351–360 of 493 posts
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…
Does this exist for DDG?
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Aren't Bing Chat and Kagi FastGPT the same in effect?
No, FastGPT is GPT-2 based. I actually prefer FastGPT because its fast (duh!), and as it gives very concise answers and all the generated response carries footnotes with the link to the source.
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://ww…
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 th…
Just use the Kagi Summarizer on YouTube videos and you don’t have to waste time watching trash. It’s a great life hack.
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…
If you’re going to search for phone numbers you’ll want to ensure you enable verbatim searching under tools on Google, and put the number in quotes, perhaps in “xxx-xxx-xxxx” OR “(xxx) xxx-xxxx” forms. Many of the sites you mention are fake sites with fake contacts just for ad serving, and I’ve read in some few cases the scammers seeded the spoofed numbers they appear to call from on to the sites they control to see…
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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.
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…
That is, in the early days, Google used to highlight that "search position couldn't be gamed/bought" as one of their primary differentiators, ads were clearly displayed with a distinct yellow background, and there weren't that many ads. Nowadays, when I do any remotely commercial search the entire first page and a half at least on mobile is ads, and the only thing that differentiates ads from organic results is a tiny piece of "Sponsored" text.
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…
Otherwise, yeah, maybe search didn't degrade but the internet got more spammy. Or maybe users just got wiser and can see through the smoke screen better. Who knows...
Doesn't change the fact that today one has to know how to filter through pages of generic results made by low effort content farms. Results that are of dubious validity, which at best simply waste your time. Or through clones of other websites (i.e. Stackoverflow clones).
Search engines can choose to help with that (kagi certainly puts in the effort and I love it for that), or they can ignore the problem and milk you for ad clicks.
Anecdotal evidence is good enough for me.
I 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 pers…