cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47107360
Google is making its Search more centred around AI, turning it into a conversation.
Besides being a worse experience, the websites from which it sources its information are losing all traffic and recognition.
Recommend a list of alternatives:
- Kagi - Paid but better experience than Google
- Ecosia - Similar experience while supporting a good cause
- Qwant - Increasingly unique results and building a EU-first index
- DuckDuckGo - Privacy-focused search, but quality of results may vary
More options: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/search-engine/
Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
I degoogled as a Covid project. Mostly it just made me feel a little bit better… and then GenAI hit. Hopefully I’ll go my whole life without ever having used Gemini. And hopefully, if they ingested any of my pre-pandemic emails, photos, docs, etc to train with, pulling it out of cold storage will at least have cost them extra time and money.
I wouldn’t know because I mainly use DuckDuckGo and haven’t had a reason to use Google in a long time.
DuckDuckGo is just Microslop Bing with a different front-end.
Yeah, whatever bias and censorship Micro$lop’s search index has, except supposedly without the tracking. It’s a step up from Google and Bing, but not the perfect solution.
What do you recommend?
I, as of yet, haven’t really explored any alternatives, but I see a lot of others mentioned in the comments here.
Not using meta search engines and going directly to the sites with the info and searching them for instance.
An yes, good thing I kept a rolodex of websites for every useful website that I might need.
Can you search your rolodex for “caddy tls configuration” for me?
SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.
are you aware of any instances that have lasted longer than a few months?
I have it set up on my own home server. Before that, I had it set up on individual PCs. It’s super easy. I guess you mean public instances. I’ve never used one because it is so easy to set up for yourself.
Is that such an issue? If so, I could set up an open instance.
Google Search has long since diminished from it’s peak. 15 years ago we used to play a “game” by describing something as vaguely or strangely as possible and would be entertained to find it still on the first page of search results.
SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance, and LLMs are the kill shot.
Indexing and ranking were already a solved problem, and conventional algorithms accomplished it much better than LLMs do. Unfortunately, LLMs need to find uses to justify investment, so now they must be used for any task that they can be used for, even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
Like Gemini replacing Assistant. Holy shit, what a dumpster fire.
The other factor is companies, interests, paying the Google and their ilk to not include things in search results. And only include what they choose as an alternative.
Then you might have different interests gaming the search results to bury something they don’t like.
This is only amplified by LLMs
Kagi and Startpage are my go-to search engines these days.
I have a paid Kagi account and feel it is very much worth the investment.Too much AI with Kagi.
What makes it worth it to you over something like Ecosia?
Also, I’m on the fence about startpage. They were Dutch but were bought by an American advertising company.
I do not like the vibes of Startpage’s owner, System1.
If you’re using Startpage because it uses google on the back-end, Ecosia does much the same nowadays (you can toggle between that and bing).
If I wanted a conversation I wouldn’t be using a search engine to get answers.
Ugh, damn post title. I went through the whole article looking for the alternatives before realizing the title of the article says nothing about alternatives.
Didnt bother with the article but
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Is an option
It’s gone to shit since Bing jacked up the price of API calls
Sorry, it was in the post body. Will update post to make this clearer.
Big business is the enemy.
Capitalism sucks:
- Private property fetishism (erodes the commons)
- Free market fundamentalism (prioritizes the freedoms of the biggest asset holders over the rest)
- Accumulationism (incentivizes hoarding far beyond where most people would have liked to stop hoarding if the system didn’t demand it)
- Consolidationism leading into economic royalism (mergers leading to monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, a two-tiered “justice” system, rules for thee but not for me)
- Transactionalism (no sense of society or priciples, but instead a system of backscratching where things only get done for their exchange value and for no other reason)
Eu-first index, you say? I might wanna check that out!
I use Vivaldi with Startpage instead of Chrome, etc; because I hate getting the AI results that are wrong half the time because they pull off of what some idiot on Reddit said (or just hallucinate)
