this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing now all return the same shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites to most of my searches, and don't respect my literal search terms even when I put them in quotes.

I'm not ready to pay for search, yet.

Is there any alternative?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 61 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.

Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn't respect your double-quotes?

[โ€“] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I think they are referring to the search engines returning LLM content farm websites.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Maybe Iโ€™m a little out of the loop, what are llm content farm websites?

[โ€“] fjordbasa 36 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Low effort websites made easier by LLM generated text. Itโ€™s not new, just made easier with the ubiquity of LLM tools. Think of it as the latest generation of spam websites ๐Ÿ™ƒ

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah I see. Junk โ€˜newsโ€™ and other regurgitated blah. Yeah, Iโ€™d guess any free search engine will probably be bloated with that. Not to mention that itโ€™s google, bing, and orange bing. Not a ton of crawlers out there indexing everything is there?

[โ€“] Darorad 4 points 2 months ago

The only other (not absolutely tiny) one I'm aware of is brave, but it has its own issues

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Ironically one of DDG's early selling points, before they fully jumped on the privacy bandwagon, was that they would filter out results for low-effort content farms (this was pre-LLM stuff).

I had used DDG since almost the beginning and it was one of the things I was originally sold on. It's difficult to find a source for it now but I did find this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110608072253/https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=377&bpid=25532

[โ€“] Bell 6 points 2 months ago

Forbes for example

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Think recipe websites that take forever to get to the recipe but it's for other topics. Like a simple question, "what is the release date for X new game?" And then there will be like 5+ paragraphs of jibber jabber about the game and then finally the last article will say when it releases.

This sort of site has been around for a while but supposedly they're more common nowadays. Personally I think people just have a better eye for things not written entirely by humans. Either way it's annoying to deal with them.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Ugh I feel like I have been seeing more of that. Asked how many ml in a wine pour and got like 5 sites that wouldnโ€™t just come out and say it. All kinds of gobbledegook dancing around the topic but no one would just freaking say it. 140ml in case you needed it