@kara I've been feeling for the longest time that Google has lost its usefulness due to essentially being pay-for-play and increasingly algorithmic and widget-based, this just proved it

If you're happy, you're happy. DDG is definitely behind in parsing but hey it reminds me of the old days of phrasing search queries carefully lol =P

@alice I still use Google Books and Scholar searches a lot and they have no competitors that I know of :( but a better general search engine would be nice.

@kara @alice I use DDG as my primary general-purpose search tool, supplemented by Google Books and Scholar for specialized academic stuff. Both of them have exasperating shortcomings, and I wish they had viable competitors.

@alice @kara My guess is that nobody has actually worked on Google Scholar in, like, seven years, and it's still running on a single server underneath Mel's desk (Mel ate the brown acid at Burning Man and hasn't been seen since 2015).

@bstacey @alice @kara oshit I forgot mel

@bstacey @alice yes :( Google Scholar is a very poor substitute for SciFinder access (that's the American Chemical Society searchable index of chemical publications, which by all rights ought to be free because you're accessing citations and abstracts and not periodicals, but you know, it's the ACS)

@kara @alice @bstacey PsycINFO from American Psychological Association is the same. Quite expensive for an individual subscription just to search citations and abstracts.

So still Google Scholar.

@tw ok