I don't use perplexity, but AI is generally 60-80% effective with a larger than average open weights off line model running on your own hardware.

DDG offers the ability to use some of these. I use a modified Mistral model still, even though its base model(s) are Llama 2. Llama 3 can be better in some respects but it has terrible alignment bias. The primary entity in the underlying model structure is idiotic in alignment strength and incapable of reason with edge cases like creative writing for SciFi futurism. The alignment bleeds over. If you get on DDG and use the Anthropic Mixtral 8×7b, it is pretty good. The thing with models is to not talk to them like humans. Everything must be explicitly described. Humans make a lot of implied context in general where we assume people understand what we are talking about. Talking to an AI is like appearing in court before a judge; every word matters. The LLM is basically a reflection of all of human language too. If the majority of humans are wrong about something, so is the AI.

If you ask something simple like just a question, you're not going to get very far into what the model knows. Models have very limited scope of focus. If you do not build prompt momentum into the space by describing a lot of details, the scope of focus is large but the depth is shallow. The more you build up momentum by describing what you are asking in detail, the more it narrows the scope and deeper connections can be made.

It is hard to tell what a model really knows unless you can observe the perplexity output. This is more advanced, but the perplexity score for each generated token is how you infer that the model does not know something.

Search sucks because it is a monopoly. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers m$ and the goo. All search queries go through these either directly or indirectly. No search provider is deterministic any more. Your results are uniquely packaged to manipulate you. They are also obfuscated to block others from using them for training better or competitive models. Then there is the anti trust US government case and all of that which makes obfuscating one's market position to push people onto other platforms temporarily, their best path forward. - criminal manipulators are going to manipulate.

I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).

I agree with you. It has gotten worse.

4get.ca

Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!

I've found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.

I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.

Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.

It's intentional.

Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.

A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.

PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.

Kagi is very good.

Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.

“Perplexity AI”

There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.

Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts

It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.

Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed