23 ms·
Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
- shutupnerd0000 3y agoSpeaking of bad software, anyone getting a huge amount of horizontal scroll on mobile on this blog post? What should I add to my bag of tricks to work around that
- cratermoon 3y ago"Going back to the debate between folks like Xe, who believe that straightforward search queries are inundated with crap, and our thought leader, who believes that "the rending of garments about how even google search is terrible now is pretty overblown", it appears that Xe is correct." Also, the article tested Mwmbl as well, not mentioned in the title here.
- coldcode 3y agoSearch was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still avoiding all the crap.
- packetlost 3y agoSearch probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very different.
- jader201 3y agoYeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality content, that search doesn’t (or can’t) do a good job of surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal left, but it’s such a small fraction that it’s much more difficult to filter it out. Having said that, I’m usually still able to find what I’m looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the keywords to use to find it. But it’s much harder nowadays for sure.
- amlib 3y agoI wonder how much influence google had in lowering the content quality over the years? After all, most SEO spam was a direct response to all the ludicrous requirements they've forced the whole web into, which eventually only SEO spam were willing to commit to. I also wonder if google just stopped existing, would the web heal over time?
- genewitch 3y agoi have a radio that can "hear" down to -130dBm, i've proven this empirically. Cellular signals work at -12dB or more below the noise floor, wspr works even lower than that. Lightning is broadband noise, and yet i can still use digital stuff when there's lightning storms. I don't buy the signal to noise argument. For example, whenever i get on youtube and get fed some content, i can immediately tell if it's had AI involved anywhere, and thumbs it down. I won't recommend it, i've called people out for linking such tripe to me (or others). Hear me out - google got bad about 11 years ago when the dorking stopped being effective, right around the time of the spotlight search results and the sponsored junk taking the top results. Around this time, various agencies (news, etc) started gaming the SEO to respond to any remotely related search with whatever the news was currently. Google chose not to "fix" this, because we're not the customer. DDG was better for a few years for real results, too, but that has gone downhill as well. The current zeitgeist uses stuff like tiktok and facebook for "web searches" - "food trucks near Austin, TX" or so. No one really uses web search like people on this site do, and google couldn't care less if we don't like the search results.
- Libcat99 3y agoIs it actually more complex to provide good results, or is it just more profitable not to? I have a hard time believing an organization like Google doesn't have the resources to provide a search engine that's just as usable as what they had 6 years ago (around the time I feel like the decay really set in). Seems a lot more likely that it's just more profitable to serve up garbage sponsored content.
- jmye 3y agoDefinitely more profitable not to. Especially as Google is an ad company, not a search company. I’d rather see a world with numerous paid/subscription search engines, that are motivated to do nothing but return search results well. I expect you would see some of the SEO crap getting solved.
- w-ll 3y agoi cant remember where i read this, but something about how google ranks site that have google ads higher than sites that dont. makese sense, its evil, but makes sense, thats why we get all this scrapped spam. is there any more info on this?
- mixdup 3y agothis is like focusing on one single problem as being the cause of the decline of the United States. It's actually a lot of things combining and there's not going to be one fix
- w-ll 3y agowtf decline of the United States are you talking aboout
- Nextgrid 3y agoIntentionally ranking sites with Google ads higher would be a huge antitrust liability, so no way they're doing that. On the other hand, they can achieve virtually the same outcome while keeping plausible deniability by just not doing anything that would downrank sites with ads (of which a significant chunk is likely to be Google's). Spam sites often include ads.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoThe problem is that even if providers of the service are 100% trying to provide a great service, everyone on the web will always be min-maxing to appear on top. So it's inevitably going to become crap.
- jmclnx 3y agoTo me it is only due to the ads, google and bing return nothing but ads on the first page. Plus for me to have the joy of seeing these ads, I need to got through a CAPTHA that I need to try multiple times. But all in all, a very good article
- 1970-01-01 3y agoThe golden era of search results is very much over. Welcome to the pot-metal era.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 3y agoI reckon these days search is pretty difficult and everyone knows how to game it. I recommend using a search engine that lets you effectively change which sites are shown. You can do this with Kagi, or with Google's Programmable Search Engines - I'm sure there are more too. In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't sometimes correct, but because I don't want videos polluting the regular results - it just takes too long to get info from videos. An ability to upvote results for a given query seems tantalizing but I bet it would be gamed too. The DIY approach seems to be the only tractable one. In my case I only only results from domains I believe are correct. The whitelist approach does have downsides. Usually I'll vet new potential domains through social means like Reddit and this site, rather than identifying them through the search results. I believe there's an inherent tradeoff between discoverability and the gameability of the results. Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008 Google Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude less content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable your place is on your business and thus no SEO. I also personally disagree that yt-dlp is the "correct" result for the average user when they search Youtube Download. I highly doubt the average user would know or care to use the command line. A website front end would be more actionable for them.
- kristopolous 3y agoI'm a big fan of the non commercial site search engines because of the gaming aspect. If you're not generating revenue from the clicks the game mostly goes away. I'm not saying people aren't entitled to make some money, but it clearly incentivizes user hostile behavior. Maybe make it an option because legitimate sites like journalism also use this model.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI got different results for Google on "ad block". And changing the query to "ad blocker" like Google suggested raised ublock origin way up in the results
- jeffreyw128 3y agoThe issue with traditional search engines is that keyword-first algorithms are extremely gameable. Try https://search.metaphor.systems https://search.metaphor.systems - it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is. So in the mentioned example of searching for Youtube downloaders, with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders (https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20best%20Youtube%20downloader https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20b...) Full disclosure - I work there :p
- KomoD 3y ago> with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders I clicked into the top 5 results, none of them were real youtube downloaders that worked, so I clicked the next 5 results, then I finally got one single (really slow) downloader that worked. 1 out of 10 top results
- charcircuit 3y ago>it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is. What prevents websites from gaming their embedding? Switching to a similarity search doesn't prevent the results from being gamed.
- marcinzm 3y agoHow is that different from keywords? Embeddings aren't magic, they're just page content. Content is trivial to game since it's controlled by the website owner. edit: The results are also from my quick QA not that great. Searching for "what is the best mouse to buy" leads to links to buy random mice versus review summaries or online discussions on mice. One of the recommended queries of "Here is a great fun concert in San Francisco" leads to some really bizarre results in non-English languages that have nothing to do with either SF or concerts. edit2: Also, Google has been using LLMs part of their search since at least 2018 so definitely not just keyword matching there.
- jeffreyw128 3y agoYup, definitely still gameable but if the model learns what high quality content is like and what high quality webpages there are (which it does), then the only way to game would be to be great :) For your search - I would recommend turning autoprompt off and searching something like "Here is a great summary of the best computer mice to use:". Our embeddings model is trained on how links are talked about on the Internet, if that helps with querying. So you have to query like how someone would refer to a link before sharing it
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWhile I've made huge improvements to the algo recently, I do think Marginalia Search got a bit lucky with the sample queries, as it is still IMO far more hit and miss than many alternatives, but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.
- bombcar 3y agoI notice you completely avoid the question on how a single developer can do so well ;) I do think that search has gotten much worse but my ability to know the magic words like “ublock origin” instead of “Adblock” and “yt-dlp” instead of “download YouTube” and phrase my search has gotten better. We’ve all been doing prompt engineering against the Internet-wide LLM that is the spam houses.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago> I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single developer can do so well ;) As much as I enjoy the notion of somehow being a 10,000X developer, it's probably mostly that modern search is a filtering problem, and MS does filtering fairly well.
- tentacleuno 3y ago> [...] but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. Would you be able to share some of your personal highlights regarding this? I've partially kept up-to-date with the DIY, non-corporate search space (YaCY and friends). I'd love to understand a bit more behind the engineering decisions made when creating a search engine; it seems like a very hard problem to solve. P.S. Marginalia is a very impressive piece of work, overall -- I've heard nothing but positive remarks from users on here. I've been meaning to try it for a while, but time constraints have... well, constrained, thus far.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoHonestly I understand it well enough that I see it is surprisingly hard, but not enough to have good solutions...
- 1905 3y ago[flagged]
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- happytiger 3y agoI feel like you could reboot yahoo directory and have more utility that most searches.
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- kristofferR 3y agoThe !bang directory for Kagi is honestly pretty good, found some cool sites there: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- louthy 3y agoDid you mean to say Kagi or Bing? Anyway, here’s Kagi’s bangs: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html
- kristofferR 3y ago> Note that Kagi supports all DuckDuckGo-style bangs. You can also make your own bangs. That said, my point was that the bang directory has a bunch of the most useful sites in each category.
- flenserboy 3y agoThe return of something like Yahoo Directory would be most welcome. There is great utility in having more than one approach into a data space. That we have been stuck with essentially one way in for over a decade means that there is a great deal out there which would be great to access but which has been rendered invisible.
- marginalia_nu 3y agohttps://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/
- arthurcolle 3y agoI use serpapi for my hot RAG and the results are fine. Brave search API is obscenely overpriced. I hope someone is working on Search because Google has become a singularly garbage company. Propping up DEI is sinful enough but just failing to compete is lame. /shrug
- toomim 3y agoDo search engines censor political topics these days? If you search "truthsocial" on ddg, the truthsocial.com website is the first hit. But if you search "trump truthsocial", it doesn't give you trump's truthsocial page, and doesn't even give you truthsocial.com within the first few pages of search results. Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at bing? It looks like google results are similar.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dpkirchner 3y agoI doubt you're seeing censorship. If you search for "truthsocial trump" on ddg, you'll see his profile, for better or worse.
- toomim 3y agoOh, interesting. So it depends on the order of the terms: - "truthsocial trump" works - "trump truthsocial" doesn't work
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago[flagged]
- Springtime 3y agoDuckDuckGo (and by extension perhaps Bing, assuming identical upstream results) has some terrible results when trying to filter by all kinds of domains. There's a power tools review/news site that returns zero hits for the actual domain when searching its name (which is the same as its .com address). While for some domains even searching using the `site:` parameter will give far fewer results when paired with a query than just searching the domain name + query sans the TLD (the router firmware site openwrt.org is among such). It's a mess and reporting it hasn't any difference ime in the past 3 years. So I'd be reluctant to say irrelevant results are due to censorship unless there was more evidence.
- senderista 3y ago
- johnfn 3y agoI noticed that the author uses ChatGPT3.5 rather than 4, which is a rather large difference. I don't have the knowledge to rerank all questions the author asked, but I will say that a test of ChatGPT 4 leads me directly to youtube-dl, which is better than every other search engine listed.
- taberiand 3y agoThat was the first thing I checked reading the article. Although the argument would be 3.5 is free - any comparison of systems against ChatGPT that isn't using ChatGPT 4 can be dismissed almost out of hand; there is not much point talking about ChatGPT if it's not using ChatGPT 4 and making proper use of its capabilities. That is not to say that there aren't valid criticisms of and shortcomings in ChatGPT 4 - just that it's not useful to say ChatGPT when it's referring to 3.5
- bombcar 3y agoHe gives the full queries - do you have chat 4.0 that you ran run it against?
- taberiand 3y agoSure. Bear in mind I have custom instructions active - which, if you want to make full and proper use of ChatGPT, you should configure, along with customised GPTs - so I get lots of dot-point descriptions, because that's what I've asked for. Also I would not normally write ChatGPT queries the same as I write them for search engines but for the sake of comparison, I'll use their queries verbatim except where my custom instructions affect the context too much. > download youtube videos https://chat.openai.com/share/3e18e4f0-5527-4479-8a2f-ef17bdf49fa9 https://chat.openai.com/share/3e18e4f0-5527-4479-8a2f-ef17bd... I got - good results. They got - "Very bad results (fails to return any kind of useful result) ChatGPT: basically refuses to answer the question, although you can probably prompt engineer your way to an answer if you don't just naively ask the question you want answered". > [What] ad blocker [can I use?] https://chat.openai.com/share/e1985d7a-c89f-4b5e-bb59-70bd115cacad https://chat.openai.com/share/e1985d7a-c89f-4b5e-bb59-70bd11... Looks good to me > download firefox https://chat.openai.com/share/3a62e5ae-8dbd-4179-8eb0-cc38ee3ebaaf https://chat.openai.com/share/3a62e5ae-8dbd-4179-8eb0-cc38ee... Also good > Why do wider tires have better grip? > [Provide links to scientific sites that describe] why wider tires have better grip? https://chat.openai.com/share/8cbcd1dc-b23f-41f3-83ad-f43f3df1a8f4 https://chat.openai.com/share/8cbcd1dc-b23f-41f3-83ad-f43f3d... Honestly, I have no idea if this is a good answer or not. But I don't use ChatGPT for answers that I don't have confidence that I can determine its veracity; if I needed to know this with certainty, I'd use ChatGPT as a jumping off point for my own research. > Why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller? > [Provide links to scientific sites that describe] why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller? https://chat.openai.com/share/dbb97ac0-840c-402c-a917-657af6f3b825 https://chat.openai.com/share/dbb97ac0-840c-402c-a917-657af6... > vancouver snow forecast winter 2023 > Environment Canada winter 2023 https://chat.openai.com/share/aab017d7-f86b-49c9-b5c0-86a0b178eccc https://chat.openai.com/share/aab017d7-f86b-49c9-b5c0-86a0b1... I don't know if almanac.com is any good but giving it the specific "Environment Canada winter 2023" query gave the expected very good result. I think ChatGPT 4 generally provided very good results for the test queries, if you tailor the queries just slightly for the format
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- Osiris 3y agoI have recently started using kagi after seeing a recommendation here. From what I understand, it aggregates results from multiple sources rather than having their own indexer. The results aren’t really any better, but the lack of ads and videos in the results makes for a cleaner experience. I also haven’t yet taken advantage of the extra features to block certain websites from results. Personally, I pay the $5 mostly in an attempt to support another competitor in the space.
- kristofferR 3y agoKagi is awesome, so much better experience than Google! Start using bangs, lenses and customized results ASAP, that makes a big difference.
- Zambyte 3y agoI actually find myself using bangs way more since I switched to Kagi from DDG. I think it's the AI bangs like !chat and !expert that got me in the habit of using bangs besides !g (which I never actually use anymore).
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- Nextgrid 3y agoPretty sure the reason Kagi is better isn't because they use multiple sources, it's just because they can use the presence of ads as a negative ranking signal, something that none of the major public search engines will ever do as it goes against their own business model.
- elcook4000 3y agoI have found appending site:edu remarkably improves google results. For both the tire question and with respect to a youtube dowloader, the first results were on the nose with the addition of site:edu on Google. Why this is needed and whether a noncommercial, information rich web portal should exist are questions for another thread.
- fantasybroker 3y agoI am not sure what the intention of this post is. In my handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia. #1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon Ramsay and shows relevant results. #2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows Wikipedia, Al Jazeera, etc up-to-date summaries about the war. #3 "Dildo". Top post on Marginalia is "Students for Concealed Carry Embraces UT Dildos | Students for Concealed Carry". Top posts on Kagi are Wikipedia (read) and Amazon (buy). > How is Marginalia, a search engine built by a single person, so good? Because it's not good?
- BytesAndGears 3y agoI had a similar experience when testing Kagi after reading this. The top result for the “wider car tires” query on Kagi was a link to Physics StackExchange with some marginally informative answers [0], which would be easy to expand on in future searches. The second result was Reddit. Then a couple of incorrect/irrelevant pages but they don’t look like scams [0]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29903/why-do-people-recommend-wider-tyres-in-car-for-better-road-grip https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29903/why-do-peo... Edit: I did just realize that I have StackExchange customized to be up-ranked. So that probably helps. But yeah, I guess this is why I usually get good results, which is something that generally still fails with Google for me.
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- hattmall 3y agoI don't disagree with your assessment in full, but I don't exactly consider wikipedia and Amazon good results. Like they are big enough that if that's the result I want I can go to them directly. So like they aren't bad or wrong, but I can see the case for excluding them. Should something like Webster's dictionary be a top result?
- 3y ago
- aworks 3y agoThe appendix describing the individual search results is both entertaining and scary e.g. "Two of the top three hits are how to install the extension and the rest of the top hits are how to remove this badware. Many of the removal links are themselves scams that install other badware."
- fgblanch 3y agoI would love to see Perplexity.ai in the benchmark. It has completely replaced Google/DDG for information questions for me. I still use DDG when I want to do a navigational query (e.g. find the URL for a blog i partially recall the name).
- rr808 3y agoMe too. I only heard about it this morning and it looks kinda perfect so far.
- larve 3y agoWhile kagi was the product that most brought me joy in 2022, perplexity.ai has been the one for 2023, even though i only recently started using it. It's just been a joy to be able to iteratively discuss most of my searches. EDIT: here's a search for tire (I don't know anything about tire, so maybe there's much better links out there, but this is pretty much what I was expecting. Not an ad or SEO in sight.) https://www.perplexity.ai/search/tire-3iuI9T6BQUSvu2tAhgsRmA?s=c https://www.perplexity.ai/search/tire-3iuI9T6BQUSvu2tAhgsRmA...
- freediver 3y agoI am wondering if you can use AI chat exclusively for your search needs? If not, what does the perfect integration looks like?
- lhl 3y agoI've been really enjoying Perplexity as well. It's a much better Internet/search focused experience than ChatGPT, Bing, or Bard. For anyone interested, until the new year (~20 more hours?) there's a code for 2mo free Pro: https://twitter.com/perplexity_ai/status/1738255102191022359 https://twitter.com/perplexity_ai/status/1738255102191022359 (more file uploads, choose your model including GPT4)
- infamia 3y agoTry uBlacklist, it's like uBlock, but for search results. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia... You can sync the settings and your personal blocklist to either Dropbox or Google Drive. It also has the ability to subscribe to blocklists. Mind, you need to manually turn on search engines and subscribe to lists. The uBlacklist subscriptions setting doesn't have any built-in feeds yet though. :( edit: THere are some feeds on the uBlacklist site though. https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions edit edit: Found an even better list of feeds. https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-filter-formats-ublacklist-hosts-filter- https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-fi...
- tentacleuno 3y agouBlacklist is absolutely excellent: I've been using it for a few years now, with absolutely no problems. Quick tip: turn on the 'Skip the "Block this site" dialog', and disable 'Hide the "Block this site" links' settings -- they make it much quicker to block spam websites (of which there are many on regular search engines).
- skygazer 3y agoJust today I was looking for an extension just to block Quora from search results. (Talk about a useless site that seems to uselessly outrank Wikipedia on google lately — what on earth is Google up to?) I’m thankful I saw your and your parent’s post.
- lillecarl 3y agoWhen Quora was new I followed some topics, got to read interesting answers to interesting questions, but then some kind of enshittification happened. I've blocked it in Kagi now.
- ic_fly2 3y ago
- thsksbd 3y agoHonestly, if you have to search something remotely technical, try HN's search function with comments enabled. If the topic has ever come up the discussion and links are likely to be more relevant and better than your avg. wiki article
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoMore incorrect usage of "hallucinated" for simply made-up or inaccurate results.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoBlah blah blah. Could you lay this article out any worse? What are the queries you used to test? I want to try them too. Buried in here somewhere. Using an adblocker is not expert anything. That you've defined your own opinion for what some of the results should be blows the thing up. Searching youtube downloader, many people would be fine with some of the ad covered but totally functional sites that pop up on Google. I use some of them every day for quick conversion tasks. I don't want any youtube-dl result. The average users don't either. Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download a program. Why do wider tires have better grip? .. what, sites like roadandtrack, prioritytire, reddit, some physics and stackexchange sites aren't good enough? they are. The Vancouver snow report one also. Lots of major news sites. Some weathernetwork and almanacs. All totally acceptable results for a sort of variable question. blah blah this is just a hate on for Google and a HN/nerd view of the world that the average user is nowhere near living in.
- inquirerGeneral 3y ago[dead]
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- SnazzyJeff 3y ago> Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download a program. They are if the first six results are SEO bullshit. Which is the de-facto state of affairs for Google today: advertising traipsing around as search.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoheh, they're not. They're all variations of mozilla download pages and site posts.
- navjack27 3y agoCompletely agree. I personally thought searching "Vancouver snow report" to be extremely strange. Just search zip code or city name and weather. Two words. That's all you need to get results. What the hell is snow report? Do you even think you can trust weather reports 10+ days out? Whole article is rambling and silly and assuming.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoCan someone tell me why Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local results? I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses containing maybe one word in common. It's most frustrating with phone numbers. I picked up the habit of searching the random numbers that called me, to try and find out if they were possibly important. I used to get a bunch of spam sites that clearly existed to profit off me making those searches. Both Google and DDG have removed those spam sites, even though they were useful at times. Google will tell me the number is in some random PDF that contains a few of the digits, then no other results. DDG will say the top result is my local police department, something that freaked me out the first few times.
- teeray 3y ago> I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses Query: “I’m coming out of my cage…” Result (Ad): “You’ll be doing just fine with these amazing year-end closeout prices at Al’s Discount Car Barn. Gotta come down—you’ll want it all!”
- boomboomsubban 3y agoAds would make sense, but there's no way my local city council is paying Bing and they are the most frequently listed result.
- moffkalast 3y agoIt was only a list, how did it end up like this?
- Gualdrapo 3y agoMaybe it was an attempt to make better their results for local results? When searching for results from my country in DDG (picking the country in the drop-down below the search box) still returned results from the USA or other countries. Even when searching stuff in the local language. Maybe they tried to fix that because it really sucked, so much I never used it again for searching into local websites.
- sagarpatil 3y agoHave you tried perplexity.ai? It's like ChatGPT and Google had a baby. Looks very promising and I'm seeing a lot of tech leaders (example Toby of Shopify) moving to it.
- dartharva 3y agoAren't Bing Chat and Kagi FastGPT the same in effect?
- littlecranky67 3y agoNo, FastGPT is GPT-2 based. I actually prefer FastGPT because its fast (duh!), and as it gives very concise answers and all the generated response carries footnotes with the link to the source.
- freediver 3y agoJust to correct, FastGPT uses claude-instant.
- emmanueloga_ 3y agoI will admit that I can't read between lines here and just go ahead an ask: What does "bluesky thought leader" suppose to mean? (1) Any guesses who this may be? Why is he not quoted directly? (btw, the term is used 3 times, presumably to refer to the same person). 1: my reading is that this is a sarcastic denomination for someone that is supposed to be an innovation thought leader but actually is just defending the broken search landscape status quo.
- rhabarba 3y agoOr it's some vocal guy on Bluesky which didn't allow public links until recently.
- 0x38B 3y agoRe: Kagi, I heard about it on HN, tried it for 100 searches, then subscribed. When I search for random JS and CSS things, MDN is the first result, and if it isn't, I can downrank whatever spammy site(s) are on top. --- I wish I had a local LLM trained to detect clickbait and or low-effort content. I imagine searching YouTube and having all the clickbait collapsed together (just like Kagi condenses listicles), with the remainder being potentially high-quality content. Don't know how feasible this is right now.
- shados 3y agoI became a huge fan of Kagi after seeing it on hacker news too. It's amazing how good a search engine can be when it's not full of ads.
- D13Fd 3y agoYeah. At first I primarily used Kagi to move away from Google as a company, hoping for results that were equally good. But Google search actually feels crappy now in comparison.
- freeAgent 3y agoJust use the Kagi Summarizer on YouTube videos and you don’t have to waste time watching trash. It’s a great life hack.
- qudat 3y agoBeen paying for Kagi for 6+ months and very happy with it. I’m pretty anti subscriptions so that’s saying a lot for a service that is otherwise free. I do have to dump into google for local searches every once in awhile, but otherwise happy with it.
- wolverine876 3y agoLook at the source for that page. Is it hand-coded? (I think it's great.)
- zzleeper 3y agoFor me the problem is not just that searching on Google is bad, but that sometimes it COMPLETELY hides exactly what I'm looking, for no good reason. For instance, I wrote an R ggplot2 package called "fedplot" (following the convention of calling the package for the figure style it replicates, as in "bbplot" for BBC-style charts). Try searching for it on Google: "github" "fedplot" doesn't get you anywhere. Meanwhile, every other search engine gives you exactly what you want if you just type "fedplot". I even tried to add the relevant websites through google's suggested tools, and nothing happened :|
- Brian_K_White 3y agoTheir black box semantic guesser has been told not to feed the radicalizing conspiracy theorist fires about federal plots. Who needs to know anything about government owned land anyway?
- Dah00n 3y agoSearching for "fedplot" looking for https://github.com/sergiocorreia https://github.com/sergiocorreia in the results: Qwant: Result 1 Bing: Result 1 Google: Result 2 Marginalia: Zero results ChatGPT 3.5: Some Federal Reserve dot plot nonsense and no useful results.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoYou're never going to find github results on Marginalia as long as they block 3rd party crawlers :-/
- Dah00n 3y agoWell, zero results are better than spam ;-)
- zzleeper 3y agoI would say Google has zero results, as it does not find https://github.com/sergiocorreia/fedplot https://github.com/sergiocorreia/fedplot nor https://sergiocorreia.github.io/fedplot/ https://sergiocorreia.github.io/fedplot/ ; even with the advantage of the latter being manually added to the Google Admin console. Meanwhile, both Bing and Qwant give me exactly what I want
- viraptor 3y agoI really don't agree with some of the expectations around results. > Download youtube videos > Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp. Links to youtube-dl or other less frequently updated projects would also be ok. That's not what a random person expects. yt-dlp or youtube-dl have no meaning to a normie. The first result is an online downloader and that's what an average person is after. I checked the first result in Kagi and it's a valid youtube downloader. If you're after a commandline tool, ask for it: "commandline tool download youtube videos" gives youtube-dl as the top result with valid options afterwards: https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+videos&r=au&sh=Sjez-gTHDNE5r9wcy3o6AA https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+... "Ad blocker" seems to ignore other options exist. Yes, ublock would be preferable for most, but ABP is not "very bad". Kagi mentions ABP at position 1 and ublock at position 8: https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOtsPNNhHA https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOt... (But for a query like that, I'd be happy with a wikipedia article about adblockers, because why not?) I'm not disagreeing that results have been getting worse for years, but... this is a really bad scoring system. It feels like that one very new person jumping on SO posting something like "syntax error: if 1 {" - what are you even asking for? (To be honest, the search engines could also give you the equivalent of "this is a very vague, would you like to specify what you're actually after? here are some suggestions: ...", but that's beyond the scope here.) The search returning not the exact thing you want to see for a super generic query, but returning a valid answer to a question is not "very bad".
- linusg789 3y agoMy thoughts exactly.
- anonymoushn 3y agoIf you try using it, the first result doesn't help you download a youtube video and does try to get you to install malware.
- viraptor 3y agoResults: https://kagi.com/search?q=download+youtube+videos&r=au&sh=OwqJD3GuPFgLuy01BYdU0Q https://kagi.com/search?q=download+youtube+videos&r=au&sh=Ow... First one is https://wave.video/convert/youtube-to-mp4-355 https://wave.video/convert/youtube-to-mp4-355 It downloaded the first video just fine.
- nneonneo 3y agoHonestly, this is depressing. Back in the day, AltaVista and AskJeeves existed but returned terrible results, and Google showed up to disrupt them all. It seems like we should be on the verge of repeating this cycle. Maybe LLMs will help, but I can’t shake the nagging feeling that the situation will simply get worse with LLMs, not better, due to hallucinations and the apparent “gullibility” of LLMs: I would not be surprised if SEOing an LLM turns out to be easier than SEOing Google.
- jimmytucson 3y agoIf you wanna know why Google (or any search engine) sucks, just look at how it measures its own search results. Most search companies do this “at scale” according to very specific guidelines, like what the author did here but on steroids. For example, take a look at Google’s 168-page instruction manual for search quality raters: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... It talks about figuring out a query’s meaning(s), judging the user’s intent (were they looking for some specific answer, etc.), evaluating the “quality” of a website, rating the site’s usefulness in relation to the query’s meaning/intent, etc. All this is to say, it’s not that search companies don’t do exactly what the author did here, it’s just that they have different standards than the author. And I’d venture their standards match their users’ better than the author’s, but maybe not or not forever, anyway.
- ec109685 3y agoWhy would an average user want blog spam search results? My hope is as LLM’s improve, they can be more discriminating about the results returned.
- jimmytucson 3y ago> Why would an average user want blog spam search results? I didn’t say they would :) In fact, I can’t figure out how your comment relates to mine. Are you claiming that Google doesn’t factor blog spamminess into its evaluation of search results? If so, that’s quickly put to bed by the document I linked, pretty much section 4.6. Excerpt: > Creating an abundance of content with little effort or originality with no editing or manual curation is often the defining attribute of spammy websites. You could claim that they fail to capture some essential quality of “blog spamitude” or that they don’t weight it heavily enough in their eval but to say they just, like, don’t know about blogspam over there, is pretty far fetched IMO.
- ec109685 3y agoI was responding to this part, “And I’d venture their standards match their users’ better than the author’s”, which I understood you to mean people like these seo’d results.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoSearch engines are not designed to give you the information you desire. They are designed to sell ads or metadata. "Result quality" is of no consequence. If you actually wanted accurate results you wouldn't use a tool that is literally attempting to read your mind like a fortune teller. It is impossible to know what you want just by the word "snow". Jesus Christ engineers are so dumb.
- naet 3y agoI think the result grading is too opinionated here. For example, the first query is "download YouTube videos", for which Google is ranked "terrible" for not showing you a command line open source program. But the literal first result is an ad supported site where I can paste in a YouTube link and download it right from the browser. That seems like exactly what most people would want or to the CLI tool the author is searching for. The author seemed to be looking for sites without ads as what they wanted to see in search results more than search relevance. Search is a very gamed system with a lot of SEO spam type results, but I think a much better analysis could be done for more meaningful results. Also I recreated some of the searches and got very different results (including ublock origin in the top three responses). Again, a more scientific ranking system could help uncover better data on searches.
- shaldengeki 3y agoThe author describes that site as such, which seems fair to rate as "terrible": > Some youtube downloader site. Has lots of assurances that the website and the tool are safe because they've been checked by "Norton SafeWeb". Interacting with the site at all prompts you to install a browser extension and enable notifications. Trying to download any video gives you a full page pop-over for extension installation for something called CyberShield. There appears to be no way to dismiss the popover without clicking on something to try to install it. After going through the links but then choosing not to install CyberShield, no video downloads. Googling "cybershield chrome extension" returns a knowledge card with "Cyber Shield is a browser extension that claims to be a popup blocker but instead displays advertisements in the browser. When installed, this extension will open new tabs in the browser that display advertisements trying to sell software, push fake software updates, and tech support scams.", so CyberShield appears to be badware.
- naet 3y agoThat's how he described it but I tried it myself and found it perfectly functional to download a video with different options for size / quality. It has ads but not nearly as bad as described. It's a service that is quasi illegal and explicitly breaks the YouTube terms of service. I think the search engine did a good job surfacing what was searched for, there just aren't going to be any free online YouTube downloaders without advertising.
- virgildotcodes 3y agoI really don't understand why anyone writing articles about ChatGPT uses 3.5. It's pretty misleading as to the results you can get out of (the best available version of) ChatGPT. For comparison, here are all the author's questions posed against GPT4: https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7525a64 https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7...
- refulgentis 3y agoIt's a bit hard to use for most, either $20/month fixed for a limited # of messages, or you need to be able to reason through how to get an API key, or get another 3rd party service with similar cost & limits.
- simonw 3y agoYou can use GPT-4 for free via Bing - though I find it a little hard to explain to people how they can do that because I'm never sure what the rules are with regards to creating Microsoft accounts, whether you can use any browser or have to use Edge, what countries it's available in etc. Actually maybe the recommendation should be to use GPT-4 for free via https://copilot.microsoft.com/ https://copilot.microsoft.com/ instead now. (Except I can't tell which version of GPT that's using yet - there was a story on 5th December that said GPT-4 Turbo was "coming soon", not sure when "soon" is though: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/12/05/celebrating-the-first-year-of-copilot-with-significant-new-innovations/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/12/05/celebrating-the-... )
- vitorgrs 3y agoFYI: Balanced doesn't run pure GPT4. Balanced uses a combination of multiple models. Precise and Creative is pure GPT4. About GPT4 Turbo, to check if you are on Turbo, ctrl+U > ctrl+f > check if "dlgpt4t" exists. If it exists, you are running turbo. You can also double-check by, well, asking stuff after 2021 knowledge cut-off as well ("What are the oscar winners?") with search disabled. But you'll notice because turbo is much faster on bing (and better too).
- 3y ago
- xpressvideoz 3y ago> However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that search results are still great. I think that this very sentence shows the author's bias, because I feel that Google's search results are not just great, but better than what it was 10 years ago.
- realcertify 3y agoYou must be kidding, Google is becoming worse every day. Still better than useless Bing though.
- computerfriend 3y agoConsider yourself part of the sizeable group of vocal folk then.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- innocentoldguy 3y agoWhile I think the article is interesting, I disagree with its results regarding Kagi. I like Kagi and rarely use anything else. Kagi's results are decent and I can blacklist sites like Amazon.com so they never show up in my search results.
- vitorgrs 3y agoWeird article. Basically, the author thinks that anything that is not yt-dlp is a bad search result, which is pretty insane. Like, for me at least, I already know yt-dlp exists. When I search "youtube downloader", it's exactly because I want an online-website page to download youtube videos.
- anonymoushn 3y agoThe author would probably accept any result that helps them download youtube videos. Did you find any and successfully use it to download a youtube video? Could you provide a link to the one you used?
- vitorgrs 3y agoIf I search "Download youtube video" on bing, literally the first result works fine for me (y2meta.net).
- anonymoushn 3y agoThanks, y2meta.net seems to work over here too.
- csours 3y agoWide tires by Jason of Engineering Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8 Better answer: learn the differential equations in this book: https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TERRAMECHANICS%20AND%20MOBILITY/epdf.pub_tyre-and-vehicle-dynamics-second-edition.pdf https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TERRAMECH...
- freediver 3y agoCurrent Kagi results for those without an account to compare: youtube downloader https://kagi.com/search?q=youtube+downloader&r=us&sh=_szITdyvMw_yudQFEzvtvg https://kagi.com/search?q=youtube+downloader&r=us&sh=_szITdy... ad blocker https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=us&sh=-BHzV2ZoCDpmgOupDo07XA https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=us&sh=-BHzV2ZoCDpmgOu... download Firefox https://kagi.com/search?q=Download+Firefox&r=us&sh=zkkmc_EQXRGi8tHNSG_ZWw https://kagi.com/search?q=Download+Firefox&r=us&sh=zkkmc_EQX... why do wider tires have better grip? https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+wider+tires+have+better+grip%3F&r=us&sh=RsPMTWospLnZLksx_Ejb3g https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+wider+tires+have+better+gri... why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller? https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+they+keep+making+cpu+transistors+smaller%3F&r=us&sh=mDb6sXbQFPtzNghLWV5bAQ https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+they+keep+making+cpu+transi... vancouver snow forecast winter 2023 https://kagi.com/search?q=Vancouver+snow+forecast+winter+2023&r=us&sh=fHojvLtqz__Zv7zHF6df-w https://kagi.com/search?q=Vancouver+snow+forecast+winter+202... I agree with the author that there is too much spam on the web. I think Kagi in general does a pretty good job at downranking it (number of ads/trackers is a negative ranking signal on Kagi) but we can always do better. Kagi has special search modes like "Small Web" which virtually eliminates spam. I welcome such scrutiny from the community. Please continue to keep us honest.
- asah 3y agoKagi gives me websites that require more clicking; Google just gives me reasonable answers and I don't see spam in your examples. "why do wider tires have better grip?" Wider tires provide more grip due to a larger contact patch with the road. While it's true that friction is not directly dependent on surface area, a larger contact patch allows for more even weight distribution and better traction, particularly during cornering. This can result in improved handling and stability. "why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?" Smaller transistors can do more calculations without overheating, which makes them more power efficient. It also allows for smaller die sizes, which reduce costs and can increase density, allowing more cores per chip. "vancouver snow forecast winter 2023" The forecast for the 2023/2024 season suggests that we can expect another winter marked by ample snowfall and temperatures hovering both slightly above and below the freezing mark. Be prepared ahead of time.
- jeffbee 3y agoPretty biased selection of queries. Article avoids the things that ChatGPT and the others without fresh data can't answer. Look at the trending searches on Google. They are all for fresh info that none of the others can answer. Sports scores. Google probably judges quality weighted by the questions their users actually ask, not this nerd bullshit.
- bluish29 3y agoIsn't any selection of queries would be biased. Even what you are saying is biased, you try to say that Google would be better for cases that it optimize for which is even weirder. That is like saying you want to compare highly optimized code that is using some C libraries vs some native python code.
- Dah00n 3y agoHow is a youtube downloader biased to fresh results? Seems to cover a pretty broad test.
- jeffbee 3y agoIt selects a "right answer" that suits a stale index, assuming that there can't have been a right-er answer discovered after ChatGPT's training horizon.
- shaldengeki 3y agoWhat's most shocking to me is how much malware there is in all of this. The fact that Google et al aren't constantly in trouble for directly forwarding unwitting users to malware distributors indicates to me just how far our standards have fallen for a "good" search engine. I feel like we'd be happier with search engines that adhered to "first, do no harm" principles.
- hannasanarion 3y agoI'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there. In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or command line tools. In the Adblock search, ublock Origin is #3, followed by some blogs about ad blocking ethics debates and the bullshit Google has been pulling recently. In the wider tires grip search, #3 is a physics blog that dives deep into the topic. In the transistors search, the first reddit link directly answers the question in very similar wording to the hypothetical correct answer spelled out in the rubric. 4/5 of the reddit results are on the correct topic, followed by two SuperUser questinos also on the correct topic, then some linus tech tips and toms hardware articles, also on the correct topic. No Quora questions. In the vancouver winter snow search, the first several results are from local news papers talking about the anticipated effects of el nino on snowfall, and then a couple of high-quality blogs and weather sites. Really wondering how Dan got such bad results. ------ Aside from that, the way that the author expects all the results to return the same kind of thing is just... weird? Like, that's not how search engines are supposed to work. A search that gives you 10 links to fundamentally the same thing is a bad search. Search results should cover a breadth of reasonable guesses for what you should be looking for given a query. If you search for "download firefox", and you scroll past the first 5 download links, then you're probably not actually looking for a download link and a blog post about firefox is not "irrelevant" and shouldn't be points against. This opinion is even borne out in search engine quality metrics that have been industry-standard for decades, like mean reciprocal rank and distributed cumulative gain. What matters is how far you have to scroll to get to a good result, not what proportion of the first N results are good.
- szundi 3y agoKagi is awesome for me too. I just realize using Google somewhere else because of the shit results.
- throwaway0665 3y agohave you customized your results and lowered or raised many domains?
- yuhong 3y ago[dead]
- gniv 3y agoMeta: Since the text on the page is so dense, I tried reading it in Chrome's reading mode. Which was fine until the Appendix. All the results are missing, leading to confusion.
- UberFly 3y agoI also was overwhelmed by the amount of data. I came back here to find the cliff notes :)
- motoxpro 3y agoThis makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp" Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). 99.999% of people are not programming tinkerers. Just makes me realize how subjective search results are. All of their "Great" results are my "Terrible" results.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darkwater 3y agoMalware or well, the actual viruses, in the '90s were a joke, especially because a computer was an isolated thing. Connected computers were the exception.
- acdha 3y agoIn the early 90s, yes. By the turn of the century the current industry we see today existed in basic form: malware stole credit cards, compromised PCs were used to send spam as part of botnets, etc. The only major advance was when cryptocurrencies made it much easier to launder money and the professionalism went up accordingly.
- carlosjobim 3y agoThe first result on Kagi is exactly this, just tried it a moment ago. It processed and downloaded the video extremely fast. Why would any reasonable person prefer youtube-dl?
- Dah00n 3y agoIt is the same using Google.
- motoxpro 3y agoTotally, As the sibling said, it is the same using Google. I am not sure, why anyone would want a programming package to accomplish a task that could be done in < 10 seconds. But again, I guess that's why search is so hard is because I have to parse that intent from 3 words.
- littlecranky67 3y agoKagi really shines on topics that are SEO-spammed on other search engines. I.e. when travelling to a touristic city, searching a recipe, or basically any product you want to buy. I actually got "search anxiety" searching these topics, as I know I will have to navigate a lot of SEO spam, content that is artificially blown up, and the core information purposefully hidden somewhere on the page - if any. Plus the multitude of cookie consent banners and newsletter subscription popups on each link... I've been using Kagi's FastGPT [0] now for these searches, it basically removes all the bullshit and gives verifiable sources for any answers. [0]: https://kagi.com/fastgpt https://kagi.com/fastgpt
- pbronez 3y agoYeah that’s my go-to as well. Interestingly, I often find that “Fast” mode results are as good or better than “Expert” mode for simpler tasks.
- londons_explore 3y agoI would kinda have liked side by side screenshots so I could see for myself rather than a wall of text
- jcmeyrignac 3y agoNo mention of https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com
- DeathArrow 3y agoThe thoughts about building a better search engine than Google are interesting. Unlike the author, I think that building a better search engine than Google is possible. But it's going to be rather expensive. And the only proven way to monetize it is selling ads. Which will degrade the quality of the search results fast. For potential investors, there are probably many better ways to invest money then by building a search engine. This lets us with only one viable alternative: build it in the open like Wikipedia and source donations from people and from Google competitors like Amazon or Apple.
- hamilyon2 3y agoIs this from desktop? What region? Ublock origin in the very top result for ios device is simply a bad search result page. Maybe fourth position is tolerable, after three different working ones. Maybe it should be lower, I doubt myself, if my point of view is too elitist. Yt-dlp is subject to all sorts of takedown requests in different jurisdictions.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoI'm not sure youtube-dl is a good answer unless you're a nerd. Which is a similar phenomenon to search. If you have sufficient tech skills there's a whole world of freely available software out there to complete your task. If you're not then you are at the mercy of a range of commercial offerings (some built on the free software) that range from arguably scams to outright scams.
- bambax 3y agoI'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even try to disable it. I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how it goes. It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos mentioning yt-dlp while trying to emulate "the non-expert browsing experience"... Yt-dlp is a command-line Python utility. Talk about non-expert! Most people don't know that videos are files that can be downloaded; of those who do, most don't know about the command line or Python. Yet when searching for "how to download youtube videos" the first result I get on Google is a link to a service called "savefrom.net", which appears to work well and does not seem to be a scam. This would qualify as "very good" in my book. When searching for "how to download youtube videos from the command line" the first few results are about youtube-dl, including links to github and superuser. Granted they don't mention yt-dlp, but youtube-dl is a good start.
- mgerullis 3y agoYeah, author seems to heavily underestimate his own needs vs general needs. But for what Google et al know about me the results could indeed be more precise. I have developed a habit of appending “GitHub” in the search query for when I am actually looking for source code vs just trying to find a page that just downloads me a video.
- gkbrk 3y agoWhen I do a Google search in an Incognito tab for "how to download youtube videos", the first two results I get are the following. - https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/ https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/ - https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/ https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/ I would certainly put those in the "Terrible" category like the author.
- Dah00n 3y agoI get savefrom.net in both Incognito and normal tabs, uBlock or not. I have no idea why you get crap results that are somehow different. uBlock doesn't change google results in Firefox for me at all. It seems you get crap added, not removed.
- poulpy123 3y agoI'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the kind of search
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThat's the tricky mind-reading aspect about search intent. Different people have varying expectations as to what they want to find with the same query. I'd definitely want yt-dlp in favor of some website.
- poulpy123 3y agoit's easy: just append command line to the query like you would append android app if you wanted and android app
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThat is a user POV solution, speaking from the search engine POV.
- bee_rider 3y agoBased on your handle, I suspect you have much better insight into this than the rest of us! But can the search engine mind-read by assuming Windows users don’t want to use a command-line utility?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThey can based on user tracking and profiling, but that's murky waters I personally don't want to dip into.
- 3y ago
- yashasolutions 3y agoKagi is great, it's now my daily driver for search. This is after I got tired of DDG, moved to Google (through StartPage), but the spammy result, or just irrelevant... and the fact that sometime they aren't any results even... for the most trivial search. So I switch recently to Kagi, and so far it's been smooth sailing and a real time saver.
- buro9 3y agomostly my search is now Wikipedia. I'm probably in a very small group who have the entirety of English wikipedia (without images) on my Android (via Kiwix), and I just search that. 99% of the time that's all I need. the only exceptions are super current things like weather (Windy), or travel (Navan work travel system gives me enough to just go direct to airlines, hotels, etc), and local (OSM via Organic Maps). I've almost completely degoogled (not intentionally, but driven gradually by Google becoming crappy incrementally), but didn't really find a single generic replacement as much as I found far better single purpose tools. I'm reminded of that Craigslist image showing how many startups were each competing against specific parts of Craigslist https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/craigslist.jpg https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20... , and this is what it feels like is happening to Google.. they're being beaten in specific areas, but at the same time spam and crap is diluting their core product.
- jimbobthemighty 3y agoThe Github link is my top result on Google. Clearly a mix of uBlock and Privacy Badger are more powerful than most appreciate.
- jmakov 3y agoUsing phind most of the time. Would be interesting adding it.
- ic_fly2 3y agoI have a small page that modifies my get requests to google by adding -site:… for a bunch of most annoying content farms for stuff I search often (docs)
- Dah00n 3y agoHave you tried uBlacklist?
- amadeuspagel 3y ago> Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool to download video from YouTube. Is that true? Do most people want to install a command line tool to download youtube videos?
- Dah00n 3y agoNo. They want sites like savefrom.net - which is hit number one on Google.
- anonymoushn 3y agoDid you try using savefrom.net? You can type "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with an error message saying "The download link not found." and does not help you download the video.
- gkbrk 3y agoI tried this. I went to savefrom.net. First thing it does is ask permission to send notifications. After that there is a popup asking me if I want to continue in the browser or download their app. If I click download, it downloads a file called download_helper_2.3.27.apk. Instead of downloading their app, if I paste a YouTube link, it tells me I can wait or download their APK to skip waiting. The download link downloads an older version called download_helper_2.3.19.apk. When I do the process again, instead of the older APK link it gives me a Chrome extension link. But if you look at the instructions you see that it's not a Chrome extension, but a minified userscript. And it has `@include https:// https://*` so it can basically run on any website regardless of clicking on an extension icon like regular browser extensions. If I try to ignore all the distractions and wait for the download link, I can click it and it downloads the MP4 file. But it also opens a popunder with the domain https://refpamjeql.top/ https://refpamjeql.top/. Not the best experience, and seems like a high risk of getting malware, but it does get an MP4 file at some point.
- BoostandEthanol 3y agoThere’s something incredibly entertaining to me about even this well researched article struggling to find a reason for why wider tyres have more grip. As I understand it, this is because tyres are still somewhat of a mystery, and anyone outside of a laboratory really doesn’t know shit. The best explanation I can think of is due to tyre load sensitivity. The friction coefficient of rubber decreases with normal force (E.g, a heavily loaded tyre has a lower friction coefficient), which is a pretty well accepted fact, this is one of the methods engineers will use to tune the handling of cars. This means a wider tyre has a lower force per unit area of the contact patch, which means it’ll have a higher friction coefficient. Now that sounds plausible to me, but that’s just my best guess explanation.
- InCityDreams 3y agohttps://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/ https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/ gives good tyre advice (obviously not car tyres, but info is there)
- joshuaissac 3y agoFor the ad blocker results, the author judges the search engines by how they rank the best result (uBlock Origin), but I think that search results that point to Adblock Plus or AdBlock are good enough. Sure, they do not block all ads, and take money from advertisers to allow through certain types of ads, but they still block ads in general, and 'acceptable ads' can be disabled in the settings. So I would consider these 'good results', rather than 'bad results'/'very bad results' as the author does.
- shp0ngle 3y agoI don't understand the praise of Marginalia. When I search for "Steve Jobs" on Marginalia, I got blogs about his speech in 2011 and some mailing list from 2007. When I search for my own name I get nothing. In Google it's just me. It's cool that one person built all this of course but... that's not a good search result compared to Google? Maybe I miss something, maybe I use it wrong
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWhat do you expect when you search for Steve Jobs? Also, which filter did you use?
- shp0ngle 3y agoI don't know I used any filters? I don't know what are filters sorry I expect wikipedia article on Jobs as a baseline.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoAh, I downrank Wikipedia pretty hard :P
- acheron 3y agoIf you just want the Wikipedia article, you can go straight there. Why are you searching for it?
- shp0ngle 3y agoBy the way please don't take it as if I am taking you down or something It's amazing what you did, it's just not a Google killer? or at least I don't see it
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIt's really not supposed to be either. Like it's designed to be the search engine you use when you can't find something elsewhere, so it's largely designed to show you different results than the ones you get on Google and Bing. In general a lot of the complaints seem to be "I'm not getting what I expect from Google". Well... yeah. That's the point. If someone wants the same results as Google, they should arguably use Google.
- haizhung 3y agoWhat always confuses me about the „search has gotten so bad“ mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at best, and anecdotal recollection at worst. Like, sure, I have the impression that search got worse over the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell? And, honestly, this should be a verifiable claim; you can just try the top N search terms from Google trends or whatever and see how they perform. It should be easy to make a benchmark, and yet no one (who complains about this issue) ever bothers to make one. Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria by which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5 examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any general claims. So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying that claim.
- anonymoushn 3y agoProbably for the same reason that there are so many more posts about anything that make claims than that explore evidence systematically, especially when the people making the posts stand to gain nothing by spending their time that way. I encounter claims that "protobuf is faster than json" pretty regularly but it seems like nobody has actually benchmarked this. Typical protobuf decoder benchmarks say that protobuf decodes ~5x slower than json, and I don't think it's ~5x smaller for the same document, but I'm also not dedicating my weekend to convincing other people about this.
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y agoThe problem with benchmarking that claim is there's no one true "json decoder" that everyone uses. You choose one based on your language -- JSON.stringify if you're using JS, serde_json if you're using Rust, etc. So what people are actually saying is, a typical protobuf implementation decodes faster than a typical JSON implementation for a typical serialized object -- and that's true in my experience. Tying this back into the thread topic of search engine results, I googled "protobuf json benchmark" and the first result is this Golang benchmark which seems relevant. https://shijuvar.medium.com/benchmarking-protocol-buffers-json-and-xml-in-go-57fa89b8525 https://shijuvar.medium.com/benchmarking-protocol-buffers-js... Results for specific languages like "rust protobuf json benchmark" also look nice and relevant, but I'm not gonna click on all these links to verify. In my experience programming searches tend to get much better results than other types of searches, so I think the article's claim still holds.
- torginus 3y agoI wonder if this aggregate enshittification of computers (be it search, social media, video games) etc. is actually a good thing for humans in general. I feel like today's digital spaces don't have as strong a grip on the minds of people - I think folks started rediscovering the value of genunine human interaction and hobbies that do not involve a computer screen. For example, I haven't seen the equivalent of 2000s-2010s Facebook addicts or (WoW addicts in the gaming space) to such an extent, with parasocial media, such as TikTok or Youtube or Twitch, having replaced social media, and social video gaming such as MMOs having lost a lot of popularity.
- nunez 3y ago> When I tried running the query from the paper, "cellular phone" (no quotes) and, the top result was a Google Store link to buy Google's own Pixel 7, with the rest of the top results being various Android phones sold on Amazon. Interestingly, if you add "before:2001-01-01" to the query, the paper that Brin and Page referenced shows up as the third result. That this query now ranks phones you can buy higher than information about phones makes sense, since the web is much bigger these days and cell phones are much more widely accessible than they were back then. > Although Google doesn't publicly provide the ability to see what was historically returned for queries, many people remember when straightforward queries generally returned good results. See above. Sort of. --- I wish Dan spent more time talking about Kagi. I, too, have found it terrible for searching for things to buy and some images but excellent otherwise.
- sundalia 3y agoThe intro query "youtube downloader" already showed me relevant results (some website where you paste an URL and bam download). I think there's a big tech bias in the whole post (how relevant is a mastodon poll, for real). Not saying the current landscape doesn't suck with ads everywhere and incentives to not give exactly relevant results at times, but I think google is pretty good still.
- anonymoushn 3y agoWhich web site did you use to successfully download a youtube video, and which youtube video did you downloadl?
- swayvil 3y agoWithout labor to run their circus, 99% of business would disappear overnight. Without business, spam would disappear. So if you remove the labor you remove the spam. So the best spam filter is UBI.
- urbandw311er 3y agoI had to stop reading this because I found it too depressing and it triggered a lot of anger about how big tech combined with the incentives of capitalism is basically fucking up the world.
- btbuildem 3y agoOn a side note: would it kill the author of the site to use a stylesheet?
- hasmolo 3y agoit's the same as my choice to only use lowercase letters, it is designed to make you upset that i am not following conventions. that's as far as i have been able to figure for hwy i started doing this, and by extension, why tech bois love to drop some vital freature to communication to signal being an 'insider'
- btbuildem 3y agook ee cummings Omitting readable styling doesn't read as "techboi rebellion", it reads as ineptitude and lack of respect for people whose attention you're seeking.
- hasmolo 3y agowhat about lowercase makes you feel a need to attack me as a person? is lowercase text an assualt on you in some way? i have not had someone insult me based on lack of key pressing, and the fact you can argue with me means you have no issues understanding or responding to me
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI’d love to see this a little extended. Searx and Yandex. Specifically… if I need something even slightly “gray”, Yandex is the only option anymore. Torrent search on google et al is just awful.
- airstrike 3y ago> Continuing with the theme of running simple, naive, queries, we used the free version of ChatGPT for this post, which means the queries were run through ChatGPT 3.5. why
- jbmilgrom 3y agoWas gpt4 used (with paying subscription)?
- IceMichael 3y agoOkay, so all search engines suck. Yeah, that matches my experience
- justinl33 3y ago> It's common to criticize ChatGPT for its hallucinations and, while I don't think that's unfair, as we noted in this 2015, pre-LLM post on AI, I find this general class of criticism to be overrated in that humans and traditional computer systems make the exact same mistakes. Finally some one said it. We are unnecessarily harsh on hallucinations. LLM’s don’t intentionally ‘lie’. To say this is a wrongful anthropomorphism.
- krapp 3y agoIt's also a wrongful anthropomorphism to claim that human beings "make the exact same mistakes" as LLMs, because they don't. Humans don't confabulate the way LLMs do unless they have a severe mental illness. A human doctor isn't as likely to simply make up diseases, or symptoms, or medications, whereas an LLM will do so routinely, because they don't understand anything like human anatomy, disease, chemistry or medicine, only the stochastic matching of text tokens. We're not unnecessarily harsh on hallucinations, it's absolutely necessary because of how effective LLMs are at convincing people that because they can generate language, they are capable of sentient thought, self-awareness and reason. Acting as if humans and LLMs are basically equally trustworthy, or worse, that LLMs are more trustworthy, is dangerous. If we accept this as axiomatic, shit will break and people will die.
- justinl33 3y agoI hear what you’re saying. Yes of course we should aim to make our LLM’s as trustworthy as possible. I think my argument was more philosophical than practical. I meant that directing real anger seems misguided; after all humans lie with intent/real negligence, LLM’s are random number generators. And ‘don’t believe everything everything you read on the internet’ is something that persists regardless of AI generated content; we shouldn’t expect to lower our guard any time soon. But yes, I agree strongly with how the danger arises because people DON’T treat LLM’s the same and get lulled into a false sense of trust.
- maronato 3y agoTo validate hallucinations is anthropomorphism. Tools shouldn’t make stuff up. I don’t second guess Pythons math results. If the result is wrong, that’s my fault for coding it wrong, never Pythons for hallucinating
- yetanother12345 3y agoIronically I had to use a search engine to discover what "Mwmbl" was. It's apparently a search engine. But, visiting the front page, I see something akin to a git commit log?! I'm not sure I'd have guessed that this was a SE if Brave Search did not tell me it was (even then I'm not convinced yet). https://mwmbl.org/ https://mwmbl.org/ Added: Interesting. Apparently it's allowed to edit the SERPS there. Which implies that I'm out, but (well, because) I've got a feeling which kind of Internet Entrepreneurs this factoid will appeal to
- shadytrees 3y agoFormatted with minimal CSS: https://ddanluu.com/seo-spam https://ddanluu.com/seo-spam