922
Fuck AI with "Fuck"
(lemmy.abnormalbeings.space)
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.
Mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/
Thanks! I’ll give it a try.
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
That's not the word I would use but yeah, it's basically a frontend for Bing. And what's especially annoying is that it serves you links to unpaywalled news that's behind an MSN paywall.
Thanks for that because I do feel like, thinking back to earlier today it wasn't giving me the video result I was looking for when searching for "Chinese tiktok make America great again"
shoves results about completely different contexts of the words, most noticeable when trying to look up game mechanics which share names with IRL phenomenon.
I'm starting to be convinced that it really is being enshittified almost daily lol
Brave uses their own index
Yes bit you can use their search without thwor browser
It's like the fucking 90s all over again but for completely different reasons.
I daily DDG but !g bang out to Google 80% of the time
Hit the back button once this month though - DDG was better than Google!!!
Has only happened twice I’ve noticed in a year!
DDG, pls use my data to be less terribly terrible (and stop rearranging results, as reported years ago)
PS: will get Kagi once I find a job cuz too lazy or something to get into SearXNG properly like I should. And Mullvad’s got Leta btw which like bundles searches for privacy
well there’s european based search engines like marginalia-search.com (but it mainly uses keywords, but has search filters at the bottom of the search result) and stract.com (which is in beta), I’d like to see if there’s more tho
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.
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.
Not the response I wanted, but probably the one I need. DDG has been disappointing, even compared to Google, but you've given me a lot of great options. Thank you.
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.
Thanks! I'll give it a try.
Yeah kagi is still good. I've been using it for a while and am very happy.
Thanks for the feedback!
Kagi is great if you have the change to spare.
Probably off topic, but now I'm imagining myself shaking a cup of change at passers by.
"Spare some change to help an old man get ad-free search results?"
How much does it cost?
10 per month, 14 in a duo deal
Thanks! A bit steep but probably worth it in the end. Do you know if you can set it as the default search in Firefox?
Not sure, I'm still trying to convince SO to get a duo.
Update: We got the duo pack. You can set it as your default search engine in Firefox on desktop and mobile. The experience is fantastic and I'm never going back. Occasionally I find myself checking the search results on Google to compare and very frequently they are filled with ads, AI generated articles or down right censored. Regarding the last one, I looked up some VPN provider's name I didn't know that I found on Lemmy and the results were identical except for one result missing from Google but on the second place in Kagi results: An article about that VPN company's private keys being compromised. That is something that I would like to know as a consumer about products I search for and it looks like Google is downright being paid to remove negative press.
Thank you so much for responding and I think you just sold me on it!