361–370 of 493 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a feature of Kagi already. You can promote or blacklist domains in your search results.
Kagi is just the best, it feels like Google did before a decade+ of enshittification and ad tech.
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…
An adblocker is necessary, and IMO a script blocker as well. I feel vaguely like search has gotten worse over time, but it is not a huge problem—usually a good site is on the first page or two, and so I can just go check them out. But if clicking a site meant I would be under attack, that really increases the stakes, I start to care strongly about the absence of bad sites, not just the existence of a good one. Other…
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…
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They can based on user tracking and profiling, but that's murky waters I personally don't want to dip into.
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…
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…
On the one hand, I'm not sure the data corroborates that. If this is a web problem and not a search engine problem, then I'd expect every search engine to have the same pattern of scam results. I'd also argue that finding relevant results among a sea of irrelevant results is the primary function of a search engine. This was as true in 1998 as it is today. In fact, it was Google's "killer feature", unlike Altavista an…
These days the results are apt to be the correct topic, but instead optimized for some other metric than what the user wants. For example downloading malware or showing as many crypto ads as possible.
I don't expect every search engine to have the same scam results. Scammers target individual search engines with particular methodologies. Google does a lot of work to prevent crap on their engines, the issue is the scammers in total do far more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit hard to use for most, either $20/month fixed for a limited # of messages, or you need to be able to reason through how to get an API key, or get another 3rd party service with similar cost & limits.
You can use GPT-4 for free via Bing - though I find it a little hard to explain to people how they can do that because I'm never sure what the rules are with regards to creating Microsoft accounts, whether you can use any browser or have to use Edge, what countries it's available in etc. Actually maybe the recommendation should be to use GPT-4 for free via https://copilot.microsoft.com/ instead now. (Except I can't t…