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

danluu.com

321–330 of 493 posts

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

#321

On a side note: would it kill the author of the site to use a stylesheet?

it's the same as my choice to only use lowercase letters, it is designed to make you upset that i am not following conventions. that's as far as i have been able to figure for hwy i started doing this, and by extension, why tech bois love to drop some vital freature to communication to signal being an 'insider'

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

#322

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.…

At the time it seemed like Google was winning, though. SEO seems to have gotten really good, or maybe Google just gave up.

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

#323
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…

This is a feature of Kagi already. You can promote or blacklist domains in your search results.

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

#324
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you click either of those links? Both seem to do the job of downloading a youtube link to mp4 for free.

Did you click either of those links? They are not YouTube video downloaders, they just link to another downloader. There is nowhere on those links to even put a YouTube URL. Are you seriously suggesting that a website with the following "About us" with only a link to another YouTube video downloader is itself a good YouTube video downloader? > Good Samaritan Support Action is to reawaken the Body of Christ to receivi…

so, there is one extra click... But for the user, the site does the job and takes an extra 1 second.

Ideal? No. But it does the trick.

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

#325

What always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst. Like, sure, I have the impression that search got worse over the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell? And, honestly, this should be a verifiable claim; you can just try the top N search terms from Google trends or whatever and see how the…

What always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst.

I can't speak for anybody else, just trying to find stuff online, not writing a treatise about it or writing my own engine to outcompete Google. It's been asked many times here over the years and the answer was always explanations, never solutions.

Shittification does not happen overnight, but along many years. It started with Google deciding that some search terms weren't so popular: "did you mean...?" (forcing a second click to do what you intended to do in the first place) and went downhill when qualifiers to override that crap got ignored.

For me enough was enough when I realized that a simple query with three words, chosen carefully to point to the desired page, gave thousands of results, none of them relevant. YMMV.

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

#327
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good illustration of my frustration with this discussion: I don't think search has gotten bad, I think the web has gotten bad. It's weird to even conceptualize it as a big graph of useful hypertext documents. That's just wikipedia. The broader web is this much noisier and dubious thing now. That's bad for google though! Their model is very much predicated on the web having a lot of signal that they…

But there's still plenty of signal. It isn't as if there are no working YouTube downloaders, or factually correct explanations of how transistors work. It's just that search engines don't know how to (or don't care enough about) disambiguating these good results from the mountains of spam or malware.

I think that both of you are correct. The internet has much more "noise" than in the past (partially due to websites gaming SEO to show up higher in Google's search results). As a result, Google's algorithm returns more "noise" per query now than it used to. It is a less effective filter through the noise.

Imagine Google were like a water filter you install on your kitchen faucet to filter out unwanted chemicals from your drinking water. If as the years progress your municipal tap water starts to contain a higher baseline of unwanted chemicals, and as a result the filter begins to let through more chemicals than it did before, you'd consider your filter pretty cruddy for its use case. At the bare minimum you'd call it outdated. That is what is happening to Google search

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Based on your handle, I suspect you have much better insight into this than the rest of us!

But can the search engine mind-read by assuming Windows users don’t want to use a command-line utility?

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point he's trying to make that the search results page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating safely. If he was looking at relevance, yours would be a solid point, but since most of the emphasis is on harm, a smaller sample works. Like "we found used needles in 3 out of 5 playgrounds" doesn't typically garner requests for p-values…

I think this is a good illustration of my frustration with this discussion: I don't think search has gotten bad, I think the web has gotten bad. It's weird to even conceptualize it as a big graph of useful hypertext documents. That's just wikipedia. The broader web is this much noisier and dubious thing now. That's bad for google though! Their model is very much predicated on the web having a lot of signal that they…

The web has gotten bad because of what big search engines have encouraged. If they stopped incentivizing publishing complete garbage (by ruthlessly delisting low quality sites regardless of their ad quantity, etc) then maybe we'd see a resurgence of good content.
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