"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
A magical word.
Source: https://mastodon.online/@gardiner_bryant/114309539375105773
I'm more surprised that people still use Google search at all after the years of enshittification — first the SEO crap, then "personalized search" bubbles, and finally the "AI" idiocy. Even shouting questions down a wishing well seems more productive at this point.
Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc all suffer the same problems. I’d love to hear other alternatives (and I don’t mean alternatives like searx that is little more than lipstick on a pig and proxies search results from said engines).
DuckDuckGo is just Bing wearing a duck hat
And yet it works better than Bing somehow.
It actually doesn't.
There's nothing perfect. I use Kagi which uses many other indexes including Google, but with a focus on "small web" results and no ads or mandatory AI nonsense.
...but it costs money.
Well worth it in my opinion. My results have been better than Google for me, and I've been using it for like a year now. Highly recommend.
I learned about kagi when I got here on Lemmy and I've been using it since. Sucks that it costs money but they're not making money elsewhere, that i know of, so it can't just be a loss leader and free.
How is DuckDuckGo shitty? It suits me fine.
Here are my gripes:
Ah yes, I have to admit the constant AI shilling does make me want to look elsewhere. I also didn't know that it's basically askjeeves but for B‽ng, lol
Google supports searching "specific phrases", -excluding_words, +ensuring_keywords, and whatever * is. I havent found any other indexers that allow me to make use of searches with that level of detail, which is often the only way you can find specific things these days.
Duckduckgo does plenty with its advanced search operators, which are pretty similar to Google's. * is a wildcard, meaning if you were to search c*y, results word return something including a sequence beginning with 'c' and ending with 'y', but having any sequence of characters in between them.
Pretty sure Yandex at least allows for all of those search operators. As far as meta search engines, basically anything that uses google's results like Startpage will also likely support them.
Left out shadow banning raw footages on YT while front page promoting the same footage with heavy edits and narration that lied about what happened ('see no resisting'). -Leading to riots, increased racism, civil unrest, anti-cop sentiment, innocent lives, jobs, and property lost, etc. All to distract us from a racist genocide they support.
Yandex is the only search I'm aware of that passes tests (using verifiable facts) on the subject. -Grok the only AI.
Is Kagi still good? If not, what engine should I use?
So, this is not a proper answer to your question. (The closest I'd give there, personally, is DDG, Qwant or Ecosia, all with their own caveats). But, I've been evangelizing a bit in favour of helping Mwmbl develop further.
Basically, it is an attempt to do for search engines what Wikipedia did for encyclopedic knowledge. It's still basically just a dream with an interface that's experimental and a search index still being built, currently seemingly bottlenecked by available (monetary) resources.
Oh, and a matrix community, where the actual community work seems to be happening.
But even though it's an infant with not that much more than a dream at this moment - I think their project shows promise, in audacity to challenge search engine giants alone, if nothing else. Currently, I am using it as my go to "first search" search engine, helping with curating results if possible (although, truth be told, in the past weeks most searches did not give anything useful at all). I also have the index building web crawling script running on the same server as my Fediverse instances - but there is also a firefox extension for more casual volunteer crawling without a cli script.
I can't sell this as a "proper" search engine, but still, am happy in evangelising it to anyone interested in supporting what tries to become a proper, open search engine not just on FOSS software, but FOSS principles.
DDG is just Bing under the hood.
Indeed, which is why I couldn't recommend it without caveats and I at least don't know of a search engine I could recommend without caveats at all.
I've had really good success with https://www.qwant.com/ and with https://www.startpage.com/
Isn't StartPage just Google's results, but less personalized?
I believe it uses a combo of bing and google with anonymizers, yes. I've just started poking around there due to waterfox mobile using it by default.
Yeah kagi is still good. I've been using it for a while and am very happy.
just tested, works well. fuck
Sounds like it’d be a worthwhile browser extension to insert that into every search.
Sudo apt install thefuck
No wait
Huh, these are not the Laurel & Hardy films I used to watch ...
Yeah, but that, uh, also alters her search results.
-fuck
Seems to still work and not affect the search. In my limited testing that is. If this keeps working someone just needs to create a extension the auto adds -fuck to all searches.
But what if I don't want to exclude "fuck?" That would filter out half of my code comments
-anal should achieve the same thing, only result that would get filtered from any normal search would be "[someone] is being anal about it"
I think you underestimate the true depth of my comments
Maybe -"fuck ass fuck shit dick cunt bitch"
It is hopefully unlikely for you to use that exact phrase lol
Good luck searching for porn with that exclusion.
Google doesn't show AI for porn searches.
Bing continues to be the best porn search engine.
Google respects AI's privacy more than people's? ~/s~
There's extensions that allow for regex rule based redirects, you could easily use them for this purpose.
This is gonna be fun
Fuck it works pretty well too
Or you could just...stop using Google?
Fuckin A
let's hope this stays our little secret
Well, that certainly illustrates the diversity of the word.
You and your fucking rope