Have you tried perplexity.ai? It's like ChatGPT and Google had a baby. Looks very promising and I'm seeing a lot of tech leaders (example Toby of Shopify) moving to it.
Aren't Bing Chat and Kagi FastGPT the same in effect?
Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
101–110 of 493 posts
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#102Do 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.
I doubt you're seeing censorship. If you search for "truthsocial trump" on ddg, you'll see his profile, for better or worse.
Oh, interesting. So it depends on the order of the terms:
- "truthsocial trump" works
- "trump truthsocial" doesn't work
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#103I 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…
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Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a big fan of the non commercial site search engines because of the gaming aspect. If you're not generating revenue from the clicks the game mostly goes away. I'm not saying people aren't entitled to make some money, but it clearly incentivizes user hostile behavior. Maybe make it an option because legitimate sites like journalism also use this model.
Subscription model like Kagi seems to work pretty well against gaming the results. Their only remaining incentive is to be good enough that people keep paying for the service.
It works not because they're somehow smarter or have more resources than Google at detecting spam/SEO, it's because unlike Google (and other ad-supported search engines), they make money from result quality and have an interest in blocking spam.
Google on the other hand makes money off ads (whether on the search results page itself or on the spam sites), so spam sites are at best considered neutral and at worst considered beneficial (since they can embed Google ads/analytics, and make the ads on the search results page look relatively good compared to the spam).
Black-hat SEO has been around since the early days of search engines and they managed to keep it at bay just fine. What changed isn't that there was some sudden breakthrough in malicious SEO, it's that it was more profitable to keep the spammers around than to fight them, and with the entire tech industry settling on advertising/"engagement" as its business model, the risk of competition was nil because competitors with the same business model would end up making the same decision.
The same reason is behind the neutering of advanced search features. These have nothing to do with the supposed war on spam/SEO, so why were they removed? Oh yeah because you'd spend less time on the search results page and are less likely to click on an ad/sponsored result, so it's against Google's interests and was removed too.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#105For me the problem is not just that searching on Google is bad, but that sometimes it COMPLETELY hides exactly what I'm looking, for no good reason.
For instance, I wrote an R ggplot2 package called "fedplot" (following the convention of calling the package for the figure style it replicates, as in "bbplot" for BBC-style charts).
Try searching for it on Google: "github" "fedplot" doesn't get you anywhere. Meanwhile, every other search engine gives you exactly what you want if you just type "fedplot". I even tried to add the relevant websites through google's suggested tools, and nothing happened :|
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#106Try 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).
Just today I was looking for an extension just to block Quora from search results. (Talk about a useless site that seems to uselessly outrank Wikipedia on google lately — what on earth is Google up to?) I’m thankful I saw your and your parent’s post.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
For me, it really depends on the type of video. For fixing cars, I'm usually looking for something specific enough that there isn't a lot of chaff. It was probably recorded and edited on a phone just to splice the clips together. Probably the default thumbnail that youtube extracted from the video.
For product videos, if Project Farm did it, look there first. Otherwise, I look for someone has a lot of videos for competing products with basically the same format, not over 10 minutes.
Tech videos are the hardest, I often still prefer text. Maybe look for links to the docs in the description? I still get duds though.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#108I really don't agree with some of the expectations around results.
> Download youtube videos
> Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp. Links to youtube-dl or other less frequently updated projects would also be ok.
That's not what a random person expects. yt-dlp or youtube-dl have no meaning to a normie. The first result is an online downloader and that's what an average person is after. I checked the first result in Kagi and it's a valid youtube downloader.
If you're after a commandline tool, ask for it: "commandline tool download youtube videos" gives youtube-dl as the top result with valid options afterwards: https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+...
"Ad blocker" seems to ignore other options exist. Yes, ublock would be preferable for most, but ABP is not "very bad". Kagi mentions ABP at position 1 and ublock at position 8: https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOt... (But for a query like that, I'd be happy with a wikipedia article about adblockers, because why not?)
I'm not disagreeing that results have been getting worse for years, but... this is a really bad scoring system. It feels like that one very new person jumping on SO posting something like "syntax error: if 1 {" - what are you even asking for? (To be honest, the search engines could also give you the equivalent of "this is a very vague, would you like to specify what you're actually after? here are some suggestions: ...", but that's beyond the scope here.) The search returning not the exact thing you want to see for a super generic query, but returning a valid answer to a question is not "very bad".
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#109I 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.
Yes, this should be table stakes for a classifier - a company with the resource of Google can definitely solve that problem if they weren't themselves in the business of spam (advertising) and benefited from spam sites (as they often include Google ads/analytics).
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely more profitable not to. Especially as Google is an ad company, not a search company. I’d rather see a world with numerous paid/subscription search engines, that are motivated to do nothing but return search results well. I expect you would see some of the SEO crap getting solved.
i cant remember where i read this, but something about how google ranks site that have google ads higher than sites that dont. makese sense, its evil, but makes sense, thats why we get all this scrapped spam. is there any more info on this?
this is like focusing on one single problem as being the cause of the decline of the United States. It's actually a lot of things combining and there's not going to be one fix