Yep, search is getting more and more broken...

I remember all the "trump vs reporters" etc. compilations, that were funny... now searching for any of those terms (basically anything at all involving trump, or now russia) ignores almost everything in the searchbox, ignores all the small creators, just picks out the one keyword (trump/russia/putin/...), and show the CNN/MSNBC/... news related to that one term, and unrelated to other search terms in the search box.

We wan't search and "sort by relevant", not by "who we think is right".

FYI, assuming you're talking about YouTube, you can still see these funny compilation videos by being smart with the way you apply filters to the search. To be honest I am actually reluctant to tell you this online because I think if YouTube knew about this they would remove it, just like dislikes.

Yep, youtube... but google search is not much better... corporate news and pinterest on top, then everything else. Funnily enough, sometimes the pages that scrape github issues get even higher than original github issues themselves.

Bilibili's search also seems to be just about as aggressive for videos on politically sensitive topics in China.

It also tends to prioritize recency a lot. Good luck searching for something with terms that have been in the news lately.

Good luck searching for someone who shares the first name of someone who has been in the news lately.

That's if they don't disregard your query and just return results for whatever they deemed to be close enough. So if you search for Simone Something, it will just disregard what you wrote and just return tons of Simon Something even if there's no shortage of results for your actual query! It's incredible that even when searching for a specific real person/name Google still assumes it knows better and just throw out letters arbitrarily. It would only be reasonable to do so if there are 0 results for the exact name or maybe just a "did you mean?" prompt for suspected typos.

It never used to do that before and that's the most frustrating part imo

it's done that for a long time, and you've always been able to force a match by wrapping a word in quotes.

(I don't think it's a 100% "must have this keyword" in the boolean sense, but it is an extremely strong suggestion to the engine.)

Maybe we have finally reached the point where people don't know boolean operators anymore though

>you've always been able to force a match by wrapping a word in quotes

This no longer works very well. A while ago I was searching for the linux syscall which is identified in the manpages as 'splice(2)'

If I didn't include quote marks, I basically got pages of junk.

If I did include quote marks I basically got a page of junk and then a single relevant link halfway down the second page followed by another page and a half of junk.

I know to use 'verbatim' now but still very much a downgrade in terms of user experience.

I thought verbatim was supposed to be wrapped in " not , '

But to your point, strict "___" searches do not seem to be respected as much anymore.

We have reached the point where google ignores them.

But credibility is also obviously a quality issue for information based search. You give people relevancy without credibility and that's just what we have today with the state of SEO. We might say that Amazon has such an issue with the lack of curation.

Drudge Report sold out to the deep state, they didn't cover hardly any of the election integrity news at all (among other editorial decisions). The rumor is Matt Drudge doesn't even own it anymore. If you still get your "conservative" news from there I suggest switching to Rantingly.

I don't see the relevance. The issue is that DDG is intentionally preventing people from finding a website that they're looking for. Worst, the top result is a look-alike website that would confuse a lot of people in to thinking it is the real thing.

I never get new from Drudge, but that doesn't mean I can't see the issue with my search engine trying to hide what I'm looking for from me.

It doesn’t exist anymore. That’s probably why it’s not being shown

Um.. what? lol. Google "drudge". It's the top result. Definitely exists.

Thanks for rantingly!

Just because Matt Drudge stopped agreeing with Donald Trump doesn't mean he "sold out to the deep state". Drudge is just as conservative as he ever was. Many conservatives just pulled a hard shift in a different direction.

> I liked DDG because it respected the user.

Unless you were searching for anything recipe-related, in which case they will push results from their partner 'yummly'. Or if you were trying to get literal result from you search string, which it will apparently silently ignore if it doesn't find enough results.

Honestly, I'll dump DDG in a heartbeat whenever I find something even marginally better. Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for.

>Their only edge is the '!' syntax which I haven't yet bothered to find an independent solution for.

I simply mimic that bang behavior using my browser's ability to add custom searches. It's a slight pain to set up on a fresh install because of all the extra addresses I manually plug in but once done, I'm not necessarily tied to any search engine. If you're in Chromium you can right-click on the address bar and see the option to select "manage search engines." From there just start editing commands and changing things from ":yt" to "!yt" like we're used to. yt being a YouTube search.

Your usage might be vastly different than mine but I found myself using sipmle things like !yt (youtube) or !hn (hackernews search) for the most part. Hardly anything beyond that and a few specific Wikis.

For what it's worth, Brave's search engine also uses that ! bang feature though I'm not sure to what extent compared to DuckDuckGo.

Firefox can sync those keywords via bookmarks, but the feature's deprecated and not supported on mobile anymore, as expected.

Kagi has been a dream. They support bangs as well.

I was only on the wait list for a couple of weeks before getting an invite; worth jumping in.

But why aren't bangs more ubiquitous? Did DDG patent them or something?

The actual logic behind it isn't anything stunning, it finds a bang, removes it from the query, then forwards the query to the search engine that was requested.

>I liked DDG because it respected the user.

Is there any evidence that they actually fulfilled their promises?

Drudge was literally the first link in my results. Haha.

Weird. Maybe I got unlucky with some experiment rollout. My top links are Drudge Retort (some stupid parody), the link to the Drudge app on iPhone, and the dictionary definition for "drudge". Nowhere on the page is there an actual link to the site for me.

For the last couple years, I think the Drudge Report itself has actually been a parody of the Drudge Report.

I like Drudge as an aggregator, it's a great way to see a "full picture" of what is going on in the world. But I do have some major gripes, the main one being that he routinely links to dog shit sources like DailyMail, The Sun, etc. That crap isn't news and I wish I could just remove all links to it from Drudge and Google results forever.

It was sold with an nda.

I clicked on that link for "drudge", the search results vary every time I reload the page. I always get the iOS app, the retort parody, and the dictionary definition as the top 3. But the position of all 3 links vary every time I click reload.

Still don't see the link to the actual site either.

So is mine. But that seems accurate to me. Searching for 'drudge' returns drudge.com as the first result. If users are clicking on that link, and saying there, then that must be what they were looking for.

Searching for "drudge report" brings up drudgereport.com.

Also, after having searched for both "drudge" and "drudge report" several times in a row, drudgereport.com is the top result for both searches.

I can almost assure you it wasn't. I'm guessing the top result is

> drudge.com

Which is not the Drudge Report, but the Drudge "Retort". The Drudge Report, seems to be completely removed, obviously intentionally.

If I'm wrong, let me know. But I'd be very surprised if you're getting the Drudge Report at the top hit, and everybody else isn't getting it on the first multiple pages.

I am shocked. I followed the link and thought I'd hit the Drudge Report, saw this link and had to double check. I am shocked.

I do not see it on the first page of my results at all.

What I did notice was that if I go directly to the Drudge Report, it's "not secure." Seems to only be happening the first time I load the page. I wonder if that has something to do with it.

Here it is in my browser (which admittedly is a somewhat "hardened" privacy-wise version of FF).

https://imgur.com/a/KJL03NW

Wow. Showing up for me now too. I sent feedback to DDG. I also wonder if they saw this thread. Seems unlikely that it just happened to show back up a day after it got attention here.

Wow, you're right. My mistake!

Look again! The first result is "Drudge Retort", a "wrecker" website designed to take clicks away from the actual real Drudge Report.

Went with Brave, I like the effort of building their own index.