It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.
Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.
- Forum Search Engine: https://crowdview.ai/
- Non-commercial Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
- Libre Meta Search Engine: https://librey.devol.it/
- Golden Age Search Engine: https://www.wiby.org/
- Yandex: https://yandex.com/
If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?
EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.
The best search I found is by asking questions to real people in forums such as this one. It’s way slower than getting an immediate answer for a question, but the signal to noise ratio is higher.
This is the reason why I think Google is prioritizing reddit so much in recent years, because reddit became one of the only places where you can get real people (well, relatively speaking more than most other parts of the Internet) answering all kind of questions.
Same! And lemmy has provided the highest quality answers on the internet in my opinion.
Generally, if I want an answer to something, I’ll search whatever I’m looking for followed by “Reddit”. I know a lot of people here hate the site owner, and with good reason, but it actually has made information gathering on the web sane again. Instead of my query coming up with a zillion AI generated webpages, I’ll end up with real people discussing a real issue, and giving their opinions and troubleshooting steps, etc.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily a search engine problem, but just an issue with the way the Internet has become.