True. Although I mostly use google for [Technical Keyword] not working with [Technical Keyword], rather than [Who should I vote for]. I actually use hn.algolia.com more often when I want an opinion on something important to me :-)

I use hn.algolia.com as a more reliable source to look for info & opinion on a lot of things a lot more than I use google.

I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.

With all their efforts to block copyrighted stuff their engine has really gone downhill I swear, and this was years ago. I hardly ever find anything I'm looking for, that or we've hit a stage on the internet where people don't ask any questions on Stack Overflow and just google and monkey patch it all together.

A lot of the stack overflow questions are moved to domain specific slack/discord/spectrumapp communities. Effectively making them harder to search, more gated and incrowdy than regular websites

Another invaluable reason for IRC log bots. Maybe we need Discord logbots too? I am no fan of Slack for open source projects / free communities though.

> I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.

I switched to DDG on my phone and it’s good. Recommend it.

I’ve been using DDG full time everywhere for a year and it was really good but has become pretty bad in the last few months. I begrudgingly have to open Google more and more. Not sure what is up.

Yup, it keeps treating all search terms as optional. My searches all "look" "like" "this" now, and it still omits stuff. Infuriating. Respect my search query.

DDG isn't a competitor, it's a meta search engine, that just uses Google and Bing under the hood.

The history of search engines is more complicated than most people realize. There's nothing weird about a search site using a different engine than you expect. Someday it could use different ones, or someday it may deploy its own.

I think other than Google that pretty much every site has had engines change over the years. IIRC Microsoft had a search site before Bing, for instance, and IIRC AltaVista changed search engine quite often as it struggled to retain relevance. In general, it's not really the engines that people are upset about, it's the parasitic stuff attached to it at the gate entrance.

Also I'm pretty sure it doesn't use Google. Last I knew Bing is used.

That’s not true?

Bubbling (something Google does intentionally to make the user experience better) is a much different and much less serious problem than the fact that Google offers inadequate customer support and has a heavy-handed banning policy

I'm not convinced it's less serious. Google's bad behaviour is serious precisely because it has total control of the memetic environment. I've never had a problem with Google that would have required customer support, but I am conscious that I make dozens of Google searches a day, and that my view of the web is exactly what Google wants my view of the web to be. That scares me more than the customer service I've never gotten.

> and that my view of the web is exactly what Google wants my view of the web to be

How so? As far as I know, the bubbling is based on your input only, not Google's. So their desires as a company are not involved in what you see.

"Bubbling" per se is essentially defined as that portion of Google's ranking algorithm that incorporates its opinion of you. The rest of it, the generic part of Google's algorithm, can and does reflect Google's desires as a company. The EU even fined them billions for it (specifically, for promoting Google Shopping over competing comparison services).

> "Bubbling" per se is essentially defined as that portion of Google's ranking algorithm that incorporates its opinion of you.

It's about incorporating Google's opinion of what you want to see, but you seemed to be implying that it is about incorporating Google's opinion of what you ought to see. I think that is somewhat misleading.

> The rest of it, the generic part of Google's algorithm, can and does reflect Google's desires as a company.

True, but what does that have to do with bubbling? Any sufficiently advanced search technology will have that problem whether it uses bubbling or not.

Use DuckDuckGo.

It's feudalism, because you don't have a choice.

You have a choice, the choices are just worse.

I tried using DDG for a long time, but it's just _terrible_ for technical queries.

Not as good as google, but it still makes sense to make it (or something else) your default search engine for those 99% of times it actually works just fine.

But it doesn't work fine 99%. I tried to find a short story I read awhile ago, so I DDG'ed for "Berryman Parrot".

DDG helpfully suggests a bunch of unrelated videos - a Coldplay video, a Tyler, The Creator sketch from the Eric Andrew show, and something about a C-line fencing tool. The actual search results are vaguely related, since the first one is a youtube video about birds with someone named Berryman in the description. The next one is a bird rescue, and the third appears to be some sort of etsy shop.

Compare to Google. The first result is the Wikipedia entry for the exact story I was searching for. The second result is the full published story. The third is a related story set in the same universe. Google then shows me some image results, and bam, the second one is actually related to the short story!

Sorry, DDG. You just don't cut it for my needs.

Usually if there’s a Wikipedia article for a phrase it’s among the first hits for me.

I use DDG as my main engine and I find that to be true. Unfortunately even Google's become pretty bad, I never know when it's going to ignore one word of my two-word query.

I often find DDG will even ignore quoted terms altogether. It was really good for a while, but it has gone downhill and now I need to open Google a few times a day.

I can replaces search, i use DDG as default, I have simple shortcut to google.

But I use gmail, google docs, Android with many google integrations. I could find alternatives, but really not as good. And mostly it would be just another company, where I'm not sure I can trust either.

Local and self-hosted options are just really not good enough. For example in MS Excel, I can't load actual currency tickers, or share it simply.

I also use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. If I don't I'll just have no voice.

I have my own web, but nobody goes there.

Open Internet is gone for me.

How is that any different than literally any other way of discovering information?

I no longer find interesting things in the top results like 10 years ago. Some search terms only return about 100 results when there should be many more.

Academic websites seem to have nearly vanished from the results.

Perhaps the results get better if you pay Google by allowing them cookies, but I think that wasn't necessary 10 years ago either.

So the difference is that in a non-biased library you find many more and interesting sources.

Or when the first result says

> "missing {keyword}, require {keyword}?"

Great job big G, I'm definitely the one who made the mistake with my query and didn't want to include that word.

You haven't, but many people do; they include extraneous words, or write overly precise queries (like including specific their specific laptop model number, which only sells in our small country, rather than a general model name), then get frustrated they can't find anything.

What are the guys at Google getting paid for other than building a system which can intelligently apply those exclusion filters?

My two word query should not have one of it's words excluded.

OR

If the typical user is asking conversational questions, the search models need a layer of NLP preprocessing, which should likewise be conditional.

My point is that there's no such thing as a non-biased library. You always see things under some influence of the process you used to find them. It's fine to prefer other sources than Google, but it's not "insane" to use Google because it will do something that is inescapable anyway.

Google has an interest into generally narrowing your results so it's easier to shove you through their hoops (advertisers, etc) and this behavior is becoming more common and a frustrating experience for me as well.

One thing I hate a lot about Google - and I am not sure why they do it - I can't even sum it up in a word or sentence. Basically you search for something, and it returns (supposedly) 10,000 matches, and 100 pages to go thru (or whatnot). You look at the first page, check a few, then move to the second page. Suddenly, the number of pages drops in half or more. Within a few more pages, things narrow down to 5 pages or less, with the last page having only 2-3 links.

I don't understand this "narrowing". I want to see every single damn result, I want to go to the "last page" and see those weird and obscure results. But nope, not any more.

They do a similar thing with image search; you search for something that you know has tens of thousands of images (ie - cats), but you are limited to maybe a total of 1000 or fewer images (show more results...show more results...END).

One last thing that occurs - and I am not sure how this is done; I don't think it is google - but how is it that I can do a lookup for something, and then in google's search results there will be exact matches for that something being searched for, but if you go to those links, invariably they forward you to some kind of spammy or worse "content" (usually doing nothing for me, because they assume everyone is using Windows - so they drop a link for a file that's an executable .EXE - yeah, sure).

It is almost like sites are (somehow) generating search results on the fly for google based on your keywords, but that can't be possible (?) because that isn't how google does indexing (that wouldn't even work or be efficient). So I don't know how it is that sites have my exact keyword matches (unless due to sheer numbers, my searches aren't that unique - but I do often search for very obscure stuff, and even those things pop up).

Meh...

If you're a mobile app developer, what choice do you have?

On Android you can easily sideload apps. So there is a choice.

I understand that 90% of people get their apps exclusively from the Play Store but that is not because Google is evil. Its because people prefer one store were they can find everything: the supermarket model.

And not just the consumers, but it would seem the producers too.

By choice, I do not have a Play Store account and wherever possible install apps only from F-Droid. However, there are (rare) times where I want to install a free (as in beer) closed source app. However, the publisher only chooses to make the app available via the Play Store. I would really, really like a direct apk download. I appreciate this approach is not for every end user and some people are scared of the "warning" messages Android displays when installing apps directly. Nonetheless, it would be really nice to have the choice and I don't see it as so much extra effort on the publisher's side.

Absolutely. If developers don't want one app store to dominate the marketplace they have to publish in multiple places. Otherwise what can they expect is going to happen? Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

My previous employer made it a condition of their BYOD mobile policy that I wouldn’t side load apps onto my device.

So even though it’s technically possible, it’s not always a going to happen.

There’s also side loading as a malware vector. If you do side load, you need to remember to turn off non-AppStore access immediately after.

"On Android you can easily sideload apps. So there is a choice."

If you develop apps to make money as a business this is not realistic. If the user can only side load your apps you probably have shrunken your potential customer base by 95%.

Managing app update becomes a problem outside Play store.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now and I've not noticed the difference. Stack Overflow, MDN are common search results while the occasional blog post also find its way into the result..

Does DuckDuckGo operate an app store that reaches most of mobile users worldwide? Why are you talking about the search engine?

> Why are you talking about the search engine?

Because the grandparent comment was about the search engine.

Try not being a mobile app developer? A bit less snarky:

- Develop mobile apps for a company rather than sell your own on Play/App store. - Develop non-mobile apps. - Not-app programming (business automation, infra, embedded, etc). - Get out of programming entirely.

This is basically the same message for all the other displaced/disrupted jobs (coal miners, bank clerks, lift operators, cashiers). Nobody owes anybody a livelihood for a fairly narrow/specific field. Especially not in "mobile app development" which 10 years ago was close to non-existent as as job title.

Publishing on the web or iOS is always a choice.

It's pretty much the same issue on iOS, we only have two crappy (and poorly managed) walled garden in the mobile world.

If you want to lose most of your audience, sure.