And saw a bunch of posts about the third party apps closing down, and lots of negativity about that whole fiasco.
… And I realized I hadn’t been there for a week… And frankly didn’t miss it. I am really loving the beehaw (and Lemmy as a whole) community. Thanks for being open, welcoming, responsive, engaging, and just generally nice people. I’m happy to be here. :)
Same here, Google has slowly become unusable for certain topics if you don’t append “reddit” to your search.
It’s way too hard to cut through the search engine optimized spam when googling something now. Especially for product recommendations all you get are random top X lists.
Yes! and when you actually click on them you realize the term you searched was only used by those pages as seo and aren’t actually mentioned anywhere in there.
I started using DuckDuckGo actively in 2014. It has since been my primary search engine. It used to be very similar to google: minimalist, an ad placed as the first search result and that’s it. DDG has stayed pretty much the same. The few times I now wander on google to try to get different results, I just find it so unusable. Search results are swimming in an ocean of suggested content… I’m never going back.
Brave Search is getting better as well. The browser is already pretty solid, I’m using it now.
I use brave on my phone. It autoblocks youtube ads, which is nice.
I’ve noticed I’ll type in the exact name of the website but forget the .com to tell my browser to go directly there, so it will do a search. My results show the site I was looking for halfway down the page, with the first half being ads and even competitors of the site! I’m not searching for items from the site but the site itself yet Google is so useless it shows me a bunch of similar stuff even when I gave it a specific.