I ask because I’ve been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I’ve been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?
Edit: In no particular order, some recommended alternatives to Google
SearXNG
Whoogle
Ecosia
Brave
Dogpile
DuckDuckGo
Kagi
Swiss Cows
Qwant
Bing
I can’t be bothered to turn off my VPN and since Google Search is dropping CAPTCHA bombs on me every time I try to access it I dropped it. I Throughout the week I rotate between Startpage, DuckDuckGo and Bing. However lately I’m more inclined to use Bing Chat and ChatGPT.
Same, captcha was unbearable when using VPN so I just went to Bing. Fuck Google.
Honestly, Bing is unironically good. I started using it because I wanted to play around with Bing Chat back when that was in beta. Before that I was a believer in more privacy focused search. It’s funny, since they limit the chat to Edge I never even use it.
I started dropping services that ask CAPTCHA every time… shit is so fucking annoying. They treat us like idiots and most of us just take it.
Got to vote with our feet!
As someone who works in IT Security, the captchas are a necessary evil at this point. Without captchas, sites get slammed with millions invalid or malicious requests every hour. The sites I work with will see error traffic spike 3000% or more from credential stuffing attacks alone. These attacks are so highly distributed that simple IP tracking and banning all but ineffective anymore. And about 99.99% of the malicious traffic comes from VPNs and hosting providers. Unfortunately botnets and the people that run them are getting smarter and smarter about constructing the traffic to avoid bot detection.
tldr; the most effective tool to keep a site up and running and accounts secure is unfortunately captchas for VPN users.
My ISP puts us behind country wide CGNATs. So if a site bans an IP it’s possible they’ll turn the lights out for a whole region.