this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you're keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. "We cut 200 lines of code if it'll give us a millisecond of page load speed", that kind of thing.
How they've fallen.
well they don't need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don't want to use it, and you can't unpin it from the taskbar either
Google sucks so bad that I switched to Bing. BING!
DuckDuckGo for day-to-day stuff, Bing for naughty content.
Duckduckgo is bing. They route their searches there afaik. It's just a privacy layer, like startpage is a privacy layer on Google.
Duckduckgo also has bangs, which I consider an essential feature.
Although I use SearXNG instead, since their equivalent is a lot more customisable (although less bangs out of the box).
Are there any that have a top knot or fauxhawk though? Asking for a friend.
Yep. I was using ddg but just spun up 2 sear instances for myself. (One on vpn one off)
What are your favorite searxng customizations / bangs?
Nothing hugely advanced. I added the NixOS wiki to !software_wikis and I also redirect the old wiki to the new wiki (since the former blocks VPNs). I also use the redirect functionality to redirect twitter/reddit etc links to FOSS frontends.
I've also added a bunch of stackexchange sites with their own keywords.
I'll add you can also use duckduckgo bangs by using !! e.g. !!protondb.
FWIW you can kinda replicate bangs using Firefox using bookmark "keywords" (I think that's what they're called). They basically allow you to create a bang for any site using any trigger characters.
Yeah, I use those constantly. For web searching, Wikipedia, work ticket lookups, etc.
I don't think that's true. They are using the index of bing, but the search results are not. At least that's what I heard, no idea if it's factual or not.
👍🏻 Roger Roger thanks for the correction
Careful saying that round these parts, you'll summon the ducks.
quack
Google sucks so bad you switched to... microsoft? 🤔
You'd be better off selfhosting something like searxNG
fuckya life BING BONG
You’re a decade late on that, Bing isn’t good anymore
Honestly nothing is good anymore. Every search engine brings up the same SEO optimized dogshit articles. I sometimes use Arc browser but that’s not really that different than asking ChatGPT.
It’s so obnoxious. I hate researching a topic only to be fed results leading to useless AI spam. The entire thing is clogged up like this. Searching on the internet absolutely sucks, now.
Yeah. Really sucks how you need to know what you're looking for in order to get any use out of a search engine these days.
For example, if you want to find a "free online video chatroom", you're not going to find it by typing those words into google. You need to know, specifically, that there is a free chatroom called https://stumblechat.com/ and type that into google in order to see it.
The world is fucked.
Recently I don't feel that way after using Kagi. Sure, there's still some junk, but somehow I'm finding what I'm looking for a lot easier. That search in forums toggle is magical.
We really are ruled by corporations.
I guess this is why it was so important to neuter the government and public institutions. Can't have regular people with control over their own lives.