Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

51–60 of 493 posts

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

#51

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?

Marginalia Search isn't trying to be a universal knowledge engine, it's just a website finder.

That's bad if you're looking for a simple answer or basic fact, and good if you're looking for a few hours of reading.

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

#52
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.

[deleted]

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

#53

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-d…

[deleted]

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

#54
post #38

I 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…

> 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. Funnily enough, lately I've been prioritizing YT videos more when searching. So many sites now are just regurgitated SEO farms with minimal quality, and easy to see why: it's minimal effort to produce and cheap to host. But making a…

Would a browser feature that skipped to the relevant parts of the video based on closed captioning and understanding search intent be useful? It seems like this would be a good way for Google to fight to stay relevant in UX vs having the chat bots just quickly spitting out a readable answer. Hunting through ad laden webpages is annoying. Seeking to the relevant section of the video is a solvable problem, especially for videos above some viewership threshold.

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

#55
post #38

I 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…

> 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. Funnily enough, lately I've been prioritizing YT videos more when searching. So many sites now are just regurgitated SEO farms with minimal quality, and easy to see why: it's minimal effort to produce and cheap to host. But making a…

Do you have some tips for finding concise videos that answer the question you are asking? I am finding more and more obvious LLM bullshit in results, so I am willing to try some other tactics. But I am not ready to spend the minutes watching videos to see if it is actually relevant or a waste of time, always artificially long to increase ad revenue.

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

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Inter…

> 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

So it's not high quality web pages but web pages that people talk about a lot which is expected since no one has an oracle that says what high quality is. The embeddings are merely a proxy and generalization for "how links are talked about on the Internet." That can be gamed at scale just like every other signal any popular search engine has been based off of.

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Marginalia supports the old Google syntax, e.g. "define:dildo"

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

#58

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN