Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are "popular results", first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.
If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I'd prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I've seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg's results.
If you're going through that route, SearX beats everything and it's not even close. It's self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, ... Rn I'm mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck.
Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it's pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I'm lazy or I'm searching for something too obscure for searx.
I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.
I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it's the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I'll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.
i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don't have many users, so they couldn't rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn't optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI
I feel like I've been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like "yeah, maybe it's gotten a bit worse? Haven't really noticed"
I get quite a bit of flak from my colleagues for paying for search, but I kid you not, I don't regret splurging on a Kagi subscription at all. It's personally less stressful for me, having to wade through less cruft, and I think I even work significantly faster because of how I use it.
It's sad when you think about it. Search was such a good experience in the past.
I also pay for Kagi and I'm super happy with that decision. I do wish they'd stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.
With most topics, I find fastgpt to be the most up to date, accurate and best sourced. And with just a normal search there's basically just one expandable strip with AI, no real annoyance for me.
This is why I jumped ship to DuckDuckGo like 4-5 years ago already, never looked back
Coincidentally, yesterday I was quickly setting up a new computer for some testing whilst talking to somebody about another so I was half distracted. I did a search for some package to install and got absolute unusable crap. I didn't understand, tried again, tried different search parameters and it just got worse, and then I noticed that, since this was a new computer, the browser was using google.
I switched to DDG, and first page first hit was what I needed.
DDG also has been in a steady decline and apparently has been using Bing as it's back-end now. I'd love to use a self hosted open source browser, or of not that, an open source federated search engine, akin to Lemmy, but I don't see either coming into existence anytime soon.
bing itself is unusable tho. I get a full page of "sponsored links" before any tentatively relevant search result pop up. DDG at least removes the sponsored bullshit.
For what it's worth, DDG isn't perfect either. There are plenty of times I have to use Google instead. I don't keep track of how often it anything but it's definitely not perfect.
apparently has been using Bing as it's back-end now.
A lot of stuff uses Bing to search, as it's the largest search engine with an official public API that any developer can just sign up and use. Voice assistants like Alexa use Bing too.
Mistakes were made. It happens, OK? I'm quite certain Bing won't let THAT happen again......../////
For my, VERY limited needs for the tiny bit I have dabbled in programing or even just help with some Linux issues, I've been using Phind. It seems to work a whole lot better than any of the other search engines. But my needs can't really twist the tail like real programmers.
Though if I would use postgresql documentation very often I could just use the Kagi feature that rewrites URLs with a regex, so I can replace it always with the latest version.
Interesting, my Kagi results gave W3Schools, geeks for geeks, and postgresqltutorial.com before the official docs, but hey still way better than OP's results!
Kagi has search personalization where you can lower/raise/pin specific domains (one of kagis main selling points) and I blocked geeks for geeks and w3schools, as these are irrelevant for me and I don't want them in my results
I don't think that's possible with searxng (but I'm not 100% sure, but I can't seem to find that feature)
I know there are browser extensions which can filter out domains in search results for different search engines like google and duckduckgo.
But the pinning/lowering/raising is a bit trickier to implement as an extension, because what kagi does is basically:
Load 3 pages of search results in the backend
Show a result as the first entry if it matches a rule for pinning
Influence the search ranking algorithm with the lower/raise rules of the user
Filter out blocked domains
It would be possible but not as "streamlined" as Kagi does.
Don't get me wrong, Kagi definitely has its rough edges and the search ranking algorithm is sometimes very unpredictable, but it provides good enough results for me to be worth the 10$ per month for unlimited searches.
yeah not ideal, but if the actual functionality of that operator hasn't changed then I wouldn't expect the version to matter. Same with searching most ruby stuff and getting old results. it hasn't changed in decades, it ain't changing now. But I did scroll down and literally every result was from the postgres docs so that's a marked improvement from the google results.
Had to test with Kagi also, leads with official documentation, after that tutorials and unofficial things. Nothing obviously irrelevant. The only thing with the Kagi results, was that there were a few very simmilar official documentation links (for different postgresql versions) at top. But, still good search results. Not sure why anyone is still using google, when there are quite a few better alternatives availale
