I find the bigger problem now is how many top results on search engines are AI written websites.
I'm using uBlock's AI Blacklist. It doesn't remove AI generated pages from search results but when a page doesn't load, you know.
Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
271–280 of 614 posts
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#272If google stops driving traffic to the websites, website owners will have zero incentive put out new content, and then what?
What websites?
I feel like this is a scene from a movie where a character goes "what are you talking about? Look around us, it's already gone" (idk why i am picturing Mark Whalberg for some reason).
But it's all just reddit, medium, twitter (twitter pages, w/e those blog things are).
The internet as we knew it is gone, man.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#273I pretty much only use Google for news searches these days. Even then, it’s mostly just to get a surface-level view before cross-referencing with other engines for anything important.
There’s so much content getting buried now.
If you’re looking for anything remotely niche or legally gray, like sports streams or ebooks, you’re often better off using Yandex or you’ll never find it.
The old Google search engine that used to properly index and surface the open web has been gone for a long time.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index Kagi employee here. We're actively working on building our own indexes beyond the limited ones we have now, not just a general index but also purpose built indexes for things like programming, etc.
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If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#275Ohi, I'm the author of the open source Searx metasearch engine. I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the same goal when I started Searx development: reduce dependence on online search engines. Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query l…
This looks very promising. Thank you for investing time in this. Assuming it indexes everything locally and falls back to traditional search engines if none found, how do you feel about adding a shared middle layer? A layer that simply indexes all the canonical data that doesn't have any personal info. This way, the contributors can automatically contribute the pages they index - building a shared search engine over…
This is an awesome idea in theory, I'd love to go to this direction, but it's a surprisingly complex topic. I find it hard to come up with an implementation that can guarantee both result quality (no malicious actors) and user privacy.
I'd appreciate any kind of help designing such system. We are on IRC/Discord/Github/Codeberg.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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What's the point in stopping paying money to Russia if Kagi is incorporated in Palo Alto, so it's paying money and will continue to do so to a country causing no less troubles than Russia?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Much of the HN audience lives in the US, giving money to the US is unavoidable in life. But in return we do have the democratic ability to try to alter the behavior of the country.
It still makes sense to avoid giving money to other bad actors who are acting in direct opposition to your home country, and whom you have no control over, when you can.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#277Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#278While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")! [1]: https://kagi.com [2]: https://uruky.com
Am I right in that I cannot demo a couple of searches without subscribing?
As of two weeks ago, you can get a couple of hours for unlimited (rate-limited) testing, just go to top up your account (or try to search) and click the PoW local and private captcha to get that.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#279I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse. I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature…
> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.
It’s particularly bad if you ask it how to do something in any given application. Most of the time it just hallucinates UI elements that aren’t there at all and confidently gives you instructions on how to do said thing in a way that is literally impossible.
I think the model must be very lightweight since they’re automatically running most search queries through it and a decently powerful model like Gemini would cost far too much in compute.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#280While there are good alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, or Ecosia, there are also ad-free alternatives, where you're not the product, like Kagi [1] or Uruky [2] (I co-founded Uruky, which is also currently and for the foreseeable future "No-AI")! [1]: https://kagi.com [2]: https://uruky.com
Just this morning I was helplessly looking at r/ecosia for a way to get rid of the new AI tab they've added (there's no way). Signed up for Uruky, let's see how it fares.
Thanks! Reach out for any suggestions, questions, or comments!