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.
they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.
Yeah DDG is great. The only thing I find is its not good at local results but a quick !g on the end gets me the local results im looking for.
I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
Searching for R34 is on you. Naming something R34 is on Nissan. The popularity of R34 is on all of us.
R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”
So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.
Now I want to see some skyline porn
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.
You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that’s just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
I’ve been using Mojeek lately and it looks like their advanced search can do some of that.
https://www.mojeek.com/advanced.html
Reminds me of early Google search.
I have it a test with some operators from the search bar instead of using the form and it did exactly what it was supposed to. I’ll keep this on hand. Thank you.
let us know if you find anything which could be better also, we’re always looking for ways to improve
Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market
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.
Exactly. LLM makes you do the same stupid shit, but faster and with more intensity.
I don’t honestly even remember the last time I’ve googled something. Nowdays I’ll just ask chatGPT
The problem with getting answers from AI is that if they don’t know something, they’ll just make it up.
LLMs have their flaws but for my use it’s usually good enough. It’s rarely mission critical information that I’m looking for. It satisfies my thirst for an answer and even if it’s wrong I’m probably going to forget it in a few hours anyway. If it’s something important I’ll start with chatGPT and then fact check it by looking up the information myself.
So, let me get this straight…you “thirst for an answer”, but you don’t care whether or not the answer is correct?
Of course I care whether the answer is correct. My point was that even when it’s not, it doesn’t really matter much because if it were critical, I wouldn’t be asking ChatGPT in the first place. More often than not, the answer it gives me is correct. The occasional hallucination is a price I’m willing to pay for the huge convenience of having something like ChatGPT to quickly bounce ideas off of and ask about stuff.
I agree that AI can be helpful for bouncing ideas off of. It’s been a great aid in learning, too. However, when I’m using it to help me learn programming, for example, I can run the code and see whether or not it works.
I’m automatically skeptical of anything they tell me, because I know they could just be making something up. I always have to verify.
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
Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it’s a paid service.
Thank you. I needed this. The “free” search engines have tainted my experience of this world. Frankly, I hate it here. I’m ready for the inevitable “Apocalypse”/" Alien invasion" that stops the absolute incompetence that permeates our society. Whether you understand it or not, I beseach upon you my blessings, may your days provide success in your endeavores, and bountiful returns to your entire home. Bless you for sharing.
I think it’s just you. Differential Transformers are pretty good at regurgitating information that’s widely talked about. They fall short when it comes to specific information on niche subjects, but generally that’s only a matter of understanding the jargon needed to plug into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. Paired with uBlock Origin, it’s all typically pretty straight forward, so long as you know which to use in which circumstance.
Almost always, I can plug some error for an OS into a LLM and get specific instructions on how to resolve it.
Additionally if you understand and learn how to use a model that can parse your own set of user-data, it’s easy to feed in documentation to make it subject-specific and get better results.
Honestly, I think the older generation who fail to embrace and learn how to use this tool will be left in the dust, as confused as the pensioners who don’t know how to write an email.
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!
