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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

#271

Post by poulpy123 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #254
poulpy123 wrote: post #209

I'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the kind of search

That's the tricky mind-reading aspect about search intent. Different people have varying expectations as to what they want to find with the same query. I'd definitely want yt-dlp in favor of some website.

it's easy: just append command line to the query like you would append android app if you wanted and android app

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

#272

Post by lbalazscs »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #245
golol wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also a known bug with Wikipedia in particular, I do index it but the results are never ranked particularly high. I haven't fixed it because I don't want Wikipedia to be the #1 result for every search. Feels like most people are aware of Wikipedia and don't need help finding it.

I often do a Google search, and then go directly to the Wikipedia result. My reasoning is that during the initial search, I don't know if there's a Wikipedia page about that topic, and I might need a fallback option.

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

#273

Post by motoxpro »

carlosjobim wrote: post #212
motoxpro wrote: post #195

This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp" Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). 99.999% of people are not programming tin…

The first result on Kagi is exactly this, just tried it a moment ago. It processed and downloaded the video extremely fast. Why would any reasonable person prefer youtube-dl?

Totally, As the sibling said, it is the same using Google. I am not sure, why anyone would want a programming package to accomplish a task that could be done in But again, I guess that's why search is so hard is because I have to parse that intent from 3 words.

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

#274

Post by vagrantJin »

anonymoushn wrote: post #263
bambax wrote: post #207

I'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even try to disable it. I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how it goes. It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos men…

cross-posted: Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU " into the text box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with an error message saying "The download link…

savefrom.net used to be good but it seems they've switched their MO. plenty of decent alternatives filled the gap though.

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

#275

Post by anonymoushn »

jeffreyw128 wrote: post #10

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…

The first result vtubego.com is a 144MB downloader app. The page contains "Pricing Plans Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, placerat verterem luptatum phaedrum vis, impetus mandamus id vix fabulas vim." above its 3 paid plans (there is no free plan).

I haven't installed the downloader app, so I'm not sure if it lets me download youtube videos for free.

The second result "ytder.com" is a redirect to "https://poperblocker.com/edge/" which seems to be a browser extension for Microsoft Edge that protects the user from the Holy See. I'm not using Edge and I'm trying to download a Youtube video.

The third result download-video.net says that it can download videos from a list of sites. Youtube is not in the list, but let's try anyway. If you put "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box and click "download" you get "500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token 'At this point I gave up, but please let me know if any of the results work.

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

#276

Post by anonymoushn »

vagrantJin wrote: post #274
anonymoushn wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cross-posted: Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU " into the text box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with an error message saying "The download link…

savefrom.net used to be good but it seems they've switched their MO. plenty of decent alternatives filled the gap though.

Can you name the alternatives, and are they present in the search results?

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

#277

Post by latexr »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #138

I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about ChatGPT uses 3.5. It's pretty misleading as to the results you can get out of (the best available version of) ChatGPT. For comparison, here are all the author's questions posed against GPT4: https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7...

> I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about ChatGPT uses 3.5.

Because that’s what most people have access to. It’s absolutely worthless to most readers to talk about something they’ll never pay for and it’s not the job of random third-parties to incentivise others to send money to OpenAI.

What I really don’t understand is why anyone gets so hung up about it and blames the writer. If you’re bothered by people using 3.5 you should complain to OpenAI, not the people using the service they make freely available.

Anecdotally, I find this excessive fawning about 4 VS 3.5 to be unwarranted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304184

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

#278

Post by lrem »

imiric wrote: post #89
ysavir wrote: 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…

Note that the problem of filtering bad data out of learning material isn’t inherently easier than filtering same out of search results.

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

#279

Post by marginalia_nu »

poulpy123 wrote: post #271
marginalia_nu wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the tricky mind-reading aspect about search intent. Different people have varying expectations as to what they want to find with the same query. I'd definitely want yt-dlp in favor of some website.

it's easy: just append command line to the query like you would append android app if you wanted and android app

That is a user POV solution, speaking from the search engine POV.

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

#280

Post by sanderjd »

gkbrk wrote: post #225
bambax wrote: post #207

I'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even try to disable it. I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how it goes. It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos men…

When I do a Google search in an Incognito tab for "how to download youtube videos", the first two results I get are the following. - https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/ - https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/ I would certainly put those in the "Terrible" category like the author.

I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab" being part of the test harness?

It seems pretty arbitrary to me to disable one of the key features - in this case personalization - of the software being evaluated.

Or is the evaluation not between "search engines" but rather "search engines without personalization"? If so, then this restriction does make sense. But that is not the evaluation that "normal users" are interested in.

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