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

danluu.com

171–180 of 493 posts

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

#171

> However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that search results are still great. I think that this very sentence shows the author's bias, because I feel that Google's search results are not just great, but better than what it was 10 years ago.

Consider yourself part of the sizeable group of vocal folk then.

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

#172

I'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there. In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or command line tools. In the Adblock search, ublock Orig…

Same here, I was curious about Kagis low ranking, and couldn't replicate the search results. Also saw ublock Origin on #3, good results for tires, transitors and snow, etc. I've never used any of the Kagi search result weighing features.

Ctrl+F on the page for "System prompt" doesn't show any hits. Given how important those are for ChatGPT (another thought - was the author testing GPT3.5 or 4?) I'm not sure how much weight to put into the ChatGPT results either.

Not sure how much I can take away from this comparison.

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

#173
post #172

I'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there. In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or command line tools. In the Adblock search, ublock Orig…

Same here, I was curious about Kagis low ranking, and couldn't replicate the search results. Also saw ublock Origin on #3, good results for tires, transitors and snow, etc. I've never used any of the Kagi search result weighing features. Ctrl+F on the page for "System prompt" doesn't show any hits. Given how important those are for ChatGPT (another thought - was the author testing GPT3.5 or 4?) I'm not sure how much…

I asked GPT-4 about Youtube Downloader and it rambled on about how downloading videos is against Youtube’s TOS and I should buy YouTube premium which has the download feature.

Getting any useful data from GPT-4 about anything even remotely “illegal” is a waste of time.

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

#174

Pretty biased selection of queries. Article avoids the things that ChatGPT and the others without fresh data can't answer. Look at the trending searches on Google. They are all for fresh info that none of the others can answer. Sports scores. Google probably judges quality weighted by the questions their users actually ask, not this nerd bullshit.

Isn't any selection of queries would be biased. Even what you are saying is biased, you try to say that Google would be better for cases that it optimize for which is even weirder. That is like saying you want to compare highly optimized code that is using some C libraries vs some native python code.

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

#175
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Google is quite quick in plugging holes in AdSense but AdWords.

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

#177
post #89
post #38

Earlier 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…

> But making a video takes time and effort, so has a much higher barrier to use as a click farm. > The mainstream channels aren't all that useful, but there's a ton of "old web" style videos (some even recent) passionately providing details for almost anything you'd think to search. And they're a gold mine. This won't be the case for long. YT is already starting to be polluted with spam and AI generated content, whic…

Yeah. I was recently looking for videos comparing two smartphones and among top ranked videos there were videos that just show the phones side by side and the video consists of showing specs side by side and videos that just have LLM-generated text, added to the video with TTS.

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

#178

I'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there. In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or command line tools. In the Adblock search, ublock Orig…

I have a new Kagi account with no custom rankings and I see the same terrible results. Basically the same as what he describes. yt-dlp is not found at all, the 2010 link to youtube-dl, and a bunch of spam sites.

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

#179
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested Mariginalia and it was completely unable to lead me to a Wikipedia or imdb page when searching for "driver ryan gosling" and variations. It just listed lots of random articles.

That.. is kind of the point of this particular search engine. > This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

Well that makes sense, but I wanted to push against the result that the OP seems to take away from their test, which was that Marginalia seems to work well for the common user.

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

#180

I would love to see Perplexity.ai in the benchmark. It has completely replaced Google/DDG for information questions for me. I still use DDG when I want to do a navigational query (e.g. find the URL for a blog i partially recall the name).

While kagi was the product that most brought me joy in 2022, perplexity.ai has been the one for 2023, even though i only recently started using it. It's just been a joy to be able to iteratively discuss most of my searches.

EDIT: here's a search for tire (I don't know anything about tire, so maybe there's much better links out there, but this is pretty much what I was expecting. Not an ad or SEO in sight.) https://www.perplexity.ai/search/tire-3iuI9T6BQUSvu2tAhgsRmA...

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