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.
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.
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/
equivalent of spraying graffiti to keep the rents down.
Does
That work?
Only as long as the graffiti is bad/sloppy.
Well, I can't draw for shit so...
Sure. Rich people don't want to live anywhere where poor people also live.
When I become a millionaire, I would live next door to rich people but in (apparently) dirty and ugly clothes. I would put three colours on the roof of my mansion and grow a hideous front yard.
Sounds good in theory, but most of the places rich people live have very strict code enforcement for how your house/yard can look. Then again, you can just take a note from Bezos with his illegal hedge fence and consider the fine part of your property tax.
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
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.
Seems like more work than installing ublock origin and using duck duck go.
duck duck go has been giving me AI summaries / suggestions
You can turn it off but if your cookies are cleared you have to do it again.
Works. DON’T TELL ANYONE OR ELSE THEYLL FIX IT.
OMG it really does!!!
Fucking cheat code!
This is gonna be fun
Fuck it works pretty well too
Or you could just...stop using Google?
I suppose we can empirically test that. Time to fuck around and find out i guess
Fuck!
Ok so I will do that going forward...
let's hope this stays our little secret
Fuck me. That actually works.
"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.