Have you tried perplexity.ai? It's like ChatGPT and Google had a baby. Looks very promising and I'm seeing a lot of tech leaders (example Toby of Shopify) moving to it.
Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
71–80 of 493 posts
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#72I would love to see Perplexity.ai in the benchmark. It has completely replaced Google/DDG for information questions for me. I still use DDG when I want to do a navigational query (e.g. find the URL for a blog i partially recall the name).
Me too. I only heard about it this morning and it looks kinda perfect so far.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#73I 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…
> it just takes too long to get info from videos.
I can’t wait until video transcripts get fed into LLMs just to eliminate the whole “This video is sponsored by something-completely-unrelated, more about them later. What’s up Youtube, remember to like, share, subscribe… 5 entire minutes pass on similar drivel… the actual thing you want, but stretched out to an agonizing length”
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#74Do search engines censor political topics these days? If you search "truthsocial" on ddg, the truthsocial.com website is the first hit. But if you search "trump truthsocial", it doesn't give you trump's truthsocial page, and doesn't even give you truthsocial.com within the first few pages of search results. Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at bing? It looks like google results are similar.
I have concluded that Google definitely censors search results relating to the Ukraine war, after vainly searching for articles about documented Ukrainian war crimes (reported in mainstream Western media like NYT/WaPo).
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marginalia supports the old Google syntax, e.g. "define:dildo"
Thanks! If you are that "single person" who built Marginalia... hope you are not taking my criticism personally. I am more annoyed by this blog post that uses a few handpicked queries to present generalized long winded conclusions that are completely disproven when using a different set of queries.
Yeah, its me, and to be fair I made a comment to a similar effect myself. Assessing search result quality is very hard, and this is definitely a pretty flattering selection of queries.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very different.
Yeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality content, that search doesn’t (or can’t) do a good job of surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal left, but it’s such a small fraction that it’s much more difficult to filter it out. Having said that, I’m usually still able to find what I’m looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the keywords to use to find it. But it’s much harder…
I wonder how much influence google had in lowering the content quality over the years? After all, most SEO spam was a direct response to all the ludicrous requirements they've forced the whole web into, which eventually only SEO spam were willing to commit to.
I also wonder if google just stopped existing, would the web heal over time?
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#77I will admit that I can't read between lines here and just go ahead an ask: What does "bluesky thought leader" suppose to mean? (1) Any guesses who this may be? Why is he not quoted directly? (btw, the term is used 3 times, presumably to refer to the same person).
1: my reading is that this is a sarcastic denomination for someone that is supposed to be an innovation thought leader but actually is just defending the broken search landscape status quo.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very different.
Yeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality content, that search doesn’t (or can’t) do a good job of surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal left, but it’s such a small fraction that it’s much more difficult to filter it out. Having said that, I’m usually still able to find what I’m looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the keywords to use to find it. But it’s much harder…
i have a radio that can "hear" down to -130dBm, i've proven this empirically. Cellular signals work at -12dB or more below the noise floor, wspr works even lower than that. Lightning is broadband noise, and yet i can still use digital stuff when there's lightning storms.
I don't buy the signal to noise argument. For example, whenever i get on youtube and get fed some content, i can immediately tell if it's had AI involved anywhere, and thumbs it down. I won't recommend it, i've called people out for linking such tripe to me (or others).
Hear me out - google got bad about 11 years ago when the dorking stopped being effective, right around the time of the spotlight search results and the sponsored junk taking the top results. Around this time, various agencies (news, etc) started gaming the SEO to respond to any remotely related search with whatever the news was currently. Google chose not to "fix" this, because we're not the customer. DDG was better for a few years for real results, too, but that has gone downhill as well.
The current zeitgeist uses stuff like tiktok and facebook for "web searches" - "food trucks near Austin, TX" or so. No one really uses web search like people on this site do, and google couldn't care less if we don't like the search results.
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#79Can 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…
> I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses
Query: “I’m coming out of my cage…”
Result (Ad): “You’ll be doing just fine with these amazing year-end closeout prices at Al’s Discount Car Barn. Gotta come down—you’ll want it all!”
Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
#80The issue with traditional search engines is that keyword-first algorithms are extremely gameable. Try https://search.metaphor.systems - it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is. So in the mentioned example of searching for Youtube downloaders, with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders ( https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%2…
So far so good. I'll try using this first from now on, and see how it does. Good luck!