This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
These numbers underline the current trend to choose European services instead of American ones, which followed the trend to deGoogle.
[the chart shows stats for American Google, American Bing, Russian Yandex, American Yahoo!, American DuckDuckGo, and Other]
Yeah, that statement wasn't supported by the data at all. It seemed to only be included as a way to link to their other articles about European alternatives and de-Googling.
Russian Yandex
Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren't working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.
Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don't cater too quite so freely.
Thanks for mentioning Yandex, bringing is back onto my radar.
And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
I'm not using their products now as I don't want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.
What would be a good EU alternative?
Qwant or Ecosia.
Thanks!
I almost never use them now.
Its been degrading as time has gone on. The other search engines (like all of them) are getting or surpassing google in certain subjects. AI has really made them look like fools in all of this. Their AI sucks for results and (while I dont like it) others are using chatgpt for search results.
I would say it is just the opposite. Google used to be good before they tried to post-process results in this extreme way and AI is just an even more extreme way to do that. ChatGPT and all the other LLMs just increase the noise to signal ratio (noise coming first because there is so much more of it than signal these days).
I actually agree. Others use chatgpt for just about everything. I dont like it for many...many reasons.
Google was much better pre-2020.
People use chat gpt to tell them what to buy. We are doomed. Our brains are about to shrink to the size of a pea in 10 years. All is going to plan for the elite.
Its funny because you can totally run good LLMs on local systems but people are just going to chat because its what they know and its easy to work with. Like I get it, but they are starting to put ads in the prompts now.
I work in an education setting and in the last month, Google started preloading the contents of other sites directly on the search page. It is wreaking havoc when combined with our blocking tools because kids will do a Google search for something innocuous and the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something else we have blocked.
It's incredibly frustrating.
If you have to stick with google, you can use udm=14. https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ You can set it as default search provider.
time to switch to Qwant, ecosia, or duckduckgo
the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something
Does that mean any search (AI insight notwithstanding) will get blocked if it includes a Reddit, Coursera or something on the blocklist result at all?
Because if yes, that's much more than just asinine. It's basically blocking entire search topics due to the sheer fact that Reddit will appear on the furst page of Google a lot.
Google search has sucked for a couple years now. DuckDuckGo is better for everything except maps.
I went long enough without using Google (probably a year-ish) that, when I accidentally made a Google search a few days ago, it was a jarring experience.
It felt wrong the same way other search engines did when I first deGoogled. It was kind of nice actually.
The irony is Gemini is really good (like significantly better than ChatGPT), and cheap for them (no GPUs needed), yet somehow they made it utterly unbearable in search.
Gemini is really good at confidently talking nonsense but other than that I don't really see where you get the idea that it is good. Mind you, that isn't much better with the other LLMs.
So it's really good at the thing LLMs are good at. Don't judge a fish by it's ability to climb a tree etc...
No, it is mediocre at best compared to other models but LLMs in general have a very minimal usefulness.
It can be grounded in facts. It's great at RAG. But even alone, Gemini 2.5 is kinda shockingly smart.
...But the bigger point is how Google presents it. It shouldn't be the top result of every search just thrown into your face, it should be a opt-in, transparent, conditional feature with clear warnings, and only if it can source a set of whitelisted, reliable websites.
After just trying it again a few times today for a few practical problems that it not only misunderstood at first completely and then gave me a completely hallucinated answer to every single one I am sorry, but the only thing shocking about it is how stupid it is despite Google's vast resources. Not that stupid/smart really apply to statistical analysis of language.
Gemini 2.5? Low temperature, like 0.2?
The one they use in search is awful, and not the same thing. Also, it's not all knowing, you gotta treat it like it has no internet access (because generally it doesn't).
The one they use on gemini.google.com (which is 2.5 right now but was awful in earlier versions too).
"Significantly better than ChatGPT" and "Good" aren't the same. Like ipecac is significantly better to drink than sewage water.
I had that happen too. Couldn't find something with DDG. Hopped over to Google and was shocked at how completely unusable it was.
I’ve fully switched to ecosia. I much prefer their efforts, and they seem to fund decent projects unlike a lot of other carbon offset companies.
Yandex is better than any American service by far imo.
Yandex LLC is a Russian technology company that
...
I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.
Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.
Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo in like 2019 and used that for a long time until Kagi came out and now I use that and I'm quite happy with it.
Everybody is using ai of course.
Who knew if your product was mostly shit people would stop using it?
77% still using it though
Sure, but this is a process that takes time; that said, he trend is downward and that will likely continue unless things improve.
The recent duckduckgo ad campaign will surely help rescue googlers and so does my mission to ensure everyone I know doesn't use google search.
Fair point, but I refer you to my previous comment with the addendum that, unless things improve, Google results are increasingly likely to be removed from other services/features as time progresses.
And if tech people are no longer recommending it, or actively recommending against it, it is possible to get people to start switching. This is largely how chrome became so popular in the first place, and that required getting people to change from the default option.
I’m glad to contribute to that metric.
Nice to see this choice is making an actual difference.
I switched when the answers I got started to become bullshit. I’d google a simple question just to double check if it was correct, but it gave me something completely different. Something so out of the realm of possibility that I was baffled.
I check the sources for the answer and they were not even related. After that I started paying more attention to how messed up google had become, and I had enough.
Google scholar however is still something I need.. even though I dislike American corporations.
It's kind of unreal that they took something that worked perfectly well for 25 years and then fucked it up entirely overnight, for no good reason.
Stick in bike spokes meme.
I stopped using Google at the same time I closed my accounts with Facebook, instagram, Reddit and Amazon. Currently I'm using Ecosia which I think is German. I’m dumping all the US companies I can based on all the Trump crap. It is taking time and effort but I should be able to actually close the Google account soon and I replaced windows with Linux on all but one of my PCs.
