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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

#411

Post by nsagent »

binarymax wrote: post #399
bscphil wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local results From what I can tell this is an issue with the Bing API that DDG uses that the DDG folks have been unable to resolve. I've tried many identical queries between DDG and Bing and while Bing does occasionally return incorrect local results, the completely irrelevant local results that appear on almost every DDG search do not seem to happen with Bing itself…

Long time DDG user (>10 years) here, and it’s astounding to me that they haven’t prioritized making their own independent index to switch off Bing. I would have expected them to do it like 5 years ago, but there’s afaik no initiative to do so. It’s unfortunate and am now trying other engines like Brave search.

I also occasionally try Brave search when a DDG search fails. Sometimes Brave finds what I want, but I frequently get Captcha (and now proof of work) challenges that are quite annoying. I don't get this with any other search provider (though StartPage would frequently do this a while back). I hope this is just a phase, because I would likely use Brave Search more if not for this issue.

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

#412

Post by jldugger »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #402
ta988 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my feedback after trying to finally get to what it is exactly. I tried to find marginalia on DDG, not on the first page. Google has it after some garbage. If I go to marginalia.nu I get a SSL error. search.marginalia.nu works If i search on marginalia for duckduckgo there first link is somewhat relevant but is about the app, all the other links are related to DDG but of curious relevance. If I search for ublackl…

Hmm, what's your browser? I renewed the cert today... Only thing I can think of is that it might not like a wildcard cert for the bare marginalia.nu domain.

Safari doesn't like https://marginalia.nu. Probably because *.marginalia.nu is not valid for the base domain. Add it as a Subject Alt Name

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

#413

Post by l8_to_catch_up »

EA-3167 wrote: post #333
bayindirh wrote: post #323

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 just tried it (free account), and it felt underwhelming, not many search results, or particularly interesting ones, for the image and video stuff I searched.

There was little to no spam, though, but not much to look at either. Maybe it might be useful when searching for stuff that usually has high amount of confusing spam, but otherwise not really useful for me...

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

#414

Post by whakim »

greggh wrote: post #347
whakim wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the author tried Kagi and the results don't appear to be noticeably different, filled with scammy adspam just like Google and Bing. Kagi's results seem to mostly aggregate existing search engines [1], so this isn't much of a surprise. Perhaps a subscription-based service that operates an index at Google's scale might help, but no such thing exists to my knowledge. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/sea…

Right, but Kagi has built in tools to make it easy to fix that. Blocking those spammy sites from ever showing up again. Moving certain sites up the ranking, and so on. These features mean that over time my Kagi results have become nearly perfect for myself.

This is addressed in the article. As Hacker News readers and expert computer users, we have a bag of tricks that we can reach into in order to make our searches perform better. With a similar level of effort and an expert user's intuition you can get good results out of any search engine. Not so for the average user. In fact, again paraphrasing the article, Google's original claim to fame was that you didn't have to spend a lot of time doing exact keyword matching and fancy tricks in order to get good results.

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

#415

Post by anonymoushn »

Dah00n wrote: post #227
gkbrk wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 get savefrom.net in both Incognito and normal tabs, uBlock or not. I have no idea why you get crap results that are somehow different. uBlock doesn't change google results in Firefox for me at all. It seems you get crap added , not removed.

savefrom.net is a crap result.

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

#416

Post by [deleted] »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #69

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…

[deleted]

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

#417

Post by [deleted] »

infamia wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#418

Post by sanderjd »

dpkirchner wrote: post #330
sanderjd wrote: post #283

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.

I don't think so. I think it's the inevitable outcome of giving all of humanity the ability to broadcast without curation.

Or maybe we're saying essentially the same thing, but you think search engines should be doing that curation. But that was never my conception of what search engines are for.

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

#419

Post by sanderjd »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #316
sanderjd wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user experience'. Maybe it's the closest we can get (though I doubt it), but it definitely isn't close enough to tell us anything about the "average user experience". The average user has been using google for years, without taking any steps to avoid personalization. An incognito session (on a browser / machine / network that is probably fingerprinted...) is pretty…

Why are you assuming all users are logged in to google all the time?

Because it is objectively the case that the "average user" of the internet has a google cookie in their browser. It doesn't require that they be logged in - though I believe it's likely also the case that the "average user" is indeed logged into a google account - it just requires that they use google search without turning off cookies or specifically blocking google's. Essentially everybody uses google search and essentially nobody cares enough (or would know how) to turn off cookies or block google's cookie.

If this doesn't describe most people you know, you're in a very small bubble. (I'm somewhat in that bubble too, but I still have lots of family and friends who use the internet the normal way.)

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

#420

Post by marginalia_nu »

ta988 wrote: post #409
marginalia_nu wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, what's your browser? I renewed the cert today... Only thing I can think of is that it might not like a wildcard cert for the bare marginalia.nu domain.

Firefox android

Hmm, can't reproduce it myself, but firefox has a nasty habit of quietly "repairing" these types of misconfigurations by redirecting from one subdomain to another. I've added marginalia.nu as a SAN, should hopefully work now.
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