i have to use startpage since googs give me a captcha (that i refuse to complete) every time now.
Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
411–420 of 614 posts
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#412I've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so I disabled it and never looked back.
Brave Search feels like '08 Google.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#413I've been using Brave search since it was first announced. Initially it had to rely a lot on their "fallback mixing" (where it ran an anonymous search on Google to get more results), but after a year or so I disabled it and never looked back.
Brave Search feels like '08 Google.
I assume that's a good thing?
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#414Yandex is excellent if you want something that behaves more like a old PageRank version of google for news and historical information that isn’t filtered to amplify corporate media outlets. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good for that task, though it is interesting to compare and contrast DDG and Yandex output, they’re typically quite different, but equally useful. The last use case I had for google was Google Scholar, bu…
Open Alex is a good Google Scholar alternative.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#415Earlier 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…
Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.
Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users.
I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones.
But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#416My search on google is still fine. On some searches it doesn't show the AI overview and on some it does - sometimes the AI overview is exactly what i am looking for and sometimes i just scroll down.
I find the results much worse though, especially in the last two or three months. My query is treated as a vague suggestion instead of a command, and the search index has become noticeably smaller.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#417When is Cloudflare stepping into the game? I know many here are wary of CF's increased role in the modern internet but if they can throw a wrench into google's monopoly, I'm all for it. They intercept a non-trivial portion of the web's traffic and presumably are as equipped as any other company is to build a good index. They're also the only the only company that has an interesting alternative incentive structure for…
I don't expect the boot on the other foot to taste any better
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It messes up sometimes i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.
Never ever trust AI summary cooking instructions. Holy crap. I made a serious error with that once.
I’ve found video game tips to also be very incorrect hallucinations as well.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#419We need to bring Yahoo! back. Now that we have AI, there's all the reason to go back to directories rather than searches, especially since searches have been faked for years now, and have just become funnels. Search used to be webgrep; now the engines barely care about your query - it's just a prompt to figure out what to sell you.
I remember the first time I copy-pasted something off a major website, in quotes, because I wanted to follow up on it, and got no search results. Not even from the site I copy-pasted from. "Search" has been in name only for a very long time.
Build directories again.
Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
#420You are the google search engine pre-2010, well before Google lost their "don't be evil" motto, made the first results page favour sponsors and added AI overview. You respond to a search query with a list of https:// URLs, each accompanied by a representative quote from the destination page that demonstrates the link's relevance to the query, and nothing else. The query is: We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have…
"Don't be evil" is still in the code of conduct, it's just the last line now. Journalism, as it usually does, perpetuated a misleading scary story in order to garner eyeballs/clicks.
Google has more than one code of conduct[0], but I only found one that is as you described[1].
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=google%20code%20of%20conduct
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...