It’s crazy that a company like Google, full of very talented people, is making a decision that is so obviously bad. I’m convinced Silicon Valley is so deep in the AI hype machine that these guys have completely lost touch with reality and have no one left to ground them.
Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
291–300 of 614 posts
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#292I turned off AI overviews in Google search a few days ago. It's often wrong and always distracting. I changed my default search engine to: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 Author should mention that you can change your browser's default search engine.
Appreciate the advice!
Took me a little bit to figure out how to do this, so I'll drop a useful guide: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#293I 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…
I like the AI Overview feature because it gets straight to the point and with no ads or cookie banners in the way, not because it’s AI.
This is the way the internet used to be before it was enshittified, you just type in some keywords and the first result was probably the most relevant and readable source of info. But now, no more.
I think if a modern search engine could deliver the same experience but with organic human written content, I’d probably use that. This is probably a new niche now for upcoming search engines, focused on finding human created works.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that’s Orion specific, I have the exact same issue with Safari and Firefox
I'll pitch in that since youtube was bought by Google it's become pretty anticompetitive too. They've absolutely been caught degrading their product on all browsers except chrome. I've witnessed this numerous times on Firefox on my android. Videos refusing to play, subtitles appearing off the screen, refusing to fullscreen, and at least 3 more annoying things i can't remember anymore.
On numerous occasions, I had issues with YouTube and Firefox that were fixed by changing the user agent to make it look like chrome.
I stopped using YouTube 10+ years ago, so no clue if it still the case.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense. But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compet…
That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.
Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.
I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense. But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compet…
> Nobody wants to pay for anything Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#297Earlier 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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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?
I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why that ability didn't result in less loss of lives in middle East for such a long time.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#300Brave Search is the best alternative because of their independent index, the AI results are still fairly good as well.
And their browser rocks because of the built-in ad-blocking including for YouTube, and the ability to filter out all YT Shorts on the mobile app.