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Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

danluu.com

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Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#41

I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In my handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia. #1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon Ramsay and shows relevant results. #2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows Wikipedia, Al Jazee…

I had a similar experience when testing Kagi after reading this. The top result for the “wider car tires” query on Kagi was a link to Physics StackExchange with some marginally informative answers [0], which would be easy to expand on in future searches. The second result was Reddit. Then a couple of incorrect/irrelevant pages but they don’t look like scams

[0]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29903/why-do-peo...

Edit: I did just realize that I have StackExchange customized to be up-ranked. So that probably helps. But yeah, I guess this is why I usually get good results, which is something that generally still fails with Google for me.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#42
post #26

I have recently started using kagi after seeing a recommendation here. From what I understand, it aggregates results from multiple sources rather than having their own indexer. The results aren’t really any better, but the lack of ads and videos in the results makes for a cleaner experience. I also haven’t yet taken advantage of the extra features to block certain websites from results. Personally, I pay the $5 mostl…

Kagi is awesome, so much better experience than Google! Start using bangs, lenses and customized results ASAP, that makes a big difference.

I actually find myself using bangs way more since I switched to Kagi from DDG. I think it's the AI bangs like !chat and !expert that got me in the habit of using bangs besides !g (which I never actually use anymore).

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#43
post #3

Search 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 golden era of search results is very much over. Welcome to the pot-metal era.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#44

The 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%2…

How is that different from keywords? Embeddings aren't magic, they're just page content. Content is trivial to game since it's controlled by the website owner. edit: The results are also from my quick QA not that great. Searching for "what is the best mouse to buy" leads to links to buy random mice versus review summaries or online discussions on mice. One of the recommended queries of "Here is a great fun concert in…

Yup, definitely still gameable but if the model learns what high quality content is like and what high quality webpages there are (which it does), then the only way to game would be to be great :)

For your search - I would recommend turning autoprompt off and searching something like "Here is a great summary of the best computer mice to use:".

Our embeddings model is trained on how links are talked about on the Internet, if that helps with querying. So you have to query like how someone would refer to a link before sharing it

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#46
post #16

Do search engines censor political topics these days? If you search "truthsocial" on ddg, the truthsocial.com website is the first hit. But if you search "trump truthsocial", it doesn't give you trump's truthsocial page, and doesn't even give you truthsocial.com within the first few pages of search results. Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at bing? It looks like google results are similar.

DuckDuckGo (and by extension perhaps Bing, assuming identical upstream results) has some terrible results when trying to filter by all kinds of domains.

There's a power tools review/news site that returns zero hits for the actual domain when searching its name (which is the same as its .com address). While for some domains even searching using the `site:` parameter will give far fewer results when paired with a query than just searching the domain name + query sans the TLD (the router firmware site openwrt.org is among such).

It's a mess and reporting it hasn't any difference ime in the past 3 years. So I'd be reluctant to say irrelevant results are due to censorship unless there was more evidence.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#47

I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In my handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia. #1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon Ramsay and shows relevant results. #2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows Wikipedia, Al Jazee…

I don't disagree with your assessment in full, but I don't exactly consider wikipedia and Amazon good results. Like they are big enough that if that's the result I want I can go to them directly. So like they aren't bad or wrong, but I can see the case for excluding them. Should something like Webster's dictionary be a top result?

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#48

The 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%2…

How do you deal with dynamically/contextually generated content? And how about paywalls and login-required content?

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#49

I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In my handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia. #1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon Ramsay and shows relevant results. #2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows Wikipedia, Al Jazee…

I don't disagree with your assessment in full, but I don't exactly consider wikipedia and Amazon good results. Like they are big enough that if that's the result I want I can go to them directly. So like they aren't bad or wrong, but I can see the case for excluding them. Should something like Webster's dictionary be a top result?

I think for single word queries like that Wikipedia covers more ground than a dictionary. Personal preference, perhaps. If I need a definition I search for "define dildo" (Kagi shows Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc dictionary entries).

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#50
Try uBlacklist, it's like uBlock, but for search results.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...

You can sync the settings and your personal blocklist to either Dropbox or Google Drive. It also has the ability to subscribe to blocklists. Mind, you need to manually turn on search engines and subscribe to lists. The uBlacklist subscriptions setting doesn't have any built-in feeds yet though. :(

edit: THere are some feeds on the uBlacklist site though. https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions

edit edit: Found an even better list of feeds. https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-fi...

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