294
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
294 points (94.8% liked)
Showerthoughts
29525 readers
330 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.
And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.
DuckDuck Go took getting used to for me due to it lacking all the convenient algorithms from Google that... used to in the past... contribute to getting better search results.
The lack of these conveniences is why I switched to DDG years ago in the first place. I realised Google was essentially helping everyone build their own Internet echo chambers and I didn't want to be part of that.
It does mean you actually need to be good at searching for what you want because DDG is very bad at "guessing".
Or to put it differently; I call you complaints skill issues. :)
You may call it as you wish. And in some way you might be right. But I've been searching the web since the 90's, from AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Google to DDG. I use operators in my queries etc. I'm not new to this. One thing that drives me mad with DDG is that it translates search terms, even if they're in quotes, and gives me results with the translated terms mixed in with the original term. That is never ever what I want. It really likes to decide for me what I want I feel like, like when I searched for screenshots of the software for a particular surveillance camera, DDG showed me nothing but product images of said camera. I tried several different queries, only got product photos. Tried Google and immediately got a whole bunch of screenshots, which DDG should have known given the term screenshot and other synonyms, in quotes.
SearXNG is better in some ways. It's a more literal search and doesn't try to guess what you're thinking as much as Google or DDG.