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.
“Perplexity AI”
Yeah 100% agree. Especially for the type of search where you’re googling for an answer. This feels like what searches used to be when Google was young and forums still existed.
Kagi is very good.
I wanted to make a joke about my first search engine, MetaCrawler, and then found out it’s still around and still does search. Going down that rabbithole, it’s changed hands a ton and was only relaunched kinda recently at some point. Is it any good? Nah, probably not.
I guess I’ll just have to rely on my other aggregate search engine, SavvySearch (no, no the first search engine does not in fact still exist, much to my disappointment).
I agree with you. It has gotten worse.
DDG and qwant are basically bing
theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.
Whats funny and kind of sad, is that they know exactly what you’re searching for, and don’t give any fucks about showing you that, and instead will show you this cool other thing that they’re getting their beak wet on thats like, eh… kinda related to what you typed in. Google didn’t get dumber, they just don’t have any meaningful competition which would force them to deliver high quality results, and instead of enshittified their results to the point where they’re practically useless.
I use brave search. I can generally find most things. They even have an answer with ai thing that gives some useful stuff when you want a specific quick answer.
I also use ddg.
There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.
It becomes more and more true every day.
It doesn’t really, it’s just that human activity on the internet is more and more taking place on platforms without any search indexing. 20 years ago, internet forum are where you’d go for advice online. Nowadays, it’s more and more becoming discord servers and similar, which just aren’t indexed by internet search.
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it really doesn’t.
Jesus, the “plandemic” explanation for why the Internet is dying. The Internet IS clearly dying, but this is stupid. Even if we got rid of all the bots and AI, the Internet would still be dying, because open protocols are not as exploitable as walled gardens. The value of capital in the world overwhelms the value of human labour and human interest, and all our social structures conform to the needs of capital over time.
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 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.
I don’t even want a baby, but I was getting nonstop diaper ads for weeks this summer.
I think it’s because they’re desperately trying to get people to have kids(thats my hypothesis anyway). Not saying yours isn’t picking up you talking about the topic, but I got so swamped with them at one point I was starting to wonder if I was losing my mind. I asked my husband about it and he was getting them too.
It was honestly weird as hell.
The chance that Google, for some reason, wants people to have babies, is significantly lower than the chance you just happen to fit some demographics cohort which is likely to have a baby, or to soon have a baby.
I don’t know, it was really super weird how randomly it started shoving them in my face when it didn’t previously.
I don’t think Google gives a shit if I have kids, but the republican party has voiced concerns over “the domestic supply of babies” multiple times over the years and I wouldn’t put it past them to give google “gratuities” to shove baby related ads on people in general, not just me specifically.
It’s just a hypothesis I have about the sudden increase in baby related stuff. I’m not dedicated to the idea or anything, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case.
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.
Kagi is pretty awesome
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.
