this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Google search is over (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/technology
 

Via @[email protected]

Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K":

  • DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

  • Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

"There are no countries in Africa that start with K." "What about Kenya?" "Kenya suck deez nuts?"

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[–] Brendan 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] Z4rK 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Alas, it has the emergent mind answer ranked fairly high still, and when search result was set to my country it was actually ranked highest.

Also, if you use Quick Answer, you’ll get same wrong answer:

Quick Answer There are no countries in Africa whose name starts fully with the letter "K". While Kenya is the closest match, its name does not start solely with "K" [1]. All of the African countries' names were reviewed across multiple sources and none began completely with the letter "K" [2][3][4].

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Kagi's "quick answer" gives me a better result:

Quick Answer

The countries in Africa that start with the letter K are: Kenya Kazakhstan [1]

[1] List of countries in Africa in alphabetical order

Though I don't know if that's because Kagi has fixed it in the last half hour, or some other factor. Still not a great answer. At least Kagi doesn't show it by default, at least with my settings.

[–] Z4rK 3 points 1 year ago

I think it’s just based on which 4-6 search results are ranked on top for you / your country, and then that’s used as basis for the quick answer. It also seems to cache the quick answer so even after I forced it so downrank some results, my answer was the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Cool thing about kagi though. I added emergent mind to my blocked domains list, and now the quick answer displays the proper answer. Still not ideal but better than no options at all to fix it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The internet really is unusable without some way to block user/sites/etc.. That's Kagi's single greatest feature.

[–] Z4rK 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah I actually just found that functionality myself today when I was looking at how I could get rid of the very same emergent mind result.

However, it seems that my quick answer got cached, at least for a while, so it stayed the same even if the results now were different.

[–] Gowens 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not op but I love kagi. I've tried so many search engine alternatives and always found myself going back to Google (or using g! to get Google results)

Kagi is the first I've tried where the results are good enough (and get better as I tailor what domains I want to appear higher or lower) to not have to rely on Google. I am a pretty avid searcher though and found I need to be on the $10/month plan for it to work out to the cheapest while still searching like I normally do

[–] Gowens 4 points 1 year ago

I think I stopped searching for things because Google got so damn bad. I remember the days when I could go several pages deep just looking through the internet.

Kagi is definitely peaking my interest from what I’ve seen so far.

[–] Brendan 2 points 1 year ago

Switched a year ago and never looked back. I was using ddg before that. Highly recommended. Being able to block and rank sites is great. You can also setup redirects and there’s a quick link to the Internet Archive for every link too.