My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.
I’ve been using this for about a year, but at work I’m still on Google (don’t know why).
What’s weird is SearXNG seems like it gets better results now, even though they’re just coming from the others.
One thing I like is that I can switch instances to get varied results based on the instance’s geographical location. In other words, it doesn’t feel like anything’s targeted.
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Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.
And the AI is trained on the shitty search results. It just parses them many times faster than a human reader can, which does at least make it better at getting to the fucking point. Once paid advertising is fully integrated with LLM, it will be as shitty and useless as traditional search. And then the entire world will collectively hop to the next trend so it can get hyper-monetized/enshittified, too.
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The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.
Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.
Huh...Can't replicate that claim (though I would believe it happening)
On the 20th Sep. I asked my Google Home if it would be raining.
It responded that it would rain. I asked when it would rain.
Home responded with "Today it won't rain."
Like what? 5 seconds ago you said it would. No weather report reports rain. Where did you get the first response from??
And I could even replicate it (have it on video)
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I'm going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or "AI" tools predating the LLMs we have now.
Kagi is pretty awesome
they overengineered it. they now give you results they think most people want instead of what you searched. for google, it helps to switch on verbatim mode and set your country to something weird like Azerbaijan
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There's an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you'll never see another Quora article again.
Idr the name of the extension - I'll check when I get home and follow up.
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theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.
DDG and qwant are basically bing
I've found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.
4get.ca
Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!
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I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.
Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.
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I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).