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 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.
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SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance
Yeah, this much started eating into the users’ need for that one good answer.
Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
Yeah, it’s so tiring. Search for something, entire first page is useless aggregator sites, containing nothing about the actual topic other than keywords. Waste of time
When ads became more important than search results. The more searches you need to attempt, the more ads they get to auction off companies who are still dumb enough to think search ads work.
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?
Kagi. It does work and they are making anti AI a priority.
"Kagi Assistant
Access multiple AI models without being tracked. Use the power of different LLMs, all grounded by Kagi search results, while keeping your prompts and data private."
I mean it’s pro-privacy, but that’s hardly anti-AI.
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.
Ah 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?
Thanks fri… wait, you’re not who I replied to. Do you have your own rolodex of websites?
Don’t be daft. You don’t need to know more than the dozen you already know. Wikimedia, stack overflow, Reddit and whatnot. For everything else you can still use a meta search engine.
So your suggesting to stop using meta search engines unless you need meta search engines?
Exactly. My recommendation is to rely less on metasearch engines.
Isn’t every alternative search engine just bing or google in the background?
Not all, but mostly, yes: https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr/116609141864889111
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
Sorry, it was in the post body. Will update post to make this clearer.
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 being useful for search has been over for at least a decade
Genuine question: What are you using?
I’m using ddg, I used to have trouble finding stuff, and occasionally used Google in the beginning, but I’ve not had to Google something in over a year now
Ecosia
Startpage
DDG
Qwant
Brave Search
Even Yandex actually doesnt suck, if you’re cool to use it.
Anyone still using Google needs to be in a home.
I am using Qwant and Ecosia
Yay, worse search
I haven’t used Google search since 2008, when I starting using Linux and Duckduckgo was the default search engine for Firefox.
Oh, how Firefox changed…
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.
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.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’ve used both Ecosia and Kagi and find the former gives me too many irrelevant results compared to Kagi. Recently though Kagi has been giving me some funky results but it doesn’t happen very often.
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).
Too much AI with Kagi.
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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)
is that as profitable as search?
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Been a kagi subscriber for about a year now. Right when they wer implementing ai overview. It’s been a very refreshing way to internet
Eu-first index, you say? I might wanna check that out!
