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That’s awesome. > The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024. This is unfortunately becoming increasingly untrue, as the forums where stu

That’s awesome. > The sort of thing you'd solve in 30 seconds with Google in 2024. This is unfortunately becoming increasingly untrue, as the forums where stuff like that was posted are rotting away, and Google’s advertisement optimized result ranking neglects the long tail. And to the extent it is still true, it’s because pioneers like you figured it out and shared their results!

MrGilbert 2y ago
To add to that, people (at least in my org) resort to ask "ChatGPT" for all sorts of questions. I don't share that sentiment, but oth, I never had trouble finding what I was looking for using Google. I agree though, it get's tougher with all that walled gardens. I guess I'm becoming the old, grumpy "back in my days, we used Google!" type of guy.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Back in my days, Google worked. Now it is a waste of time. Someone that wants to hold himself to the notion that Google was/is good really looks like someone having issues getting old
  - MrGilbert 2y ago
    Any alternative to Google?
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      Claude Sonnet 3.5
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Bing is pretty much the next best engine, but also has targeted ads (albiet less intrusive) and IMO less relevant results without fine tuning. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's backend without targeted ads (but still uses ads). Kagi uses google backend but without Google's ad-optimized algorithms. But that's a subscription solution. sadly your best "free" alteratives is going back to the days of smaller, specific communities, and searching through there. If the forum has a bad search, you go back to google but can then use Site:[website.com] as a filter to fine tune your results. .
    - Xywzel 2y ago
      Yes, lots of them, but they are all just a matter of not giving all your search data to same company, non I know work better in this regard, in finding good forum posts or logs to answer questions you have.
    - danielheath 2y ago
      Kagi (I'm a customer) works much the same way google did in 2010 or so.
      - red_admiral 2y ago
        I looked up Kagi and their sources include "AI" - do you know if one can turn this off?
        einsteinx2 2y ago
        Yes there’s a toggle to turn it off in settings. It’s a little AI summary box they sometimes show at the top of search results.
        darby_nine 2y ago
        Yea trivially
        danielheath 2y ago
        Yeah, I keep that off - although the one time I looked at it, the text it generated was full of footnote citations, which linked to actual search results which supported what it was saying. I still don't use it - I can't trust it not to misrepresent what its citations say, and if I have to check the cited pages I might as well just use regular search.
      - 998244353 2y ago
        As a customer of Kagi, it's better than the current Google but it's still not the Google of 2010. Google sponsoring irrelevant results is one thing, but the bigger issue remains: in 2024, creating a trove of worthless "articles" and optimizing the crap out of search result performance is a viable business model. Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance. No doubt the same is true for all alternative search engines.
        darby_nine 2y ago
        > Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance It seems to be responsive to which sites you want ranked higher/lower. For instance I have wikipedia pinned which resolves a longstanding issue google has had where seo is prioritized over relevancy.
    - hooby 2y ago
      weirdly enough, when asking for documentation/problem solving types of questions - chatGPT actually is a good alternative. you still have to double-check since you can't trust it... but you shouldn't trust random google results either, so that's not a big change. it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...
    - red_admiral 2y ago
      Bing is ok for results, but tries to push too much crap on you - do you want to link to your microsoft account? We've got rewards for you, are you sure you don't want to link to your microsoft account? Have you tried our copilot AI? Do you want to switch to Edge as your default browser? Did you know you can link Edge to your microsoft account? Here's some news from a scummy right-wing tabloid paper on the home page that you might be interested in. I think in the default windows setup, your bing searches are "integrated" with your user account in some way. Look, I don't mind the top 2 search results being ads (if you make them visually distinct from the rest), but I don't want all the other crap. Bing's engine through duckduckgo is better. The ads don't get in your way once you've learned to start reading at the third entry on the page.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      Kagi is solid
  - layer8 2y ago
    Google still works for me, but you have to generously apply “tricks” like verbatim mode, double quotes, time ranges, domain filters, exclude terms (minus sign), include search terms that bias it towards forum results, and so on.
  - dgb23 2y ago
    Google works very well as an alternative to knowing the exact link to something you already know exists and know how it's named. But it has become very bad at _discovering_ valuable information.
dgb23 2y ago
I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this. I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past: - There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before. - The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller. - Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.) It's extremely hard to find good content, even though _i know_ it is out there. Sometimes it's even hard to find sites I visited before, but I only remembered vague keywords. And this is true especially for content that is of educational nature or interesting punditry. You know, the stuff that comes directly from people who have expertise and have earned a grounded opinion. This is why I'm hoarding links to all sorts of interesting things. It's not an efficient way to do it and I don't know if there's a more general solution here. Very unfortunate.
- fouronnes3 2y ago
  I agree with your observations. The time is just right for a Google search killer. There might be some AI in it, but the fundamental goal should be a massive increase of the SNR of search results.
  - LiveTheDream 2y ago
    For me, this has been perplexity.ai. Give it a query, it expands that into multiple queries (possibly chained depending on results) and synthesizes the results into an answer with citations.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Kagi's done that for me. Most is prefiltered and setting some domains to never appear again sorts out remaining spam. No generative AI, would recommend. The SNR is amazing compared to google. On the other hand like the sibling comment mentions, perplexity is great at digging out obscure stuff sometimes. Provide enough details and use the pro type search and you may be surprised.
- binary132 2y ago
  Maybe it would be neat if there was a place online people could hoard, archive, and share their link troves. I know I’d be interested in that. A lot of this type of content becomes unmaintained and rots badly.

MrGilbert 2y ago

To add to that, people (at least in my org) resort to ask "ChatGPT" for all sorts of questions. I don't share that sentiment, but oth, I never had trouble finding what I was looking for using Google. I agree though, it get's tougher with all that walled gardens. I guess I'm becoming the old, grumpy "back in my days, we used Google!" type of guy.

meiraleal 2y ago
Back in my days, Google worked. Now it is a waste of time. Someone that wants to hold himself to the notion that Google was/is good really looks like someone having issues getting old
- MrGilbert 2y ago
  Any alternative to Google?
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    Claude Sonnet 3.5
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Bing is pretty much the next best engine, but also has targeted ads (albiet less intrusive) and IMO less relevant results without fine tuning. DuckDuckGo uses Bing's backend without targeted ads (but still uses ads). Kagi uses google backend but without Google's ad-optimized algorithms. But that's a subscription solution. sadly your best "free" alteratives is going back to the days of smaller, specific communities, and searching through there. If the forum has a bad search, you go back to google but can then use Site:[website.com] as a filter to fine tune your results. .
  - Xywzel 2y ago
    Yes, lots of them, but they are all just a matter of not giving all your search data to same company, non I know work better in this regard, in finding good forum posts or logs to answer questions you have.
  - danielheath 2y ago
    Kagi (I'm a customer) works much the same way google did in 2010 or so.
    - red_admiral 2y ago
      I looked up Kagi and their sources include "AI" - do you know if one can turn this off?
      - einsteinx2 2y ago
        Yes there’s a toggle to turn it off in settings. It’s a little AI summary box they sometimes show at the top of search results.
      - darby_nine 2y ago
        Yea trivially
      - danielheath 2y ago
        Yeah, I keep that off - although the one time I looked at it, the text it generated was full of footnote citations, which linked to actual search results which supported what it was saying. I still don't use it - I can't trust it not to misrepresent what its citations say, and if I have to check the cited pages I might as well just use regular search.
    - 998244353 2y ago
      As a customer of Kagi, it's better than the current Google but it's still not the Google of 2010. Google sponsoring irrelevant results is one thing, but the bigger issue remains: in 2024, creating a trove of worthless "articles" and optimizing the crap out of search result performance is a viable business model. Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance. No doubt the same is true for all alternative search engines.
      - darby_nine 2y ago
        > Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance It seems to be responsive to which sites you want ranked higher/lower. For instance I have wikipedia pinned which resolves a longstanding issue google has had where seo is prioritized over relevancy.
  - hooby 2y ago
    weirdly enough, when asking for documentation/problem solving types of questions - chatGPT actually is a good alternative. you still have to double-check since you can't trust it... but you shouldn't trust random google results either, so that's not a big change. it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    Bing is ok for results, but tries to push too much crap on you - do you want to link to your microsoft account? We've got rewards for you, are you sure you don't want to link to your microsoft account? Have you tried our copilot AI? Do you want to switch to Edge as your default browser? Did you know you can link Edge to your microsoft account? Here's some news from a scummy right-wing tabloid paper on the home page that you might be interested in. I think in the default windows setup, your bing searches are "integrated" with your user account in some way. Look, I don't mind the top 2 search results being ads (if you make them visually distinct from the rest), but I don't want all the other crap. Bing's engine through duckduckgo is better. The ads don't get in your way once you've learned to start reading at the third entry on the page.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    Kagi is solid
- layer8 2y ago
  Google still works for me, but you have to generously apply “tricks” like verbatim mode, double quotes, time ranges, domain filters, exclude terms (minus sign), include search terms that bias it towards forum results, and so on.
- dgb23 2y ago
  Google works very well as an alternative to knowing the exact link to something you already know exists and know how it's named. But it has become very bad at _discovering_ valuable information.

dgb23 2y ago

I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this. I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past: - There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before. - The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller. - Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.) It's extremely hard to find good content, even though _i know_ it is out there. Sometimes it's even hard to find sites I visited before, but I only remembered vague keywords. And this is true especially for content that is of educational nature or interesting punditry. You know, the stuff that comes directly from people who have expertise and have earned a grounded opinion. This is why I'm hoarding links to all sorts of interesting things. It's not an efficient way to do it and I don't know if there's a more general solution here. Very unfortunate.

fouronnes3 2y ago
I agree with your observations. The time is just right for a Google search killer. There might be some AI in it, but the fundamental goal should be a massive increase of the SNR of search results.
- LiveTheDream 2y ago
  For me, this has been perplexity.ai. Give it a query, it expands that into multiple queries (possibly chained depending on results) and synthesizes the results into an answer with citations.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Kagi's done that for me. Most is prefiltered and setting some domains to never appear again sorts out remaining spam. No generative AI, would recommend. The SNR is amazing compared to google. On the other hand like the sibling comment mentions, perplexity is great at digging out obscure stuff sometimes. Provide enough details and use the pro type search and you may be surprised.
binary132 2y ago
Maybe it would be neat if there was a place online people could hoard, archive, and share their link troves. I know I’d be interested in that. A lot of this type of content becomes unmaintained and rots badly.