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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by MTK@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.

I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.

Perplexity seems to work but I don't like the idea of AI giving me "facts" since they are mostly based on other AI posts

ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.

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Kagi is great. It’s a paid service but you can try 100 searches for free.

You can use the Orion browser on iOS and set Kagi as the search engine.

[-] GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago

The day i pay for search engines is the day i finally finish my 2020 new year's resolution

Enjoy your war against ads then. I’m not against supporting content, I just wanted a better model than invasive ads.

[-] vxx@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You only tested Google and Bing.

Qwant and DDG both use the Bing architecture.

I agree though, search engines have become noticeably worse the last 2 years.

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

I’m pretty sure they discovered in the google monopoly case that google realized a couple years ago that a worse search experience would not negatively impact their bottom line. So makes sense

[-] irreticent@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

It becomes more and more true every day.

[-] jerkface@lemmy.ca 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Jesus, the "plandemic" explanation for why the Internet is dying. The Internet IS clearly dying, but this is stupid. Even if we got rid of all the bots and AI, the Internet would still be dying, because open protocols are not as exploitable as walled gardens. The value of capital in the world overwhelms the value of human labour and human interest, and all our social structures conform to the needs of capital over time.

[-] sandbox@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

It doesn’t really, it’s just that human activity on the internet is more and more taking place on platforms without any search indexing. 20 years ago, internet forum are where you’d go for advice online. Nowadays, it’s more and more becoming discord servers and similar, which just aren’t indexed by internet search.

[-] ChippiChappa@ani.social -2 points 6 days ago

it really doesn't.

[-] Subverb@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It's intentional.

Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.

A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.

PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.

[-] ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 7 points 6 days ago

Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.

[-] EatATaco@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago
[-] ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 3 points 6 days ago

Besides be sad and hit my head against a wall? Depending on the query, I'll sometimes use ChatGPT or find an associated Discord, subreddit or somewhere and hope for the best.

I'm disappointed a lot.

[-] EatATaco@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago

I bang my head against search engines. Normally I can find something decent after multiple searches, but it never used to be this way.

[-] Fedditor385@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago

So what about open source self hosted search engines? If it requires some hardware I'd gladly team up with a small group of people to finance a bigass server that just gets us our personal search engine

Any good ones out there?

[-] MTK@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Searxng, but there are plenty of instances already

[-] Hawk@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 6 days ago

Perplexica is interesting too, but it uses a moderate amount of ram because of elastic search.

And of course you need to have ollama running

[-] MTK@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago
[-] LonelyNematocyst@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

There's stuff like Searxng or whoogle, but these aren't "real" search engines, merely "search aggregators" - they relay requests to a bunch of actual search engines, like bing or google, and aggregate the results. That's why they don't require tons of compute and scraping, and also why they often fail to work (since the search engines in question don't like or allow this). I believe it's not feasible to run a "real" search engine alone or even as a small group of people - according to this comment you need a powerful server with terabytes* of drive, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and a lot of compute - and all of this will just let you crawl some top domains, nowhere near a good chunk of the internet.

*which sounds low actually, I would have expected more for this

[-] Shape4985@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market

[-] alekwithak@lemmy.world -2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I just use chatGPT to search now. I have a super-prompt in its memory telling it how to search and to cite sources and provide links and it is so much better than Google even though it's using AI, too.

*The future is now, old men!

[-] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 150 points 1 week ago

they're pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I'm getting actual results.

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[-] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 119 points 1 week ago

It's not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.

Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every "product" they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It's not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.

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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
603 points (96.7% liked)

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