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

danluu.com

381–390 of 493 posts

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

#381
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…

This is a feature of Kagi already. You can promote or blacklist domains in your search results.

But I can't do regexes, wildcards or anything like that as far as I can see, like I can in uBlacklist

And it seems like they also have a 1000 domain limit?

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

#382

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…

> 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…

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

#383
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…

I use uBlacklist with my own blacklists and Google has been pretty usable, it's great.

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

#384
post #207

I'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even try to disable it. I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how it goes. It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos men…

> they could make a different test

The takeaway I got from the article is everyone can make their own test, as opposed to relying on other people's sentiments and memes about X is bad or Y is good.

Trying to emulate a non-expert experience without workarounds is not the common usage pattern since everyone familiar with their favorite tools have ways to get more value out of them, but this article presents a way of constructing an experiment (this is why I chose these queries, this is how I ranked scams, etc.), and I think people should follow this same spirit to evaluate if they are stuck in a local optimum with their current choice of tools.

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

#385
post #96

I reckon these days search is pretty difficult and everyone knows how to game it. I recommend using a search engine that lets you effectively change which sites are shown. You can do this with Kagi, or with Google's Programmable Search Engines - I'm sure there are more too. In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't sometimes correct, but because I don't want videos polluting the regular results - it just…

I have a hard time believing it's so difficult for a search engine to distinguish between a credible, respected website that has been around a while with some generated garbage that exists to be a search result. We humans can tell them apart, so in principle, computers can too.

I guess this brings up the question of how good are humans at doing this across a wide number of domains on average?

The other question I have is how long do these garbage results stay up for a particular query on average?

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked GPT-4 about Youtube Downloader and it rambled on about how downloading videos is against Youtube’s TOS and I should buy YouTube premium which has the download feature. Getting any useful data from GPT-4 about anything even remotely “illegal” is a waste of time.

With a better prompt, you can get it to list some, but it’s very annoying to do so. Mistral showed that their medium model is far better (yet not good), and the same prompt as in the article gives only one instead of 3 paragraphs of rambling about copyright, and then lists 3 categories of options with examples for each (not good, because ytdl is not one of those listed). Funnily enough, both mistral and GPT4 apologiz…

It's plausible that mistral trained on GPT-4 output and therefore has similar mannerisms.

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

#387
post #17

I noticed that the author uses ChatGPT3.5 rather than 4, which is a rather large difference. I don't have the knowledge to rerank all questions the author asked, but I will say that a test of ChatGPT 4 leads me directly to youtube-dl, which is better than every other search engine listed.

I’ve come to recognize that any article that uses 3.5 has an agenda.

The agenda of not wanting to pay for something just to test it out when there is a free version?

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

#388

I'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the kind of search

They do not do that, have you tried using them?

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

#389
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author describes that site as such, which seems fair to rate as "terrible": > Some youtube downloader site. Has lots of assurances that the website and the tool are safe because they've been checked by "Norton SafeWeb". Interacting with the site at all prompts you to install a browser extension and enable notifications. Trying to download any video gives you a full page pop-over for extension installation for som…

That's how he described it but I tried it myself and found it perfectly functional to download a video with different options for size / quality. It has ads but not nearly as bad as described. It's a service that is quasi illegal and explicitly breaks the YouTube terms of service. I think the search engine did a good job surfacing what was searched for, there just aren't going to be any free online YouTube downloader…

Which web site did you use to successfully download a youtube video? Which youtube video did you download?

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

#390

I really don't agree with some of the expectations around results. > Download youtube videos > Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp. Links to youtube-dl or other less frequently updated projects would also be ok. That's not what a random person expects. yt-dlp or youtube-dl have no meaning to a normie. The first result is an online downloader and that's what an average pers…

If you try using it, the first result doesn't help you download a youtube video and does try to get you to install malware.
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