For most use cases, web search engines are fine. But I am wondering if there are alternative ways to finding information. There is also the enshittification of google and tbh most(free) search engines just give google search result
Obviously, the straight answer is just asking other people, in person or online, in general forums or specialised communities
Libraries are good source too but for those of is that don’t have access to physical libraries, there free online public libraries(I will post the links for those that I found below)
Books in general, a lot of them have reference to outside materials.
So, I been experimenting with an AI chat bot(Le chat), partially as life coach of sorts and partially as a fine tuned web search engine. To cut to the chase, its bad. when its not just listing google top results it list tools that are long gone or just makes shit up. I was hoping it to be a fine tuned search engine, cuz with google, if what you want is not in the top 10 websites, your on your own.
So yeah, that all I can think of. Those are all the routes I can think of for finding information and probably all there is but maybe I missed some other routes.
Wikipedia. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, download a copy of Wikipedia and use an offline. Kiwix is the easiest way to do that.
Complains about the enshittification of search engines, uses an AI chat bot to search things instead. What?
Have you tried using an LLM configured to search the Internet for you? It’s amazing!
Normal search: Loads of useless results, ads, links that are hidden ads, scams, and maybe on like the 3rd page you’ll find what you’re looking for.
AI search: It makes calls out to Google and DDG (or any other search engines you want) simultaneously, checks the content on each page to verify relevancy, then returns a list of URLs that are precisely what you want with summaries of each that it just generated on the fly (meaning: They’re up to date).
You can even do advanced stuff like, “find me ten songs on YouTube related to breakups and use this other site to convert those URLs to .ogg files and put them in my downloads folder.”
Local, FOSS AI running on your own damned PC is fucking awesome. I seriously don’t understand all the hate. It’s the technology everyone’s always wanted and it gets better every day.
Agreed, a locally running LLM is an amazing choice.
is there a non- to middling-tech savvy option for a local ai?
Not at this point, no. Not unless you know how to setup/manage docker images and have a GPU with at least 16GB of VRAM.
Also, if you’re not using Linux forget it. All the AI stuff anyone would want to run is a HUGE pain in the ass to run on Windows. The folks developing these models and the tools to use them are all running Linux. Both on their servers and on their desktops and it’s obvious once you start reading the
README.mdfor most of these projects.Some will have instructions for Windows but they’ll either be absolutely enormous or they’ll hand wave away the actual complexity, “These instructions assume you know the basics of advanced rocket science and quantum mechanics.”
i aupreciate this, thank you
Chatbots can’t think or tell if anything is correct. They can generate fake data and there is literally no amount of “tuning” to fix that. For the love of the planet and your sanity, please never touch one again.
I find duck duck go works better than Google now. I also find perusing Wikipedia will often give me the information I need or point me in a better direction.
The chatbot isn’t the issue here. It’s the user treating it like a reliable source of information.
It’s a large language model - not a large knowledge model. It gets plenty of stuff right, but that’s not because it actually “knows” anything - it’s just trained on a massive pile of correct information.
People trash it for the times it gets things wrong, but it should be the other way around. It’s honestly amazing how much it gets right when you consider that’s not even what it’s built to do.
It’s like cruise control that turns out to be a surprisingly decent driver too.
I’m fully aware of the technology behind it. I trash it because it’s resource sucking, planet burning trash that serves no real purpose.
The technology is inherently flawed and fills no niche because you can never trust anything from it. Even if it’s right 9/10 times that tenth time can, and has, killed people.
It’s a chatbot. You talk to it, and it responds in natural language. That’s exactly what it’s designed to do - and it does it exceptionally well, far better than any system we’ve had before.
Faulting it for being untrustworthy just shows most people don’t actually understand this tech, even though they claim they do. Like I said before: it’s a large language model - not a large knowledge model.
Expecting factual answers from it is like expecting cruise control to steer your car. When you end up in the ditch, it’s not because cruise control is some inherently flawed technology with no purpose. It’s because you misused the system for something it was never designed to do.
I’m old enough that the first kind of “web search” that I used were manually compiled website directories. Some are still around, maybe try a few and see if you like them. Come to think of it, it’s probably still a fun way of exploring websites around a subject. Here’s the current incarnation of one of the most prominent ones:
Man, physical web directories! I wasn’t “around” for them but it’s wild to think the web was that small once. I was born in the mid 80s but didn’t even hear the word internet until around 1996.
I do remember webrings though. That was one way to discover new websites before algorithms took over. Not great for research probably but a fun way to explore.
Thank you for the link, had a conversation the other day talking about what our game plan is when search engines become even more useless. I feel we really go full circle with this one.
Here is an active codeberg repo curating german Amazon alternatives: https://codeberg.org/phranck/Amazon-Alternativen
Careful with the whole chatbot-lifecoach thing. People are developing psychosis from being that personal with those things. Don’t let it give you affirmations
LLMs are designed to agree to whatever to say (for the most part) so you could be dead ass wrong and it’ll be like, “you’re absolutely right!”
Which is bad. But you should see some of the shit chatgpt said to Stein-Erik Soelberg. That shit went way beyond just yes-anding misinformation. Dude got straight up groomed
Which is why (for certain things) after it’s provided an answer, I push back and argue a counterpoint, to see what it comes up with.
I have been really enjoying Kagi, unfortunately it’s a paid service. Kagi allows you to specify the source of your search results. For example, I can limit my search to the Fediverse or Usenet, etc.
That’s not unfortunate to be honest. It’s how they can make a search engine that is both good and doesn’t harvest user data or rely on ads.
You can try to not use a search engnie at all, but the Web relies a lot on them. If that’s really what you want, you’re limited to surfing. Go to a site, follow links, and hope you get where you need to go. Surfing is great for finding things you didn’t know you were looking for, and not so great for finding particular things you need information on. For that, either try whatever libraries you have access to or cave and use a search engine.
There are plenty of search engines that aren’t Google. Some don’t use the same search index (big list of web pages that it shows you when you search stuff). I currently use Qwant as my primary engine, and before that i used Startpage. I’m also fond of Marginalia when a big, normal engine isn’t giving me helpful results.
Or you can ask people, like you said. Forums, chatrooms, whatever Lemmy is, maybe email somebody if you think they know stuff about whatever field you’re interested in. Or you could sit down in a coffee shop with a sign that says “Tell me about electrical engineering” or whatever it is you want to know, and see how that goes.
Wikipedia is good, if you don’t mind that it has a search bar with an index consisting of its own pages. You shouldn’t trust everything you read there, but every good article (and most bad ones) cites sources, and you can follow those citations.
There’s a paid search engine that some techies use, can’t remember what it’s called.
Probably Kagi. Everyone that uses it swears by it, in my experience.
I tried it for a bit (until the free searches ran out), and it’s genuinely good. But I don’t use search engines enough to justify paying subscription.
I’m paying for it and can confirm that I swear by it.
Same here. Absolutely worth it. That and I migrated over to Proton for email too
It’s called Kagi, I am using the 3 month free trial and it’s genuinely amazing, sadly they use Google Cloud and sometimes I can’t use it with a VPN and without a VPN it’s sanctioned for me because I am in Iran
Webrings.
Kagi.
Ask tech literate humans.
Use ecosia.org They are testing their new search index! If you use it you’ll be helping nature, helping fine tune new search engine, etc
I don’t know if DMoz is still out there, but there are web directories in the world. Also, hopping into IRC and asking channel relevant questions sometimes helps.
That’s pretty much it. I don’t think there are other ways.
Sorry for the tangent, but your post reminded me of Herodotus and his book “Histories”. If anyone reading this don’t know who that is, he’s called “The Father of History” for being the first (known) historian writing down events and history.
If you read his book, it’s full of “he said that, she mentioned this, I heard about, etc”. It’s an interesting experience compared to reading modern books, because modern books reference each other and won’t bother you with where they got that info in the text itself, they’ll just give you the sources at the bottom of the page or at the end of the book. Herodotus didn’t have that, he had to rely on what people said.
This resulted in some interesting accounts. For example, he talks about enormous “ants” that were about the size of foxes, lived in the hills, and carried away piles of sand that contained gold dust, which the locals collected and turned into wealth.
There’s some theories that he was likely talking about marmots, but we’ll never know for certainty. It may have been him just misinterpreting accounts, or maybe it was just someone who pulled his leg and he believed them.
Where I’m getting at, every book/article/etc we have is actually just writing down what someone else said/wrote with new insights. It’s easy to forget that nowadays with modern books and articles, “Histories” is a reminder of that fact.
It depends on the subject. For some things I use search engines, for some things I’ll just google for books or research on the subject matter and obtain pdf’s for those, some stuff on relevant internet fora, and it used to be that youtube had some good info, though lately it’s overrun by AI slop.
Kagi if you’re OK with US based tech, Good if you want EU based tech
surf good web pages and follow the hyperlinks that are on them. Real web pages have links sections.
