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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It becomes more and more true every day.
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.
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.
it really doesn't.
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.
Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.
What do you do instead?
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.
I bang my head against search engines. Normally I can find something decent after multiple searches, but it never used to be this way.
There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.
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?
Searxng, but there are plenty of instances already
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
Very cool
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
Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market
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!
they're pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I'm getting actual results.
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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