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

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

#91

Post by tentacleuno »

infamia wrote: post #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 subscript…

uBlacklist is absolutely excellent: I've been using it for a few years now, with absolutely no problems.

Quick tip: turn on the 'Skip the "Block this site" dialog', and disable 'Hide the "Block this site" links' settings -- they make it much quicker to block spam websites (of which there are many on regular search engines).

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

#92

Post by lamontcg »

endisneigh wrote: post #5

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…

> 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.

That was a decade after Google was created and people certainly understood SEO and Google was constantly updating its algorithm to punish people who were trying to game the algorithm.

The wikipedia page on "link farming" for example references it happening as early as 1999 and targeting SEO on inktomi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm

I remember some internal presentations at Amazon around ~2004 about how boosting Google SEO on Amazon web pages increased traffic and revenue (and Amazon was honestly a bit behind-the-curve due to a kind of NIH syndrome).

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

#93

Post by louthy »

kristofferR wrote: post #23
happytiger wrote: post #13

I feel like you could reboot yahoo directory and have more utility that most searches.

The !bang directory for Kagi is honestly pretty good, found some cool sites there: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Did you mean to say Kagi or Bing?

Anyway, here’s Kagi’s bangs:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

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

#94

Post by 0x38B »

Re: Kagi, I heard about it on HN, tried it for 100 searches, then subscribed. When I search for random JS and CSS things, MDN is the first result, and if it isn't, I can downrank whatever spammy site(s) are on top.

---

I wish I had a local LLM trained to detect clickbait and or low-effort content. I imagine searching YouTube and having all the clickbait collapsed together (just like Kagi condenses listicles), with the remainder being potentially high-quality content. Don't know how feasible this is right now.

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

#95

Post by tentacleuno »

nulld3v wrote: post #65
robrenaud wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I've definitely seen Google do this already: https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-suggested-clip-sea...

Google seems to be taking much more advantage of YouTube's transcription feature lately. The first addition was the (ok, gimmicky) animation on the Subscribe button when someone says the dreaded like. Hopefully a sign of things to come.

Overall AI summaries are very welcome for a certain subset of YouTube which is sadly dominated by sponsored, clickbait, and ad-driven content.

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

#96

Post by stevage »

endisneigh wrote: post #5

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…

I have a hard time believing it's so difficult for a search engine to distinguish between a credible, respected website that has been around a while with some generated garbage that exists to be a search result. We humans can tell them apart, so in principle, computers can too.

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

#97

Post by marginalia_nu »

bombcar wrote: post #86
marginalia_nu wrote: post #11

While I've made huge improvements to the algo recently, I do think Marginalia Search got a bit lucky with the sample queries, as it is still IMO far more hit and miss than many alternatives, but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.

I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single developer can do so well ;) I do think that search has gotten much worse but my ability to know the magic words like “ublock origin” instead of “Adblock” and “yt-dlp” instead of “download YouTube” and phrase my search has gotten better. We’ve all been doing prompt engineering against the Internet-wide LLM that is the spam houses.

> I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single developer can do so well ;)

As much as I enjoy the notion of somehow being a 10,000X developer, it's probably mostly that modern search is a filtering problem, and MS does filtering fairly well.

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

#99

Post by marginalia_nu »

tentacleuno wrote: post #87
marginalia_nu wrote: post #11

While I've made huge improvements to the algo recently, I do think Marginalia Search got a bit lucky with the sample queries, as it is still IMO far more hit and miss than many alternatives, but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.

> [...] but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. Would you be able to share some of your personal highlights regarding this? I've partially kept up-to-date with the DIY, non-corporate search space (YaCY and friends). I'd love to understand a bit more behind the engineering decisions made when creating a search engine; it seems like a very hard problem to solve. P.S. Marginalia is a very impress…

Honestly I understand it well enough that I see it is surprisingly hard, but not enough to have good solutions...

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

#100

Post by berkut »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #69

Can someone tell me why Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local results? I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses containing maybe one word in common. It's most frustrating with phone numbers. I picked up the habit of searching the random numbers that called me, to try and find out if they were possibly important. I used to get a bunch of spam sites…

Yeah, I've noticed this as well with DDG recently: even with the localised checkbox disabled it still prioritises them, which often is very frustrating as the results are then almost totally useless.

However, more generally, I've personally found that DDG (and maybe Bing's then?) localised results are just really bad, and have been for the multiple years I've been using DDG and it's had this feature: I'm in New Zealand, and enabling localised / region-based search still often provides results to pages with TLDs like "co.uk", ".ca" and ".pl" (these latter are really common for content-generated spam in my experience), which I just can't understand...

Unfortunately, I have found that Google's results are usually a lot better in terms of being "location-aware" than DDG, at least when that's what you want...

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