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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

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

#461

Post by reactordev »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #429
mapt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I tried Gemini "Can you find the origin of this story I remember from 10+ years ago? Here's three paragraphs of what I recall" "Yeah, it sounds like a very common copypasta back in the early 2010's, related to XYZ" "So... uhh... provide me a link please" "I can't provide links" "You're a search engine" "I don't have a current connection to the Internet." "Well can you give me any examples of anything even v…

I've encountered this as well. I'm pretty sure it is unable to produce answers involving some copyrighted works. For example, I was trying to find an old video and it filled in the gaps in my knowledge very accurately, however it absolutely could not provide an actual link to the video or any concrete content related to the video. In my case I suspect the original uploader took down their videos from YouTube or there…

This is literally Google’s core business… advertising, surely they could have offered you a link to purchase said movie or the studios that made said movie and then they could collect some revenue from it but nooooo… they send you, the consumer, on wild goose chases to duck duck go.

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

#462

Post by dmd »

daveoc64 wrote: post #454
dmd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the greatest example because they both do find me, but here's an example of where Kagi is supposed to be better at precisely this, but isn't. Search without quotes for daniel drucker mclean. That's me, and Google correctly on the first page finds ONLY pages related to me. Kagi pollutes the page with many results for my doppelgänger, the much more famous Daniel J Drucker of the University of Toronto, even though n…

Virtually all of the Kagi results bring you up when I do that.

Odd. For me more than half are the other guy.

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

#463

Post by yegg »

latexr wrote: post #458
yegg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI, at DuckDuckGo we have a search setting to turn ads off: https://duckduckgo.com/settings We also have a no ai version: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

I hadn’t looked at the settings page in ages. Some interesting stuff in there. You can even block certain websites now (goodbye, Pinterest). It’s time I give DuckDuckGo another go. As I fiddle with the options, I was about to suggest there should be a private way to share settings to another device so I don’t have to redo everything on my phone, then I looked at the right side of the page and saw you already provide…

Thanks, and thanks for the report. Will investigate.

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

#464

Post by blazarquasar »

veber-alex wrote: post #240
blazarquasar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web. Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made. According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.…

You are doing a 100 searches a day on avarage? Is your job to search for random stuff on the internet?

I guess both my job and my personal life do involve a lot of searching, though i’d say that sometimes (a lot of the time) its also my ADHD getting the best of me.

Looking through some of my history of today:

- “github rate-limits”

- “oriental hornet”

- “riva 88 florida”

- “logistic map”

- “zeiss euv mirror”

- “authentik helm”

Just to name a few…

For a lot of these, LLMs would slow me down significantly. Most of the time I already know exactly what im looking for.

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

#465

Post by blazarquasar »

treis wrote: post #233
blazarquasar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must have wildly different workflows/ways to interact with the web. Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made. According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.…

Can you give an example of your searches? I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.

Along those lines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269481

By “their own index” i assume you mean training data? If so, thats a big part of the issue for me. As an example, if I ask an LLM for some part of the Zig stdlib, I will get an incorrect answer 10/10 times because it will refuse to look up the latest documentation.

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

#466

Post by treis »

blazarquasar wrote: post #464
veber-alex wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are doing a 100 searches a day on avarage? Is your job to search for random stuff on the internet?

I guess both my job and my personal life do involve a lot of searching, though i’d say that sometimes (a lot of the time) its also my ADHD getting the best of me. Looking through some of my history of today: - “github rate-limits” - “oriental hornet” - “riva 88 florida” - “logistic map” - “zeiss euv mirror” - “authentik helm” Just to name a few… For a lot of these, LLMs would slow me down significantly. Most of the t…

[flagged]

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

#467

Post by KellyCriterion »

mancerayder wrote: post #295
WarmWash wrote: post #141

Earlier 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…

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 Phot…

>>Google won because it was a single text box.

I remember a colleague around 1998, he said: "how will they ever make money? Its just an empty website?"

LOL

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

#468

Post by nunez »

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…

My problem with the AI Overview feature is that it provides what you're looking for at the expense of everyone who provided the data to make that functionality possible.

Website owners losing traffic to the AI Overview feature is well-documented and has been discussed extensively here. This reality begets a few questions:

-----------------

What happens when it no longer becomes profitable for anyone to share knowledge online?

AI companies have scraped physical books to build their training sets. What happens when it no longer becomes profitable for anyone to share knowledge at all?

Are you okay with a handful of corporations owning the truth?

Are you okay with that same handful telling you _what the truth is?_

-----------------

I'm totally fine with Google telling me where to find truth. I am, personally, NOT okay with for-profit corporations like them telling me what the truth is. Every AI search I do is tacit acceptance of what they're doing, so I try not to use it.

All that said, you're definitely not in the minority outside of this site.

Heaps of people take the AI Overview result as the truth, case closed.

Given its inaccuracies (I used it the other day as a last result to locate these Korean cat treats, and AI Overview said that it was a "health food" for "wellness"), it's a massive problem that we haven't fully realized yet IMO.

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

#469

Post by kqp »

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…

Genuinely, I’d recommend you spend a day manually verifying every AI answer you otherwise would have just trusted. I suspect what you’ll find is actually that you cannot bring yourself to do it. I’ve found myself trusting AI answers sometimes, despite knowing they’re usually false, and after some introspection I realized my subconscious was acting on three factors: I wouldn’t actually be harmed by being wrong about the thing, I wanted to feel like I knew it, and I didn’t want to spend any time on it. Getting a real answer could only work against those goals: I didn’t actually need it, it’d likely be less certain, and it’d certainly take a lot longer. In other words, I was fooling myself.

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

#470

Post by treis »

blazarquasar wrote: post #465
treis wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of your searches? I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.

Along those lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269481 By “their own index” i assume you mean training data? If so, thats a big part of the issue for me. As an example, if I ask an LLM for some part of the Zig stdlib, I will get an incorrect answer 10/10 times because it will refuse to look up the latest documentation.

No, I mean they're constantly crawling the web. That gets fed into the next model but it's also searchable by the current one. For example, if you ask chatgpt what the latest shooting at the white house was it will tell you about the one from two days ago.

ChatGPT has effectively assimilated Google search. You can tell it to look up the latest version of the zig docs and do whatever.

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