I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.
It depends partly on where in the world you are and what language you use. I just tried that query in English and an answer callout was the first result, specifically highlighted. Then there is a "people ask" refiner widget, some videos in which the first is titled "How to use a massage ball (tutorial)" and then a WikiHow page. No ads.
I tried again in the local language and now I see some product ad results for buying a massage ball, but then it's back to the video results and sports blogs showing how to use them. That seems OK. Probably most people searching for massage balls do want to buy one or are very likely to do so soon.
I dunno, seems like they're both pretty good pages of results.
It also can't fetch more than 2 pages of results for either web or image search. Reverse image search just straight up doesn't work. I don't know why they have it.
With searxng, searching at least works. It also has plugins that I think can do some of what Kagi is useful for (but it depends on the instance)
> It also can't fetch more than 2 pages of results for either web or image search
I can't speak for image searching, but I found when I get limited results from Kagi, The other search engines that produce More results just pad those results with noise. Sometimes I'll do a specific search and have no results on Kagi, so I switched to another engine justified I have thousands of unrelated results
> The other search engines that produce More results just pad those results with noise.
Yeah, that's been an increasing problem.. Google has been especially bad with this for a while now.
When I tried to search for something where I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, I could only change my query so many times until it stopped being what I wanted.
I came here to suggest Kagi. I bloody love it. No ads, ability to remove or downgrade or promote particular sites, lenses, I love it all.
Your comment - honestly, hand on heart, I can’t remember the last time I paged through beyond the first page of any search engine. I didn’t even know Kagi had this “problem” and so I guess I just don’t see it as a problem. But then I realised I’m absolutely in that bit of “must be on first page” internet lore, too…
> I didn’t even know Kagi had this “problem” and so I guess I just don’t see it as a problem.
Took me a while before I actually realized this limitation as well. I started noticing it when I was searching for things I didn't know exactly how to find.
Kagi is great for when you know exactly what to find and have a general idea of where, but when you actually need those n-page results to help you refine your search, and you can't, it's a showstopper for me.
I'm not even sure why it's a limitation. It might not be intentional?
I just did the same search and the first result was how to use a massage ball. I scrolled down a bit and saw a reddit thread titled "using a massage ball for back pain".
The declining quality of Google's search results is greatly over exaggerated.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I also am using an ad blocker, but aside from that the pages that are returned work perfectly fine for me for the most part.
Yes sometimes there is some useless blogs taking up top spots but then I tried the so hyped alternatives like kagi and they don't filter these out either so eh...
It works perfectly fine even on the Google android app that is unaffected by uBlock. I always hear people complain about search results but I can't remember the last time I even had to scroll down when searching. I do usually mostly search for ultra-specific programming stuff though.
At the very least Google (or any search engine for that matter) should consider implementing a feature that allows users to explicitly signal query intent.
For instance, a 'noshop:' prefix could be used to signal that the user is not looking to buy anything. There are two distinct groups of users searching for terms like "massage ball" or (in my own case) "managed switch": those looking to buy the product and those who looking to learn about the technology. Serving ads to the latter group is not just irritating but also ineffective since those queries were never going to lead to purchases in the first place.
Which Google user would want to pay for ads about things you cant buy ('noshop')?
Oh wait, you meant Google _product_. You want Google to cater to its product needs by sacrificing own money making potential and limiting its actual users.
Google already tries to infer whether a user is shopping or seeking information and serve results accordingly. If I search for "managed vs unmanaged switch" or "massage ball usage", I do not see any ads.
All I'm saying is that Google should consider allowing users to explicitly state their intent, since some queries ("massage ball" and "managed switch") are ambiguous and so the intent cannot always be reliably inferred. Analogy: while type inference works well in many cases, there are situations where explicit typing is required because the type is ambiguous based on usage alone.
The results are not that different across locations within each country, especially location agnostic queries like the particular example. It would be rather surprising if there's huge difference between locations within US for this particular query.
If you actually compare results across different people across many queries, you will notice that they differ relatively little. The fact that search uses personalization doesn't mean it is always personalized or it affects all results always. It affects relatively small number of queries and relatively small number of results, very dependent on the types of queries and types of results.
Location affects a lot more results than personalization, but that is also very query dependent, so certain queries are affected by the location a lot more than others. And the particular example query is one that you can expect very little location variation.
I appreciate the parent commenter complaining about how they were looking for something just to get ads instead, and getting a response telling them to buy something.
That said, I'll also second the back mechanic book for anyone with back pain.
ChatGPT is also becoming a victim of SEO. Not purely at the crawling level, but also at the answer level.
But as a default, it gives mostly "SEO-optimized" answers in a SEO-optimized format. Even simple question are answered with bullet points. Some descriptions look like advertisements and it's all very authoritative, even when it's just bullshitting/guessing and doesn't really know the answer for sure. This is what I was escaping from.
EDIT: For example the last thing I asked was how Brendan O'Brien did sample replacement in drums in Blood Sugar Sex Magic. It answered something that was 90% plausible but most of the content was walls and walls of text about the equipment it assumed it was used (plus info on more equipment unrelated to sample replacement), rather than actually answering the question itself.
I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. It might be unpopular to use or like ChatGPT among the users of HN but - it’s true, this is one of the quickest ways to get answers for something
Exactly. This seems to be one of the skills we need to learn. In the same way we have to use our own intelligence and skills when searching google (Is this source website reputable? What’s the context I’m searching in? Do I know this person / company? Does that result sound likely? Can I compare to other answers to see if it makes sense?) - it seems to me that using ChatGPT to do anything requires a similar set of (slightly cynical / take what you read with a pinch of salt / check your facts - but nonetheless understand that this is a useful tool) type response to it.
