I have never in my life got any useful information out of Quora.
In fact, it's so bad that when I mistakenly click on a Quora link, and I have some time to kill, I read the page to have a solid laugh at all the stupid answers in there that gets promoted.
Came here to say pretty much this. I will add that one time years ago I went back and gave a correct answer after I had found it. The next time I looked it wasn't displayed. At that point I determined that quora was a scam site.
Just use: https://search.marginalia.nu/ It crawls forums, wikis and other human generated content.
No SEO garbage, scammers or AI. (mostly)
It's still very much an alpha.
I still have a Reddit account but I stopped posting anything to it a couple of years ago. I only use it for a few niche things I can't find anywhere else, like r/SamsungWatchFaces
I genuinely can't trust google results to be true and unbiased anymore. Nowadays I use a combination of google results, reddit results, Quorn results, ChatGPT fever dreams, and dead reckoning.
These days, I only ever use Reddit to find answers and to comment in one small community I probably could not live without. I've drastically cut down on my Reddit usage since whole API debacle.
(Don't ask about trying to move that community to Lemmy. Already had someone ask that repeatedly the last time I mentioned this. They've polled their users, and they're not moving.)
As asked already, why do you feel the need for an account for this? It changes nothing. You've surely misunderstood something, you keeping an account has absolutely no relation to any of this.
So this is not really google's fault then but rather while people were using it to find answers in links, they expected shitty SEO and LLM written articles to not mess with the results.
Google doesn’t want you to find answers. They could improve this. They want repeated searches and more time spent on each Google page to increase eyes on their ads.
I'm pretty sad these days when I see an issue marked as solved, but then when I get to the solution it just says "this comment has been deleted in objection to the API changes and Steve Huffman is a dirty little piss boy". We've lost millions of hours worth of answers because of Reddit 's greed.
The best way to find information on the internet is to give up on Google and use Kagi. Add a question mark at the end of your search and it'll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer and saving you tons of time. They include sources if you want to dig deeper.
That's understandable, but you're nowhere near private with Google either. They definitely know who you are, even if you never log in. At least with Kagi they're not logging everything and keeping a record of everything you do. They do have an option to enable history, but I have it turned off.
They do have an option to enable history, but I have it turned off.
Actually, that "setting" is there just for show. It can't be turned on. Underneath the setting, it says
Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.
Sadly, their CEO is kind of a weirdo. There was a recent post chain on Mastodon I think where a user shared their disappointment with Kagi - had something to do with their not being as privacy-focused as they claimed they are - and the CEO just decided to keep sending unsolicited emails to the OP about this, trying to with them over with phone and video calls
it'll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer
This is literally what the Google AI thing that everyone has been mocking does. For example, it suggested gluing cheese onto a pizza because that was a highly up voted comment on the reddit thread that was the top search results.
Tbh I find it hard to believe that it's actually better, knowing how many resources Google probably poured into getting the summaries right already. If the same amount of scrutiny were applied to Kagi's summaries, people would probably find similarly embarrassing answers.
Perhaps, but it has worked well for me. Plus they have features to change your results to forums, listicles, and other formats, rather than having to add qualifiers to the search. You'd think Google's general results would be better too, considering all their resources, but they've been trash for years now. They're more focused on making every penny possible than producing good search results.
I don't think using it for Google counts at all anymore because that's Google's fault. I occasionally look at r/beermoney for ideas but that's it. Haven't looked at the front page in a year.
