As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.

I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.

Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
    1091·
    10 months ago

    It’s positively maddening. Especially since that Spez has turned Reddit into a walled garden experience now, I no longer want to rely on Reddit for answers. Google is just a mess of garbage blogs full of link rotted ‘answers’.

    • Burp@kbin.social
      62·
      10 months ago

      All the AI generated websites are driving me insane. They just repeat the same thing over and over again with a bunch of useless text.

    • Jamesbong@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      10 months ago

      I no longer used reddit daily. But I still use it (without an account) mainly for research. Reddit no longer exists. It’s just a databse of answers like stack overflow to me.

      Interestingly I even relay even less and less on searching reddit through google. I use bing ai and bardai since their dataset upadates daily.

      • folkrav@lemmy.world
        51·
        10 months ago

        I don’t have access to Bard (Canada) and I don’t use Bing nor Edge, but ChatGPT is usually pretty good at telling me what to look for or giving me an answer that’s close to the real thing or has the right keywords. However, it’s really often just wrong enough that people replacing a search engine with it and use it for information is kind of worrying…

      • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
        111·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, Duckduckgo, but I find accuracy a bit questionable. It’s not as predictive as Google. If you have suggestions though I’ll def try them.

        Apparently Bing is great for porn but I wouldn’t know.

            • localme@lemm.ee
              21·
              10 months ago

              Underrated comment.

              Fwiw, Amplosion is a great iOS app/safari extension to de-AMP google search results. Bonus: it’s made by Christian Selig, the dev behind Apollo (rip).

              • danielton@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
                3·
                10 months ago

                The other reason I quit using Google is because Google shows you what they think you want to see, rather than just what they found. I’m not really interested in buying an extension to make Google’s filter bubble usable.

        • dingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          51·
          10 months ago

          DuckDuckGo is shit. It doesn’t even understand basic syntax like quotes for some reason. I would rather have it only give me a few results to my query as opposed to showing me unrelated nonsense. Through the years I will occasionally try to give it a chance, but I can never find anything useful with it.

          Then everyone tells me “well, I just use DuckDuckGo to search Google using !g”. Well what the heck is the point of doing that? Now I have to type two extra characters to search the exact same search engine I was using anyway.

          • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
            6·
            10 months ago

            Then everyone tells me “well, I just use DuckDuckGo to search Google using !g”. Well what the heck is the point of doing that?

            The point is to only use Google when DDG doesn’t give the results you want.

      • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        There is a new search engine https://trystract.com/ that is in Beta. It is interesting in that it’s open source and has a ‘Discussions’ feature that returns some Lemmy results. As it’s a Beta it’s pretty hit or miss right now.