" button at the top of the Google results page, most of the junk goes away: the shopping links, the "others have asked" stuff... Sometimes you have to find the "Web" button under "More," depending on the size of your search window. This may be the same as the &udm=14 fix mentioned above, I don't know, but it does help limit the junk. I use DDG myself.
I usually use the web search tab. There are still sponsored ads up top, though.
Yes, that URL parameter is the same as the Web tab. It's been my default since I heard of it over the summer. So much better than the All results I occasionally accidentally click on!
Many advanced search filters are available at the vanilla search argument of most search engines as search operators. A list of the search operators available form Google is here:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
I use site: and format: all the time
It sure did get a lot worse in switching to its AI version a couple of weeks ago on me. I've changed to the "pure" search results version, but in the process I've lost something. For a long time, Google did offer some info, and I liked that. Say, if I searched for a museum, a right column would show whether it's open or closed at this hour and day, and clicking on a down arrow would then give weekly hours. But I just can't stand the alternative now of getting its AI idea of what I want to know right at the top and little else.
Why does Duck Duck Go have to have such a stupid name? That probably more than anything stops me from checking it out.
Duck Duck Go has a stupid name because the guys who named the company are six-year-olds in adult bodies.
But that's also why they aren't in it strictly for the money. Six-year-olds don't care about money. They just like cool toys.
... unlike that reassuringly corporate-sounding "Google"?
As usual, the real money is in faking people out. It's also getting very difficult to read anything on the internet, between the ads and video and the privacy questions.
Encyclopedia Brittanica?
Google Search is a dumpster bin of advertising and deception and distraction, with just enough facts thrown in to keep most people from giving up on them entirely.
Back in 2006, when Google was just a few years old, they were trying to map the entire earth and I met some of their senior programmers (because I design telescope optics). They all loved UNIX, had long white beards and pot bellies, and about half of them wore T-shirts that said
DON'T BE EVIL
Of course, that was a long time ago, and a lot of advertising dollars have been thrown their way since then, and who is so firm that they cannot be seduced?
Then there is the arc of Google:
Knowledge is Power -- Power Corrupts -- Study Hard -- Be Evil
Oh, one other thing about Google that really annoys me, and it's not the search engine. Pop-ups on ever so many Web pates now dominate the screen asking if I want to lot in via Google, rather than let me log in via my pw for that site (or not at all). (Neither Ublock nor nor a right click custom blocking of that element nor the browser's setting to to kill popup swill make it go away. Nor will any setting (recommended by some) on logging into Google itself. They just are out to control the Web.
This filter in uBlock Origin disables the login with Google box for me.
||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe
All of the big monopolistic squatters scream "We use AI!" all day.
If AI had any promise, wouldn't search results begin to suck less than they used to, instead of more, as they're now doing?
+1
Depends on what tools you are using and how you are asking the questions. I bypass web search all the time and go right to ChatGPT for a lot of stuff for work. I was looking for citations for low income rebate delivery barriers and didn't even bother with Google.
Maps is something I could use a non advertising based solve for - I get really tired of searching for something and getting 10 offers and ads for "local" things.
Search results are never going to suck less as long as there's money to be made from advertising. I use Duck Duck Go when I'm doing basic searches because, like others, I'm done being tracked everywhere I go and getting ads for something random I looked up yesterday.
It's all AI, though. Search engines, LLMs, etc. Giant graphs of increasing complexity.
I have been using Duck Duck on on Macs for years. Couldn’t tolerate Google.
Startpage takes Google search and strips out all the privacy invading stuff. I tried DuckDuckGo but I didn't find it turned up the most useful results. Right now, I have one computer trying Qwant. So far it is . . . OK. I don't have complaints in general.
I had the same experience with duckduckgo... never found more useful results.
There also this repository of past Google search box styles.
https://oldgoogle.neocities.org/
I'm another happy Kagi user. I honestly haven't noticed a big quality difference between their results and Bing, but I do like their ability to adjust the ranking of particular domains, and their UI is clean.
I use DuckDuckGo because it’s better than Google with respect to privacy, but the Google search results are a bit better (unless something’s changed recently). Issues with DuckDuckGo:
False positives (search results that don’t match your query) can vastly outnumber the matching results. Enclosing your search terms in double quotes (quoting each word separately) reduces these.
False negatives (pages matching your query that don’t show up in the search results) also occur. Specifically, I’ve observed:
1. Find a web page, say https://xyz.com/page.html
2. Search for more information on DuckDuckGo using a query that matches the page you are looking at.
3. https://xyz.com/page.html is not included in the search results.
4. Add "site:xyz.com" to the query, and https://xyz.com/page.html shows up in the results, showing that DuckDuckGo has indexed the page.
In addition, I think there are a fair number of web pages that DuckDuckGo hasn’t indexed but Google has.
Duplicate results are no longer a problem; pages are included only once in the search results.
Startpage.com with an ad blocker is Google search without all the bullshit. Duck Duck Go is Bing, and their search results are generally not as good as Google. Kagi is also worth a look (even though it's paid) as it gives you control over blocking bad sites.