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I’ve heard people are switching to AI for search because of how badly Google is sabotaging their core product.
I find LLMs more useful. At the least it can steer searches in the right direction, rather than combatting a results page full of ads and SEO bloat.
For many things, the first page of a Google search is full of uninformative or misleading clickbait. Rarely will you get the actual information you’re seeking. It’s an awful search engine.
Some of it is not googles fault. Some of it is the fact that seo pays, so shitty clickbait articles that serve ads or affiliate links make money, so they gameified search results that were less useful. Originally, most useful information was provided by hobbyists with no commercial intentions. That became less and less of the internet over time.
It’s why reddit did so well. It was actual recommendations from actual humans for problems, products etc. So then the bots and scammers came for it’s like they came for google.
The marketing team at Google wants a worse search product, which requires users to make more searches to get to where they wanted, in the process seeing more ads.
Google search has gone downhill because it’s a monopoly focused on extracting maximum value from you, instead of trying to give you maximum value.
The fact that they chose pay over accuracy is googles fault.
Kagi is great. Strong recommend
Got a subscription, haven’t looked back.
Here’s what my search results look like. No ads, no AI summary (I turned that off for me), no Pinterest (again, control I have).
Coming from duckduckgo, being able to tell MSN news aggregation to fuck off was worth the price of subscribing alone. I use the LLM search occasionally by suffixing a question mark but have it off by default. Customized ranking is great too. I used to fiddle with browser addons to filter results, but no more. The image search is little slow relative to the big players, but everything else is magnitudes better
Ecosia plants 🌳 🌲 🌴
either of these self-host-able?
Qwant and Ecosia are good. They are European companies, and have been working on European search index for some time now. Most browsers have one of the two as a search engine option.
EDIT: Here’s a blog post from last year: The internet just got better: our European search index goes live
noai.duckduckgo.com has been my go-to for a while now. It’s not perfect but gets the job done.
This isn’t a beautiful chart. What should be a pie chart has been turned into… Whatever this is?
It gives a cognitive emotional bias to the viewer of Google physically pushing it’s competitors out to the fringes, to the edge, etc. Shouldn’t introduce any extra bias on top of the data.
To be fair that’s literally what’s happening. Google at this point by their own admission has an inferior search product that is intentionally worsened so that users are pushed to be more likely to make multiple search queries which creates more ad impressions. They maintain their dominance despite this mainly because they control the most widely used web browser on desktop and mobile and then pay billions to be listed as the default provider with heavy integration on the next two most popular browsers. Literally all of this was disclosed during their antitrust trial
Since others are offering alternatives, I’d like to share a tool I use: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
I switched to ecosia a few weeks ago
Works well IMO
This is not beautiful, fuck Google.
Search engines have became so bad that are mostly unusable. If appending the word reddit at the end of a query doesn’t work, and it works less and less every day I just give up.
Depends on what you search. Some keywords are jhst completely flooded with slop but for more specific things they still do their job for me quite well.
I try to switch here and there, but Google search is still at least a level above everyone else, even considering all the shityfication they did. Sometimes it’s just bizarre how badly other search engines do at some searches.
