I know a lot of regular people who hate this, but Kagi can be a hard sell for regular people. What are y’all’s recommendations for free search engines at the moment? I used to rec DDG, but I feel like their results are much worse than Kagi’s at present
Our results have continually improved, and would be happy to take your feedback (email is in my profile) if you give it another try.
Google changes its search box
501–510 of 961 posts
Re: Google changes its search box
#502What scares me about this new AI mode thingy is that every answer sounds like a systematic literature review, but only for the results. For example, if I look for users feedback about a specific product, it says "People think that..., but also that...; It's important to notice that some people ..." where with 'people' it means just a random comment on a random website just because it thought it was a good contributio…
For models trained on a corpus of groomed data, the "critical thinking" bit is baked into the work of grooming the data and how it is trained. And someone is thinking critically about both so as to make a good model.
Now, every damn thing is called AI no matter where it is getting results from.
Are modern models super handy? Absolutely.
But calling it AI implies a lot more critical thought than is actually happening!
Edit: took the time to write a shorter comment.
Re: Google changes its search box
#503The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
Re: Google changes its search box
#504I wonder how many of them would switch to a paid model that offered pre-ai-era google search?
Re: Google changes its search box
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, fair. Hard to understand why it would get that wrong.
I’d make assumptions about how the cheapest and fastest possible flash model optimized for being extra cheap and extra fast would get something wrong based on its limited context (which can be very incomplete summaries of search results)
Re: Google changes its search box
#506Re: Google changes its search box
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self hosting a web search engine is probably quite a feat
It's actually not that hard now, once you get useful content. When I worked on Search (~2009ish), the primary index was called 4BBase, because it was the top 4 billion webpages (actually more like 5.5B during my time, but it had been around for a few years). A typical webpage is about 100K, and HTML compresses at 80-90% compression rates, so you're looking at 10-20K/page. The index would take about 50-100 TB. Even af…
Re: Google changes its search box
#508Re: Google changes its search box
#509So many questions: Is “the goal of Search” really: “to help you ask _anything_ on your mind”? If “reimagined Search” is “designed to anticipate your intent”, Would it correctly infer my intent to not utilize an agentic approach? Is there an “off switch”? As for “Search agents” “operating in the background 24/7”, What is the carbon footprint of that? How do I turn it off? How do I ask it to stop phoning home my every…
Re: Google changes its search box
#510I had an interesting one yesterday. Someone responded to me on Reddit with very official sounding words to make their argument. I was still dubious and googled a few of the concepts they threw out there. The AI confidently told me they were right. Then I checked the sources, and found the only source that agreed with them was their own Reddit comment!!!
Google has become the ouroboros