An addendum to this, perhaps as a next level, is to give it a non-google search.
DuckDuckGo helps me avoid the SEO-driven spammy results more easily than with Google, which is particularly apparent when searching about products, or terms that could be construed as product-related. My hypothesis is that the SEOptimizers have learnt the specifics of what Google’s algorithm looks for and so have refined techniques to get their less-deserving clients rise to the top, and (thankfully) those techniques don’t work with whatever alternate algorithms DDG uses. (To be clear, it’s not a strict “DDG is always better than Google” thing, rather that they’re surprisingly good at complementing each other, one being good when the other gives weak results.)
Million short is useful when I’m searching for something that’s had a lot of media attention, but I want to avoid the mainstream media pieces on it. It excludes the top 100/1000/.../million websites on the Internet (as ranked by Alexa) from its results, which is sometimes exactly what you want.
For the sake of completion, some other alternate search engines are Metager , Qwant , and Mojeek (all of which claim privacy as their primary benefit). And I love me a bit of wiby when I’m feeling nostalgic about the old, simpler, 90s Internet of plain personal pages, and want to experience some of that again.
An addendum to this, perhaps as a next level, is to give it a non-google search.
DuckDuckGo helps me avoid the SEO-driven spammy results more easily than with Google, which is particularly apparent when searching about products, or terms that could be construed as product-related. My hypothesis is that the SEOptimizers have learnt the specifics of what Google’s algorithm looks for and so have refined techniques to get their less-deserving clients rise to the top, and (thankfully) those techniques don’t work with whatever alternate algorithms DDG uses. (To be clear, it’s not a strict “DDG is always better than Google” thing, rather that they’re surprisingly good at complementing each other, one being good when the other gives weak results.)
Million short is useful when I’m searching for something that’s had a lot of media attention, but I want to avoid the mainstream media pieces on it. It excludes the top 100/1000/.../million websites on the Internet (as ranked by Alexa) from its results, which is sometimes exactly what you want.
For the sake of completion, some other alternate search engines are Metager , Qwant , and Mojeek (all of which claim privacy as their primary benefit). And I love me a bit of wiby when I’m feeling nostalgic about the old, simpler, 90s Internet of plain personal pages, and want to experience some of that again.
I am delighted to learn about million short