cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47107360
Google is making its Search more centred around AI, turning it into a conversation.
Besides being a worse experience, the websites from which it sources its information are losing all traffic and recognition.
Recommend a list of alternatives:
- Kagi - Paid but better experience than Google
- Ecosia - Similar experience while supporting a good cause
- Qwant - Increasingly unique results and building a EU-first index
- DuckDuckGo - Privacy-focused search, but quality of results may vary
More options: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/search-engine/
Is searching with -AI not going to work?
google being useful for search has been over for at least a decade
Yay, worse search
Just when you thought it couldn’t get even worse…. Google disappoints yet again. Maybe this will be the push people need to start using alts
Ecosia.org ⬆️
Yeah I don’t think that one will go over well with the current wording on their FAQ.
Frequently asked questions What is this? This is a metasearch engine that gets results from other engines, and strips away all of the tracking parameters and Microsoft/globohomo bullshit they add. Most of the other alternatives to Google jack themselves off about being ““privacy respecting”” or whatever the fuck but it always turns out to be a total lie, and I just got fed up with their shit honestly. Alternatives like Searx or YaCy all fucking sucks so I made my own thing.
Sounds like a straight shooter to me. What’s not to like?
‘globohomo bullshit’ doesn’t strike you as a red flag?
Maybe they are trying to ‘take back’ a bigoted term, but I don’t get that feeling. Especially since the vast majority of people using that term are shithead chuds.
I sort of missed that one. Sort of makes the post odd.
Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
Yeah, it’s so tiring. Search for something, entire first page is useless aggregator sites, containing nothing about the actual topic other than keywords. Waste of time
Agreed, and for the moment the “AI experience” is better than what Google Search was a couple of years ago… but I have faith, they’ll sell this one out too, after all: users are the product.
I haven’t used Google search since 2008, when I starting using Linux and Duckduckgo was the default search engine for Firefox.
Oh, how Firefox changed…
Firefox always used Google as their default search engine, since Google pays a lot of money for that privilege.
Edit: some Linux distros used to change that default while they were shipping a non-branded fork of Firefox.
Google Search has long since diminished from it’s peak. 15 years ago we used to play a “game” by describing something as vaguely or strangely as possible and would be entertained to find it still on the first page of search results.
SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance, and LLMs are the kill shot.
Indexing and ranking were already a solved problem, and conventional algorithms accomplished it much better than LLMs do. Unfortunately, LLMs need to find uses to justify investment, so now they must be used for any task that they can be used for, even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
Like Gemini replacing Assistant. Holy shit, what a dumpster fire.
The other factor is companies, interests, paying the Google and their ilk to not include things in search results. And only include what they choose as an alternative.
Then you might have different interests gaming the search results to bury something they don’t like.
This is only amplified by LLMs
At the moment, I do find that the LLMs bring me more of what I want to see than the basic search engine used to a few years back… 15-20 years ago the basic search engine seemed to be much better then slowly deteriorated from there.
I have confidence, they’ll sell this version to the highest bidder faster than they did the last one, then it will be just as bad as listening to radio advertisements as a way to find a good local restaurant to eat at…
I wouldn’t know because I mainly use DuckDuckGo and haven’t had a reason to use Google in a long time.
DuckDuckGo is just Microslop Bing with a different front-end.
Isn’t every alternative search engine just bing or google in the background?
Yeah, whatever bias and censorship Micro$lop’s search index has, except supposedly without the tracking. It’s a step up from Google and Bing, but not the perfect solution.
What do you recommend?
yacy is an interesting alternative if you self host.
Kagi. It does work and they are making anti AI a priority.
If you live in Europe, the French search engine Qwant is great.
I recommend DDG as the first line, and kagi free tier if you can’t find it on DDG.
I, as of yet, haven’t really explored any alternatives, but I see a lot of others mentioned in the comments here.
Not using meta search engines and going directly to the sites with the info and searching them for instance.
Ah yes, good thing I kept a rolodex of websites for every useful website that I might need.
Can you search your rolodex for “caddy tls configuration” for me?
Thanks fri… wait, you’re not who I replied to. Do you have your own rolodex of websites?
Don’t be daft. You don’t need to know more than the dozen you already know. Wikimedia, stack overflow, Reddit and whatnot. For everything else you can still use a meta search engine.
So your suggesting to stop using meta search engines unless you need meta search engines?
Exactly. My recommendation is to rely less on metasearch engines.
SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.
Yup, easy peasy. And if you really want AI deep research, how about plugging it into your own local LLM with Vane
are you aware of any instances that have lasted longer than a few months?
I have it set up on my own home server. Before that, I had it set up on individual PCs. It’s super easy. I guess you mean public instances. I’ve never used one because it is so easy to set up for yourself.
Is that such an issue? If so, I could set up an open instance.
Nah, it isn’t, there is a whole instances list and there are always the same instance, often some new ones pop up but that’s it, there are also some great instances not in the list
I degoogled as a Covid project. Mostly it just made me feel a little bit better… and then GenAI hit. Hopefully I’ll go my whole life without ever having used Gemini. And hopefully, if they ingested any of my pre-pandemic emails, photos, docs, etc to train with, pulling it out of cold storage will at least have cost them extra time and money.
Ugh, damn post title. I went through the whole article looking for the alternatives before realizing the title of the article says nothing about alternatives.
Didnt bother with the article but
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Is an option
It’s gone to shit since Bing jacked up the price of API calls
Sorry, it was in the post body. Will update post to make this clearer.
Kagi and Startpage are my go-to search engines these days.
I have a paid Kagi account and feel it is very much worth the investment.What makes it worth it to you over something like Ecosia?
Also, I’m on the fence about startpage. They were Dutch but were bought by an American advertising company.
Qwant is French and they’ve been partnering with Ecosia to build a European index.
I’ve used both Ecosia and Kagi and find the former gives me too many irrelevant results compared to Kagi. Recently though Kagi has been giving me some funky results but it doesn’t happen very often.
I do not like the vibes of Startpage’s owner, System1.
If you’re using Startpage because it uses google on the back-end, Ecosia does much the same nowadays (you can toggle between that and bing).
Too much AI with Kagi.
If I wanted a conversation I wouldn’t be using a search engine to get answers.
Big business is the enemy.
Capitalism sucks:
- Private property fetishism (erodes the commons)
- Free market fundamentalism (prioritizes the freedoms of the biggest asset holders over the rest)
- Accumulationism (incentivizes hoarding far beyond where most people would have liked to stop hoarding if the system didn’t demand it)
- Consolidationism leading into economic royalism (mergers leading to monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, a two-tiered “justice” system, rules for thee but not for me)
- Transactionalism (no sense of society or priciples, but instead a system of backscratching where things only get done for their exchange value and for no other reason)
