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Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

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Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#211

Post by yieldcrv »

freediver wrote: post #164
yieldcrv wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve replaced most of my google searches with LLM discussions and some bullshit checking I usually only need to understand a concept, not understand if the personnel and company names it made up actually exist everything else I use google for are just addresses so I’m wondering if a paid search engine would shift my behavior back to search engines, or if that ship has just sailed

LLMs can not yet replace good web search. There are whole categories of queries whera a LLM is more or less helpless with. Think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware, 'grep the web' style queries just to name the few. For example: nyt crossword cheap iem reddit starbucks near me M7FFALP Likely, a good search product in the future will be a combnation of both.

> everything else I use google for are just addresses

> LLMs can not yet replace good web search ... think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware

amusing.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#212

Post by allarm »

inductive_magic wrote: post #168
cassianoleal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with DDG and local searches? I find it exceedingly good, especially with the country selector being so up and front. It's very easy to search for those kinds of things in other places, for example to plan a trip. Kagi for me is a no-no. I mostly browse on temporary containers, and also have Firefox delete cookies on close. A search engine that requires me to be signed in would be a massive pain to use.

>What's wrong with DDG and local searches Maybe its different in the US or just not optimised in Germany, but the quality of search results isn't comparable. Query: "All you can eat Kiel" Google: 1. a map with the top three restaurants for this context in the foreground 2: a list of restaurants, sortable by price/date/hours 3 to end of page: links to homepages of the top restaurants DDG: 1. a completely random assort…

With all respect, there’s not a lot of restaurants around here ) comparing to i.e. Hamburg. A couple of steak houses, some locals, 4-5 asian food and the Brunswik, which is always busy. There’s also Kiellinie, but it’s mostly a seasonal thing. Though there’s a lot of folks around sipping cocktails with ice in winter, crazy. Love this city.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#213

Post by smsm42 »

phil9909 wrote: post #184
smsm42 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any system that can check balance, can link searches to a user. I don't think it's true. I can immediately see at least two ways how it can be done without identifying the user. 1. Each user gets X tokens at the beginning of the month. When searching, user supplies a token, which is immediately burned. The token does not contain the user identity, just signature validating it's a valid token. 2. Variation of the ab…

In both these cases the search engine provider could easily store your identity together with your token while issuing it and recover the identity once the token is used without any way to prove this from the outside. They could even issue tokens in the form AES_ENC("SOME KEY ONLY THEY HAVE", USER_ID | counter) and you would not notice. You would have to trust them that they won't do this, which is no improvement to…

I think there's a fundamental difference between "X can not be implemented" and "can we trust this provider to implement X correctly"? In this case, it can be implemented without violating privacy. But of course you need to trust them to actually implement what they say and not instead put 9000 trackers in each page and track your every movement like certain other big companies do. But these are different things - the comment upstream claimed that the subscription system can not be implemented with privacy. This is not true - it can be. Whether or not a particular provider would implement it, and whether we can trust them that they did - that's a different question, which is also important but does not change the answer to the original one.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#214

Post by yzydserd »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #141
TradingPlaces wrote: post #18

Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.

I tried it a little but honestly thinking about having a limit of searches made me anxious every time I thought about searching like “is this really necessary” and so I went back to google.

Kagi searches are soon to be unlimited (fair use policy?) for the $10 plan. If I understand correctly, this may happen around October 2 when other new features are released.

I use search a lot in my workflow and my usage is showing 2k/month. I expected it would have been 3-4k.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#216

Post by janaagaard »

delboni wrote: post #98
TradingPlaces wrote: post #18

Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.

Does anyone knows how Kagi performs on country specific search or even search in another languages?

Working fine for me with Danish as my primary language. But I think that I mostly search for English content, so unsure how your experience will be.

But could you not just pay for a month and try it? I don’t think their plans bind you for a longer than a month.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#218

Post by steroids33331 »

lazylion2 wrote: post #161
kotaKat wrote: post #39

Similar vein, how the hell do I search an image and combine it with text anymore? I hate Lens and there's apparently no way to properly "image" search anymore.

Yandex's image search is pretty good

depends.. it don't work as good anymore for me

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#219

Post by dannysullivan »

I was on vacation when this came up, so playing some catch up. I work for Google Search. I've been very involved with the concerns raised about quoted searches last year, especially because they never stopped working. They do work.

We did make an update last year to better reflect where quoted content appears on a page in the snippets we show. We did this because sometimes it's hard to find the quoted material on the page itself, leading to the "quotes don't work" issues.

This post explains more about this: https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...

The post also explains things like how with punctuation, we'll ignore that -- which leads to the "example.com" type of issue you might be having. If you're quoting a domain name, we're likely seeing that as "name com" rather than a request to just search within the domain. If you want to just search within the domain, that's what site: is for such as [site:example.com whatever you want to search for]

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