• 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The only REAL replacement I’m still looking for is YouTube. Sure, Peertube and proxy sites for YouTube exist. But the amount of content I am interested in is by dozens of decimals larger an YouTube than on any other alternative combined.

    And, yes, of course, the search engine.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I hope alternatives to youtube like Nebula and peertube find their footing, but I can’t help but suspect that youtube has and will continue to find the successful path in this social media era. I’m not a youtuber or anything, so I don’t really know any details about how it works, but the way they seem provide a platform with monetisation and brand building possibilities built in seems pretty effective/pragmatic for a platform that needs to find someway to work within capitalism.

    • hedgehogging_the_bed@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Try Nebula! It’s a bunch of YouTube creators who got together to make their own platform for video content. The price is quite reasonable and the videos are the same you would see on YouTube but often a few days early and with the sponsorship ads removed.

    • PHLAK@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Duck Duck Go has been nothing but great since I switched a few months ago. It’s like Google from 10 years ago.

  • CharAhNalaar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I’m not sure there’s anything they can do about it though.

    • marmo7ade@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is plenty they can do. They created this mess with their algorithm. They can undo it by changing it, again.

      Google does not objectively score or rank a site based on what you are actually looking for. They rank based on how much time other people spend on the site. How many other sites link back to the site. They rank based on how many words are on the page, regardless of if that actually matters.

      This is why when you google a recipe, all the top results are blog posts from soccer moms telling a life story about food. You don’t care about that stuff - you just want the recipe. But that’s what google cares about.

      Google can change this.

    • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      They simply need to change the way relevancy is measured. They need to implement some mechanism that can evaluate the quality of the page. The algorithm should penalize sites that have content very similar to other sites (like those that scrape github or stackoverflow), low effort sites, or sites that are infested with too many ads.

      And since so much quality information is in youtube videos, and they already generate transcripts, why can’t you search through those?

  • o0joshua0o@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I avoid Google products as much as possible these days, especially anything launched within the last 2-3 years, because it will soon be abandoned and unsupported. Their search results are worse than they have ever been. The only Google app I actually like is Google Maps.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s no surprise that Facebook is hanging on, the average nerd might avoid it like the plague but the average person doesn’t care

  • ArghZombies@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo… Now it’s just Google, or slightly worse versions.

    I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.

    • CustodialTeapot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The fact you’re saying you’re still getting useful results on Google means you haven’t used Google for the past year to me.

      • Plopp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They said as useful as Google. Not that Google gives objectively very useful results. And I agree with them. I use DuckDuckGo every day and pretty much every time I have to add !g to send my query to Google because the DDG results are shit in comparison.

        I’m talking about on the desktop btw. With adblocking and script blocking. I accidentally used Google on my phone yesterday and I think I got cancer.

      • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Seriously. If I want to hope to get any result that is mildly useful, I’m obligated to add a specific site on the query, either wiki or reddit.

    • AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is brave search, which seemed pretty good to me, even though i am using kagi search now. And to be honest, so far kagi seems really solid, and if you go past the fact that you have to pay for it (on most other search engines you are the product) then give it a try, the first 100 searches are free.