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What are alternative to searching using web search engines? (programming.dev)

submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) by cactus_head@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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For most use cases, web search engines are fine. But I am wondering if there are alternative ways to finding information. There is also the enshittification of google and tbh most(free) search engines just give google search result

Obviously, the straight answer is just asking other people, in person or online, in general forums or specialised communities

Libraries are good source too but for those of is that don't have access to physical libraries, there free online public libraries(I will post the links for those that I found below)

Books in general, a lot of them have reference to outside materials.

So, I been experimenting with an AI chat bot(Le chat), partially as life coach of sorts and partially as a fine tuned web search engine. To cut to the chase, its bad. when its not just listing google top results it list tools that are long gone or just makes shit up. I was hoping it to be a fine tuned search engine, cuz with google, if what you want is not in the top 10 websites, your on your own.

So yeah, that all I can think of. Those are all the routes I can think of for finding information and probably all there is but maybe I missed some other routes.

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

No it can't do that. It's an LLM, it can only generate the next word in a sequence.

Your knowledge is out of date, friend. These days you can configure an LLM to run tools like curl, nmap, ping, or even write then execute shell scripts and Python (though, in a sandbox for security).

Some tools that help you manage the models are preconfigured to make it easy for them to search the web on your behalf. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a whole ecosystem of AI tools just for searching the web that will emerge soon.

What Mozilla is implementing in Firefox will likely start with cloud-based services but eventually it'll just be using local models, running on your PC. Then all those specialized AI search tools will become less popular as Firefox's built-in features end up being "good enough".

[–] TheOneCurly@feddit.online 1 points 17 hours ago

I understand how agents work. I'm just saying it cannot "verify relevancy". That's a qualitative assessment that an LLM is incapable of doing. The scripts and regex that form the backbone of the "agent" can absolutely download a webpage and add the text contents to the context. But after that it's just random bullshit.