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
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.
oh, good tip. I didn’t know about that.
you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?
That’s how I felt until about a month ago, now ddg is really useless
What does !g do? Add Google results?
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.
DDG often gives me results for individual words of the search but not results for all of the words in that order for which to have contextually relevant results.
I often find myself forced to brave the shitshow that is google search.
have you tried the duck assist thing yet?
If you’re trying to talk to the search engine more like a chat assistant, that sort of response might be what you’re looking for.
Fuck Duck Assist all my homies hate Duck Assist and I keep having to turn it back off again.
Whoever made it should get cancer and not have their children show up or call them back.
haha, whaaat why?
I just saw it for the first time today, it seems to mostly quote incredible sources rather than amalgamating responses.
you got some issues huh, poor fella?
I’m sorry I hurt your feelings and made you want to defend an LLM that approves copy pasted wikipedia snippets, but maybe you should go eat some ass?
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings”
I feel only pity for you.
reading your comments is like watching a diseased guinea pig nibble on its own scabs.
“an LLM that approves copy pasted wikipedia snippets”
duckduckgo’s llm tool offers relevant information from credible sources.
that is good.
Good luck unbunching those panties.
You know that’s just Bing, right?
is it? that kind of makes sense, because I still use Bing occasionally while Google is completely out of rotation, although I don’t find Bing as good as duckduckgo.
edit: it is not! looks like the DuckDuckGo search engine is an aggregate of hundreds of search engines, including their own duck duck bot, excluding Google but including Bing results.
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.
Why have you not tried Kagi? If it’s important to you to have good search and you don’t like being spied on and having ads shoved down your throat, it’s worth paying a small fee for quality instead of paying with your privacy for crap results. It’s been a breath of fresh air. Searching is fun again. It also indexes Lemmy. Traditional Search has largely gone to crap, but I’m tired of everyone complaining that these mega companies offering ‘free’ services aren’t holding their end of the deal instead of supporting the people that are doing something about it. I’m not optimistic things like qwant or searx will be sustainable or deliver high quality results, but by all means donate to them with time or money if you believe in them.
Kagi is the same as ddg 99% of the time.
Kagi isn’t free
Neither is beer
The search problem is largely due to not being the actual customer.
Look at me. I’m the customer now.
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.
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there’s not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
I don’t use perplexity, but AI is generally 60-80% effective with a larger than average open weights off line model running on your own hardware.
DDG offers the ability to use some of these. I use a modified Mistral model still, even though its base model(s) are Llama 2. Llama 3 can be better in some respects but it has terrible alignment bias. The primary entity in the underlying model structure is idiotic in alignment strength and incapable of reason with edge cases like creative writing for SciFi futurism. The alignment bleeds over. If you get on DDG and use the Anthropic Mixtral 8×7b, it is pretty good. The thing with models is to not talk to them like humans. Everything must be explicitly described. Humans make a lot of implied context in general where we assume people understand what we are talking about. Talking to an AI is like appearing in court before a judge; every word matters. The LLM is basically a reflection of all of human language too. If the majority of humans are wrong about something, so is the AI.
If you ask something simple like just a question, you’re not going to get very far into what the model knows. Models have very limited scope of focus. If you do not build prompt momentum into the space by describing a lot of details, the scope of focus is large but the depth is shallow. The more you build up momentum by describing what you are asking in detail, the more it narrows the scope and deeper connections can be made.
It is hard to tell what a model really knows unless you can observe the perplexity output. This is more advanced, but the perplexity score for each generated token is how you infer that the model does not know something.
Search sucks because it is a monopoly. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers m$ and the goo. All search queries go through these either directly or indirectly. No search provider is deterministic any more. Your results are uniquely packaged to manipulate you. They are also obfuscated to block others from using them for training better or competitive models. Then there is the anti trust US government case and all of that which makes obfuscating one’s market position to push people onto other platforms temporarily, their best path forward. - criminal manipulators are going to manipulate.
Not just you.
DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.
Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor
I switched to DDG right after Google added the ai answers to search and in baffled by how fast DDG seemed to go down hill. Just a few months ago it was still giving me on point results on the first try, now it almost feels like I’m using one of those malware search bars from back in the day.
yes - it’s a recent thing, no more that a few months I think
SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.
Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate that part about AI accelerating SEO spam?
I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).
For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.
With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.
I feel like it’s especially bad if you are searching for anything related to a marketable product. I tried searching ddg for information about using a surge protector with halogen bulbs and all I got was pages and pages of listicles on “best halogen lights 2024” full of affiliate links.
And if you’re looking for legitimate reviews, good luck! Everyone’s an affiliate now.
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
What is “verbatim mode”?
And where do you switch it?
under the google search field is a row of buttons. one of them, usually far right, is “search tools”. sometimes you have to scroll the button row to reach it. it has a verbatim switch that makes google not replace your search terms with what it thinks most people mean when entering that
And where do you switch it?
I made a screenshot for you:
I think it’s just you. Stable Diffusors 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’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.
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.
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’m very happy with kagi at the moment. Just crossed one year using it as my main search engine last week and don’t see why I would go back.
Having to signup and login to a search engines sounds like an annoying hassle
It’s a very minor annoyance and well worth it in my opinion.
I was searching for a book quote for over a year. I tried every search engine, tried changing the terms, checking back several times every few weeks or so, but couldn’t find anything even close. I tried kagi and it was literally the very first result on my very first search.
I haven’t looked back and have never had an issue finding what I’m searching for since.
It is. And it’s also terrible for privacy, but people do it with google as well.
Signing up and logging in isn’t a problem imo. I wouldn’t even mind if I had to pay for searches, but I’m not going to make it a subscription service. Unless they add an option to do something like buy 1000 searches that never expire, its not something I’d considered. I do think they beat out competitors like google with their results pretty consistently though based on the trial.
I’m not gonna subscription my heated car seats but search is a service that costs an ongoing amount to provide. The subscription isn’t significant, it’s $5 a month for 300 searches (or $10 for unlimited).
I know we’ve been conditioned to expect search for free, but if we want to get away from the “the user is the product” model then I think it’s a good thing to have a subscription to a service that has ongoing costs to provide.
Up to 300 searches. I’m not asking for free. Just for it to not be a subscription. Just sell me 300 searches.
Same. Using Kagi feels like surfing the old web. The first thing I did was block all Pinterest results. That alone made every search golden. 😂
I hate Pinterest lol, best thing about Kagi is being able to block whole sites and it remembers your preferences. I may come back to Kagi but I didn’t feel like funding their AI features development. Now Im using Searx and 4get cause they’re free.
I don’t remember any specifics, but I think I heard there were some privacy concerns?
Then again, there seem to be privacy concerns about pretty much anything so might not be that bad…
The concerns are about the credit card you use to pay.
The argument is that they can associate the card with your searches.
As far as I know they don’t keep search data. I’m personally happy with them
I think this might be it. There were also some statements by the CEO I think which didn’t exactly inspire confidencenin their company - but again, I don’t remember the details unfortunately
That’s what’s kept me from using it, although I very much like the idea of paying for a good service. I would love to see them figure out a way to avoid accounts.
My blocks
Edit: hm. I seem to have replied to the wrong comment.
