Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.
The issue with LLMs that I have is that while they are great at certain tasks, they are bad at anything, let’s call it factual, due to their nature.
I can for example use it to quickly draft up a email or a piece of python code, and I can immediately see whether or not the response it generated is actually what I want.
If I go ask it what the hottest day in a given country was or ask it to explain something, I have absolutely no idea whether it’s bullshit or not and I will have to double check it anways.
I think the learning curve with LLMs as a tool is to be able to know when to use it and when to rely on other sources instead.
That seems rather risky, considering that they don’t really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.
As opposed to Google searching manually, which always has accurate outputs and never outputs falsehoods as fact. 🙂
As long as you double check the source of an answer I don’t see an issue.
If you’re double-checking the sources, both to make sure that they exist, and they are accurate, you may as well do the research without using an LLM in the first place.
You’re just adding to your workload unnecessarily in that case.
I’d recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I’d recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
You’re fooling yourself if you think Bing is any different, or that ChatGPT won’t become the same thing. It’s destiny is to be a smarter version of Alexa, only users will falsely assume neutrality it doesn’t possess.
The only thing the others have over Google is they’re not the primary focus of SEO, but that will change. SEO has devoured the corpse of Google search and waiting to determine what prey it should focus on next.
One thing with an AI-based search engines is that they might have better luck not getting influenced by SEO techniques. Like I can pretty reliably look at a website and determine if it’s useful or just got to the top by gaming the search engine. It just takes time, and I’m sure some tools could help even more with that
100% Google has been the best place to put effort it. If they slide down the popularity ladder then the next will become the zone of battle. I’m firmly of the belief that all options are temporary and on an eventual course of becoming bad, some faster than others. It’s a case of being able to just adapt and move on. Be it google, reddit, netflix, whatever.
Time for a federated search engine?
Stop. Don’t make federated the next crypto/blockchain
Startpage or searxng are better
Good for privacy, but there’s definitely features (and processing power) that don’t exist there.
I’ve been using Startpage for a few weeks now and honestly it doesn’t bug me waiting an extra 3-5 seconds for my results page when it’s not ad-fueled garbage.
Brave Search is basically DuckDuckGo but with an independent index. unfortunately it doesn’t support images yet so it redirects you when you click on “images”
I love brave search. I think it’s way better than DDG. and that’s not even considering their summarizer feature. it’s basically autotldr for your search
Same, I love it too. The UI is great, it’s fast, and the discussions tab is nice. I get pretty high quality results too.
Thanks. Never heard of that before. This is awesome.
There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you’d see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they’re still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)
It’d be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the “top” results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).
You might be interested in SearXNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Edit: spelling
I JUST started using SearXNG and have been also googling the same terms to see how they compare.
So far (less than a week), SearXNG has had what i was looking for in the first 5 links every time. Googled result was either below the scroll or I gave up. Maybe only a couple dozen tests, but it wasn’t even close.
Wow, I miss Dogpile! It was my go-to search engine in grad school (along with Altavista and Ask)
I think Hotbot did that back in the 90’s, and it’s relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com
Huh, I might need to restore my bookmarks backup from IE5.
What up, Lycos?
Magellan, looking good.
What about Jeeves? Did anyone ask Jeeves?
I’ll Infoseek an answer on that.
You dare question the majesty of AltaVista?
DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn’t hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.
Still way better than Google in terms of sponsored results and ads.
Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.
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I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate
Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.
For what it’s worth, Bing is similarly full of ads, but with a more cluttered page design and a lot of video previews. Often times I find its suggestions for related searches get in the way of actually reading the search results for the current search…
It looks like you might be using the built-in Google app. Could that be a factor?
For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.
I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.
Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.
Yeah honestly, it’s great so far. I tried searxng for quite awhile and it did the trick somewhat, but damn SEO farms were my biggest pet peeve. The time I save is worth the money
Is there a way to to something like this for Lemmy? This is one thing that I used all the time for Reddit and found immensely useful.
Search-Lemmy is under development for this.
DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.
Others, more specific uses:
- https://www.ecosia.org/ - search with praxis, kind of mixed results but non tracking and they do good things
- https://www.perplexity.ai/ - longform answers by ai with citations plus search
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ - anti corpo search
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/ - STEM
- https://www.phind.com/ - programming
- https://knaben.eu/ - torrents
- https://annas-archive.org/ - books
ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269
Wow! This is the first time I’ve heard about Knaben Database, but it looks handy. Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.
You can still.
Under the Tools dropdown you can change it from “All Results” to “Verbatim”.
Try this: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=tacos site:reddit.com
So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff
Wow, that’s really strange. They aren’t marked as ads either…
The enshittification continues.
I can’t reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode
Can’t reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)
For me it is still working. But ig it will go all downhill rather quickly.
Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to sift through the SEO hellscape
Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.
Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.
Fuck.
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Bug or most likely faked. I’m selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.
Tech hate, so hot right now.
What do I need to do to prove it’s not fake? Record the screen from another phone?
“it works on my machine”
It also works on mine.
Maybe OP’s “search results” were the ads at the top of the google results
My search engine results have been so dogshit lately, this just makes it worse. Glad I don’t use Google anymore (even though all of them are bad regardless).
I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my “keyword picking ability”… now going back to Google feels unreal
Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do
!mcwiki diamondto search the minecraft wiki for “diamonds”I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse
My problem with ddg is that I can’t refine my search by excluding keywords, only by adding more. For example, it’s frustrating if I’m looking to buy a product locally and half the page is Amazon results.
If I add
-amazonto the query on ddg I don’t get any Amazon results. Is this not the case for you?It is not. It works fine for google, but not for DDG.
That is weird. I wonder why we are seeing so different behavior from ddg.
You can do that on ddg. See this link: http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax
This is a tragedy. I will have to see if this still works on Bing
