Even Yandex from Russia is a better search engine. But I am yet to come across a truly powerful, fair and accurate search engine.
Kagi !
Looks good apart from the Google tracking:
https://fshot.org/utils/surfacescan.php?site=https%3A%2F%2Fk...
Google changes its search box
791–800 of 961 posts
Re: Google changes its search box
#792Oh dear they made a terrible mistake right from the start.
> The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind
No. The goal of search is to find websites that match the text of the search term you put in. When they started to think they were "answering questions" is when google search started to become useless.
Re: Google changes its search box
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic. I may be strange and unusual, but I just have never cared about my Google ranking. I know this makes me out of the ordinary among site owners but I have been humming along fine. This certainly will disrupt traffic but for some of my sites I honestly think this is a good thing. I…
Only issue is what happens when the company that owns the search and has a dominant share of the browser market flags your site with the good old "warning: potential risk ahead" when people try to reach it directly? And buries the "I know the risk let me through" deep in the browser settings. Advocate for different browsers? Google is pushing web attestation in one form or the other. I wish the future would look blea…
Don't forget that other browsers also just use googles web good boy list and if you report false positives point you towards google and cover their ears.
Re: Google changes its search box
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step 1, Google serves info directly and consumers rejoice Step 2, Google extinguishes the web and nobody has a reason to publish content, consumers lament but are trapped, Google has created a platform to serve content instead of links Step 3 (or maybe 2a), Google is now monetizing their content machine Step 4, Google offers people a way to contribute to the content machine, make some $$ per N views, whatever. People…
I mean this is already (kind of) the case for video. There's no real mainstream way outside of youtube to make meaningful money with free video content. But yes, interesting thought which does kind of make sense. The marketplace-ification of the textual web.
Since "making money with free content" essentially means manipulating your users into spending more money elsewhere from which you then get some indirect kickbacks, I don't think we need to lament there being fewer opportunities for that particular business model. That's not to say that video centralization doesn't have other actually bad effects.
Re: Google changes its search box
#795I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data. When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with…
> My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here. The question though: Why is that? Is your Google search usage down because LLMs are "so much better"? Or because Google actively chose to destroy the quality of their search results to juice advertising revenue, and appears to continue to do so to juice AI adoption? > and have them provide me links for source data. And therein lies the answer: Yo…
LLM integrate more kinds of information and allow bidirectional debates. I can't ask Google to do the same search session but change some parameters from far earlier.
ps: I'm not pro centralized corp. owning data and ai. But so far they are the cheap highway to answers
Re: Google changes its search box
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a catch-22. Without google crawling your site, you don't get any new traffic. But with google crawling your site, you also might not get any traffic. AI summarization has already causes issues for sites like rtings where people are no longer visiting the site but still making use of the data presented there. Leading to rtings not getting enough traffic to continue to post their data. It is an existential crisis…
Step 1, Google serves info directly and consumers rejoice Step 2, Google extinguishes the web and nobody has a reason to publish content, consumers lament but are trapped, Google has created a platform to serve content instead of links Step 3 (or maybe 2a), Google is now monetizing their content machine Step 4, Google offers people a way to contribute to the content machine, make some $$ per N views, whatever. People…
Haven't they tried doing Step 4 already? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol
Re: Google changes its search box
#797Google: "The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate."
US: The goal has always been about MONEY
Re: Google changes its search box
#798Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
> then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?
The counter argument is that sites are becoming more AI slop or may intentionally provide poison they don’t want to train on. There may be a cut off date after which training must be carefully curated; and the main body of data has already been collected.
Sites may still get traffic from agents searching for current information. Maybe even the resurgence of RSS? One can dream.
Re: Google changes its search box
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident. We google something specifically because the humans within reach don't know. The goal of searching is, well, to search pages - we're trying to find a site when we use google search. The goal when using an LLM is generally different; we want an answer, not a site.
LLMs are not a site. They are a clever person that can point you to sites. They, like humans, are fallible.
LLMs can not point you to sites, only in a general direction. That is because complete URLs do not exist as single tokens in any of the large models. It can synthesize a plausible-looking url, and if you're lucky that URL might even exist. But that doesn't mean that there is any relation between between the text surrounding a hyperlink in LLM output and the text on the linked page.
AI agents can verify and summarize URLs, but a plain LLM can not.
Re: Google changes its search box
#800Earlier quoted context omitted.
My grandfather was one of the first people in Canada to own a commercially available chainsaw. Let me tell you - it didn’t take 30 years for people to figure out that chainsaws were useful.
Yet most of the kids on HN think they write better code than ai and that it’s completely useless and has no place.
[deleted]