this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
1256 points (94.0% liked)

Technology

59434 readers
2976 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
1256
Google search is over (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Via @[email protected]

Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K":

  • DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

  • Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

"There are no countries in Africa that start with K." "What about Kenya?" "Kenya suck deez nuts?"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I've been using DDG for a year and like the search results but what bothers me is that you can't exclude a word from your query with minus sign!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I've noticed that, too. It wasn't always that way though. A couple of years ago, minus worked no problem.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Quoting also doesn't work on DDG, AFAIK.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DDG is just bing and I think google too? I don't know what's happening but over the last 2 years or so every search engine has been getting worse and worse and worse. They're all borderline un fucking usable.

Except kagi. Which you have to pay for. Which I am totally fucking okay with given the state of everything else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the suggestion

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Try search.brave.com, it can do that.

They have their own index unlike ddg which is just a proxy for bing. Bing removed the minus feature at some point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use DDG, but !g is imprinted on my muscle memory for life.