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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

techcrunch.com

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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#161

Post by fgaanb »

margorczynski wrote: post #77
bobajeff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.

> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO. At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good d…

Google knows exactly what it is doing. The downranked .edu domains which always ranked high in 2005. They want to feed people with rage bait and SEO websites, since the persons who read that garbage are the only ones who react to advertisements.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#162

Post by nobodywasishere »

rpdillon wrote: post #100
d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

> 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.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#163

Post by king_geedorah »

pgwhalen wrote: post #136
king_geedorah wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If it helps, I could have written this comment just about word for word, and you can check my account and see that I’m clearly human. I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.

I don’t doubt that people feel this way. I doubt that every new account inflating the apparent consensus is genuine.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#164

Post by whstl »

rpastuszak wrote: post #120
nekzn wrote: post #18

I 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…

> 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 Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.

A team I worked with once optimized a website, and cut about 400k of cruft, down to under 200k total.

I did shit that was career-damaging, such as deciding not using heavy libraries that a platform team was pushing me to do (thus affecting their OKRs). I had to deal with designers complaining that removing JS didn't allow the special animation they wanted. The works.

We did it, and we managed to even score a few positions in Google.

Right after that, someone from Marketing added a few dozen random "pixels" to Tag Manager "because that's how Marketing is done", forcing us to adopt a cookie banner and bringing the lighthouse score to half of what it was.

Notice: The pixel was collecting data but it wasn't being used by anyone. There weren't ever any marketing campaigns involving the website.

Eventually the person was fired by the CEO for not bringing results, and we managed to remove the pixels, but by them the damage was done.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#165

Post by Kuyawa »

I don't know what a search engine is anymore, I use Brave search and usually the AI response is more than good, I can dive deeper in AI if needed.

Before, search engines provided links, links provided the info we were looking for. Now AI provides that info without the middle man, links are just a footnote in case you need them.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#166

Post by asciimoo »

rdmuser wrote: post #158
asciimoo wrote: post #122

Ohi, 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…

It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.

It isn't supported yet, but it's a good idea and quite simple to implement it. I've added it to the issue tracker: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/issues/431 . Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#167

Post by breppp »

king_geedorah wrote: post #85
nekzn wrote: post #18

I 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…

[flagged]

I think the greater issue in this discussion is that the TechCrunch author, like most blogger/journalists are facing a complete erasure of their business model and have a vested interest at opposing this

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#168

Post by king_geedorah »

john_strinlai wrote: post #157
Akronymus wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it read like you implied the poster to be an astroturfing account. Though I may have misinterpreted that.

they are 100% implying the poster is astroturfing, easier to accuse someone of astroturfing than accept that different people can have different opinions. especially an opinion as world-shaking as not minding ai overviews. this sort of accusation is becoming pretty common, and eventually going to ensure that the only new users actually are bots, because any potentially new humans that want to sign up are going to get…

What you infer from reading the text is your problem, not mine. My follow up comment articulates exactly my position.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#169

Post by Fnoord »

d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.

I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).

What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#170

Post by peesem »

theodric wrote: post #124

udm=14 is still working for me (for now) to disenshittify the results. You can use my Firefox extension to inject it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

`&udm=14` just sends you to the "web" tab of search, which does remove the AI summary, but you also lose the widgets that google puts at the top of search, if you like those (weather, calculator, games, etc). one of my friends recently found that you can add a short invalid filter parameter like `&tbs=1` and it'll give you the main search with no AI but with those widgets if they would normally appear. you do still get the "People also ask" section, but that's probably easily removed with an extension or user script
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