I can easily spend 2 hours researching a simple question and not finding any answers. Google search isn’t as good as it used to be—I suspect foul play through SEO 👨‍💻

@renevanbelzen I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a long time, but although I specifically tell it to give me only Norwegian results, it lumps in Danish ones too (and often list those first). Maybe they know Norwegians can easily read Danish, but that’s not what I want. Also there’s a lot of sites in the results that either are scam operations and/or political influence. That said, I’m not going to change my default until something better comes along…

@odd @renevanbelzen You might be interested in taking a look at searchmysite.com. You can add you own site and other useful, independent sites you come across.

@jeremycherfas That domain is for sale, no longer active as a search engine.

@odd And what’s the deal with those sites claiming you won a prize, yet deleting your navigation history behind your back, disabling the back button? Whoever thought anyone wanted that as a search result?

@renevanbelzen @jeremycherfas Probably searchmysite.net ?

@thedimpause @jeremycherfas Ah, the chicken-and-egg problem. Finding answers, and then seeking questions that fit those answers. Doesn't seem practical in daily use, unless you're bad at remembering what you already or almost know.

@renevanbelzen I don’t understand.

@jeremycherfas Here's my problem. The personal search engine you suggested wants me to enter my selection of websites beforehand. This would imply I know what I want to search for well in advance. If I already knew what websites to research, I wouldn't need this personal search engine, but, instead, use any search engine, including Google.

What I actually want is a search engine that filters out garbage. I don't want to go back to the days of Yahoo (read: search on a collection of curated websites), because this seems very much what the search engine developers were inspired by, knowingly or unknowingly.

@renevanbelzen I do t think you have to choose a site in advance. Here, I did one for you: searchmysite.net/search/

@jeremycherfas I wanted an answer for "How to program the Commodore 64 on the Raspberry Pi 400 using net.sf.VICE as an emulator" and got more than six million results for this very specific question. DuckDuckGo gave me seemingly more relevant results, though still not very helpful, since it didn't answer my question. I suppose the answer should've been: "You can't! Buy a Mac instead!"

@renevanbelzen I agree, I would be perplexed if a search for that exact phrase turned up millions of results. I’m sure you must also have tried the key words with Boolean operators? No more advice to offer, I’m afraid.