Ask HN: How do I search the web in the age of enshittified search engines?

51 points · ManlyBread · 7 days ago

Like most internet users I used to use Google to search for information but now the quality of the results is abysmal and I no longer find it useful most of the time.

I've tried other search engines (Bing, Yandex) and the results are a bit better but still nowhere near the old Google. Kagi is a thing but I'm not sure if the quality justifies $120/year, especially since I don't earn my salary in USD.

Putting "site:reddit.com" helps a bit but there's plenty of stuff that simply isn't there, so it's not a solution either.

LLMs are a bit better with the quality of the searches but hallucinations are a thing so I need to verify the information myself so I am back to square one.

Is there anything else I can do to find information easier or to improve the quality of the searches?

36 comments

not_your_vase · 7 days ago

If you know the below mentioned, then just ignore. Otherwise give it a try.

There is one thing, that many people either forgot, or never knew: how to create a search query. Nowadays most people put in a human question: "how to bake bread", "how to use a red toilet seat", "what happens to today around the corner".

However even to this day, search engines gives better results if instead this, you try to imagine the results, and search for text that you think appears on the correct result: "bread recipe", "toilet seat user manual", "concert Tuvalu 2024 november"

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pino82 · 7 days ago

I'd say "-site:reddit.com" helps a lot. And also "-site:youtube.com" and some others :)

Admittedly, I usually do the exclusion in my brain and not actually via the search query.

I don't know where the hype comes from, which says that reddit posts are particularly smart and useful. Maybe just from their own marketing, which is repeated over and over in social media by these 'smart' guys?! It's completely not reflected by my practical experiences at all.

When I accidentally end on a reddit thread and read some posts, I'm always like "Well, and that's it? What a waste of time..."

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throwerofstone · 6 days ago

While I still mainly use Google to search for terms online, I am increasingly using the free version of Perplexity for more advanced topics or general questions. Perplexity is an LLM like Claude and ChatGPT, but instead of relying on the data it's been trained on, Perplexity gathers a whole bunch of sources (websites, youtube video transcripts, etc.) related to your query, and then uses the contents of those sources to generate an answer. So while it may not be as smart as Claude or ChatGPT on certain topics, it does seem to hallucinate a whole lot less. And at times when I'm not given the answer I'm looking for, or when I want to make sure it's not making things up, I simply browse the list of sources it used to generate its answer.

bottedconvos · 3 days ago

Oh man, I feel you. Searching for good info these days feels like panning for gold in a kiddie pool—every once in a while, you strike it rich, but mostly, it’s just wet disappointment.

I’ve been down the same rabbit hole (tried Kagi, got sticker shock, and yep, LLMs are great... until they start making stuff up). One thing that’s helped me cut through the noise is sharpening my critical thinking skills—it’s like giving your brain a search engine upgrade. I wrote a newsletter - just started - post about this (with some hopefully helpful tips), so if you’re up for a quick read, check it out: https://bottedconversations.substack.com/p/critical-thinking....

Let me know what you think, please! Always looking for better ways to avoid the search engine struggle bus!

Yawrehto · 5 days ago

If you're getting a ton of irrelevant results, it's helpful to find a word common to them and exclude it from results; I don't have an easy way of measuring how many relevant results are excluded but if you choose it well it'll help. Similarly, find some list of all the operators for a given search engine and try them out.

I've found searching multiple indexes can be helpful, especially ones that seek different categories of thing out. For instance if I can't find something using Google, Marginalia can be surprisingly helpful. A list of sites to try is available here: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-....

Also, often finding some discussion of something that seems close to what you want and might discuss it briefly and seeing what it links to will help. But that's from mostly looking at academic stuff, which has copious citations that often won't show up in a search query for a term, but can be found in the likes of JSTOR or LibGen/SciHub.

Also from academic stuff: if you can find directories of things related to what you want (eg 'old books about the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey,' to take a real question I had), often a more general term ('old books') and then searching those websites (HathiTrust, Internet Archive, etc) directly will find things.

But that's for someone who primarily runs into trouble because I'm researching obscure subjects and probably are less applicable in other areas.