Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
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Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#2"Going back to the debate between folks like Xe, who believe that straightforward search queries are inundated with crap, and our thought leader, who believes that "the rending of garments about how even google search is terrible now is pretty overblown", it appears that Xe is correct."
Also, the article tested Mwmbl as well, not mentioned in the title here.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#3Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#4Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
Search probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very different.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#5I reckon these days search is pretty difficult and everyone knows how to game it. I recommend using a search engine that lets you effectively change which sites are shown. You can do this with Kagi, or with Google's Programmable Search Engines - I'm sure there are more too.
In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't sometimes correct, but because I don't want videos polluting the regular results - it just takes too long to get info from videos.
An ability to upvote results for a given query seems tantalizing but I bet it would be gamed too. The DIY approach seems to be the only tractable one.
In my case I only only results from domains I believe are correct. The whitelist approach does have downsides. Usually I'll vet new potential domains through social means like Reddit and this site, rather than identifying them through the search results. I believe there's an inherent tradeoff between discoverability and the gameability of the results.
Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008 Google Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude less content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable your place is on your business and thus no SEO.
I also personally disagree that yt-dlp is the "correct" result for the average user when they search Youtube Download. I highly doubt the average user would know or care to use the command line. A website front end would be more actionable for them.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#6Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
Search probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very different.
Yeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality content, that search doesn’t (or can’t) do a good job of surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal left, but it’s such a small fraction that it’s much more difficult to filter it out.
Having said that, I’m usually still able to find what I’m looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the keywords to use to find it. But it’s much harder nowadays for sure.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#7Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
Is it actually more complex to provide good results, or is it just more profitable not to?
I have a hard time believing an organization like Google doesn't have the resources to provide a search engine that's just as usable as what they had 6 years ago (around the time I feel like the decay really set in). Seems a lot more likely that it's just more profitable to serve up garbage sponsored content.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#8Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
The problem is that even if providers of the service are 100% trying to provide a great service, everyone on the web will always be min-maxing to appear on top.
So it's inevitably going to become crap.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#9I got different results for Google on "ad block".
And changing the query to "ad blocker" like Google suggested raised ublock origin way up in the results
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#10The issue with traditional search engines is that keyword-first algorithms are extremely gameable.
Try https://search.metaphor.systems - it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is.
So in the mentioned example of searching for Youtube downloaders, with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders (https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20b...)
Full disclosure - I work there :p