[bane]

I was just searching for an old friend of mine who's last name happens to be a substring of another common last name. I tried everything, quotes, + signs, - signs, middle initials, middle names, cities we lived in together, etc.

Every single returned link after the first 3 had the superstring version of the name and not the correct name. It turns out that this returns endless results for a fairly well known singer, not my friend.

So now did I not get the results I was looking for, I got tons of results that were objectively wrong.

Then suddenly, about 6 pages into those results, I started getting ones for the correct last name, but now the first name is a mess.

This happened on Google, DDG, Baidu, Sogou, Haosou, Dogpile, the current Yahoo search, Bing, and to some extent on Yandex. Naver was worse, Daum totally worthless with incorrect results.

Utterly worthless.

The thing is, my friend's name is surprisingly fairly unique, there's probably less than 20 people in the world with that specific name. It's like the search engine's desire to fill the screen with worthless garbage results has overpowered the need to supply the 2 or 3 that are actually correct, even if the quantity is a little disappointing.

[giancarlostoro]

I would honestly pay at minimum $10 a month to a search engine startup that focuses on the top 10k, then top 100k Alexa sites, and does good indexing of top sites. If I google something programming related, give me all the stackoverflow you find relevant. I don't even care about image search, that can come later. I think the world has room for a search engine competitor, I'm just not sure what it would look like, but I hope someone is working on something that isn't just a repeat of hot garbage.

[LeonenTheDK]

Just a suggestion, I'm not a subscriber but am investigating the service: Kagi might come close to that. You can up or down rank sites too boost their visibility in your searches. Would take some time to get going but eventually I think one would end up with a much better and almost curated result set.

Generally though these days I'm trying to distance myself from Google so if anyone has any other search engine suggestions (beyond the usual DDG, Bing, Yandex, Neeva) I'm very open.

[giancarlostoro]

I think this is okay so long as you can toggle it off since now you apply userbase bias, which isn't guaranteed to be perfectly neutral, since it is bias in aggregate, anything remotely ideological in nature would be skewed one way or the other.

I do like this idea however.

[LeonenTheDK]

My understanding of is that it's just for you, not based on what every user of Kagi is choosing. Looking in the settings though I'm not sure if you can disable this feature on an ad hoc basis, which would be useful now and then if you want to get a fresh set of results and get out of your own biases.

[asicsp]

Negating some string with a `-` prefix works in my experience. But haven't come across a case with superstrings, can't think of an example to try too.

[behringer]

Try neeva?

[bane]

Nope, same shitty results.

I've basically decided that my friend's name is going to be my search engine quality test from now on, the results are so spectacularly terrible.

All I want is something the crawl the web, suppress SEO spam, and let me "search" on things exactly as I've quoted them. Like we used to in 1998.

[zbrozek]

I've found that with Google I have to use verbatim mode to get it to do anything vaguely sensible.

Synonymization is the worst thing to ever happen to search, and it keeps getting more and more aggressive.