I’m currently prioritizing DuckDuckGo over Google and others for a better quality of search results. There ain’t much ads to mess your attention, and the results are quite good most of the time.
kagi.com for me has been more than worth it for the price with unlimited searches.
CEO of Kagi has no boundaries and doesn’t know how to take “no” for an answer. He thinks he can just browbeat other people into agreeing with him. It’s a bad look and makes me have zero trust in Kagi as a product.
https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/kagi-ceo-s-recent-controversy/8119/2
I said elsewhere just a few days ago: These fucking techbros need to realize that sometimes shutting the fuck up and letting your products speak for themselves is the better move than trying to browbeat everyone into acceptance of your view of your products. Prelovac’s insistence on being heard by someone who has no interest in a conversation with him screams entitlement and a controlling attitude. People who can’t take no for an answer generally are not good people. Not being able to accept someone else’s lack of consent and wanting to bully them into consent is a bad fucking look, period.
Cool
It feels like this is the only bad thing about kagi that keeps getting shared every time kagi is mentioned. Somehow it feels like one person and their followers trying to promote themselves as Karen’s more than legitimate accusations.
A CEO getting involved with the end users is not a bad thing imo
When I read your post I was expecting something much worse than what you linked to.
It wasn’t really all that bad. Imo, it was 1 or 2 emails too many.
Maybe I’m a little biased because I love the product so much. It’s a fantastic search engine again and all of the AI extras add value and aren’t obnoxious like everyone else’s.
I am still happily paying for kagi even if the CEO emails people that write shitty blogs about them.
Stop using Google. You can’t change them, you have to leave.
I’m using Duck Duck Go now.
I swapped to ddg about a year ago. I’ve noticed their search results are not the greatest either. There is so much spam and paid articles that make it to the top search results I often end up frustrated trying to find what I’m looking for.
The Internet really is enshittified.
To be fair I think DDG has improved marginally over the years while Google is simply shit now. I feel like spam sites are quite prevalent on Google but less so on DDG.
I am also considering switching to Bing.
Is it a viable alternative? How is it going?
I’ve been using it for years at this point, and I really prefer it to google. For most of my common/easy searches, it gets what I want pretty reliably. Occasionally I’ll have more obscure searches where I do have to switch back to Google, but honestly Google feels less and less helpful for that as time goes on. To add, DDG has bangs which are just wonderfully handy. Turning your search into a google search is as simple as adding “!g” to your query, and it’ll redirect the search. There are tons of other ones too, it’s a really nice feature that makes DDG more convenient in a lot of cases. Very much worth trying out at least
TIL bangs. Thanks!!
!w for Wikipedia is a good one
Free Google (& other) proxy: SearXNG
Further reading / Instances: Searx.space
One good instance: SearXNG.site
For basic searches (kinda a Bing reseller with disappointing results): DuckDuckGo
Vote-with-your-wallet alternative: Kagi (who may have astroturfed or may have not, but great engine at $10/mo unlimited - have tried their free trial)
Comments of mine RE: why everybody’s just reselling search ($1b+/yr to operate your own crawler): one and two
I’ve been using duck duck go for months now. It’s totally cromulent in my opinion!
It’s really good these days. Kagi is still the beat, but if you want free, DDG is the way to go.
I’ll have to give this kagi a shot I never heard of it! DDG just doesn’t ever seem give me what I want and I’ve been trying it forever. It’s like I’m always playing this cat and mouse game with the search engine and it just gives me alllllmost what I want but not quite.
I’ve been using kagi for 6 months or so.
It’s lit.
It’s not free, but I find it worthwhile. I really hope Apple includes it as a default engine in the next update.
Kagi doesn’t sell you shit, so if you use Google for that, you can’t get that replacement data:
works fine for me, and their implementation of AI (only letting it use wikipedia and maybe some select other sources) is pretty nice IMO, perfect for answering questions like “how many people live in X Y Z cities in total?”.
It struggles when you have more than one word, it will ignore context and give you results with maximum number of either word. Still better than Google at this point, though.
You can also look into Ghostery private search also. I’ve been using it some and it appears to be at least as good as DDG. YMMV
Same, but lately Bing fucked with their pricing, and now the search results are usually garbage. I have to go re-search the query in Google way too often.
DDG drops ads in results too just not as many yet
this is wrong, because today you won’t find the thing you’re looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.
And then you notice that your search term was “corrected” to something completely different. Looking at you too, Amazon.
i follow a channel on youtube called yitube that’s impossible to look up because it gets corrected to youtube. it’s maddening.
Fuuuuuuuck Amazon is even worse, if that’s possible. You used to be able to search for a product and would get that as the first result or at least on the first page. Now, they just return shit that is vaguely related but is a paid sponsor or someone manipulating their search algorithms.
but this doesn’t depict results you’re looking for in “now” unless you assume it is a product search.
edit: I see the yellow is supposed to be the same result. I am ashamed
Use Ecosia.
I tried it on mobile for a little while but they’ve got this privacy notice that takes up half the screen and their results are pretty shit too.
Presumably you can dismiss that, because I don’t see it. The results are just okay, but they’re leagues ahead of Google. Plus, you know, trees.
&udm=14 is a temporary fix for those who still feel the need to use Google’s search.
Paid search isn’t the solution, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of the CEO of Kagi search.
What I would like to see is a non-profit search.
Google wanted to organize all the world’s information to make it useful. Sounds like a great idea destroyed by a profit motive getting in the middle. Try the same idea without the profit motive and you’ll probably end up creating something people will defend endlessly, like Wikipedia.
What if your search engine asked you for a five dollar donation, once a year, the way Wikipedia does?
Search engines should be non-profit, honestly, they should be an extension of Public Libraries.
What does &udm=14 do?
It’s the equivalent of doing a Google search and then clicking on the “Web” tab for results.
Clicking on “Web” manually inserts the &udm=14 at the end of the search string. I believe udm is just classifying which type of search to run, and this is a basic “web search” with no gimmicks.
&udm=14 is fancy for nerds who think they’re special but for anyone else it’s just clicking on “Web” results.
I did not even know they separated out Web searches until I came to your comment. Super useful, thank you.
I haven’t kept up on this controversy, but is this really all there is to it? People think the service is untrustworthy because the CEO tried a bit too hard to convince a critical blogger, according to the comments possibly due to neurodivergence?
Read the blog post. I can totally see where the writer is coming from. Vlad’s email responses are pretty laughable with that added context. Not only did they tell him they weren’t interested in engaging, but the responses he sent anyways thoroughly dodged the substance of their arguments. They did their research and came to pretty reasonable conclusions, and vlad totally talked around/failed to address the points that really matter. Kinda slimy ngl.
I can also see from the highlighted discord exchanges why they weren’t interested in engaging with him further. Sure he “responds” to everything, but he doesn’t really engage with constructive criticism. Whether or not the guy is autistic isn’t really relevant to whether he can run the business competently and make sure questions are answered in an honest and transparent manner.
Do you mean to tell me that I keep scrolling I’ll eventually get to the yellow promised land?
Just one more “o”, maybe it will be there…
that’s what she said
butlerian jihad?
For the unaware, this is a scifi term which describe humans overthrowing robot overlords.
by using uBlock Origin, uBlacklist, and then something other than Google.
It’s an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.
I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the “Don’t be evil” slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore “we” cannot “fix” this. Only they could, and only if they want.
But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to “have things”, but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.
SearXNG does pretty well.
There’s also an ongoing project called Yacy which is trying to make a decentralized ever-growing index, but it’s small enough right now that the results are still quite poor even when federating with other users until you spend enough time fine-tuning it, which most people don’t want or have time to do.
That’s neat - though I would worry that it could get polluted easily, e.g. China, Russia, and/or fascists everywhere would very much like to control the conversation, so as it got a wider userbase that would be the time for it to cease functioning, whereas before that it could be allowed as something to occupy our time. So much of our daily lives are impacted by such geopolitics that we don’t even/often think of.
I hope that we (people writing FOSS) can explore the concept of voting more - e.g. how wikipedia does its edits with “trust actors”, similarly the Fediverse (& searching) could have a much wider pool of trusted community mods (or potentially a lesser category of that, lacking full post-removal capability as current ones do) where mods could vote and once something went below a certain threshold (e.g. 5x more down- than up-votes from such community curators), then a flag could go up like “this post has been marked as containing potential misinformation - are you sure that you would like to read it?” By distributing the load like that, it could help make this place MUCH more active, by lowering the barrier to moderation as it conjoins normal reading activities with a very simple button bush for most people. (and then a higher category of mods can double-check the curator mods, etc.)
On the other hand, authoritarian developers are unlikely to want to extend the Lemmy code along those lines, and rather go the opposite direction so that anytime someone says something even the slightest bit against their party line, boop the person becomes insta-banned in every single community that they have ever interacted in, even if never having commented but solely voted in them (I am not exaggerating this up - for one see the notes for the upcoming v0.19.4 release allowing this capability, and multiple recent threads discussing how this has already happened to numerous people - e.g. here is one excellent accounting of that process).
So anyway, if someone is willing to build a good system, then the people do seem willing to take it forward - e.g. see how many have already done so to Google Maps with all the reviews & pics including menus & such to share with everyone. But ofc there will be resistance to now doing that again for somewhere else, and perhaps still yet again if that one fails, and so on in perpetuity.:-(
Seems like you’re trying to address systemic problems of learned human nature at this point, which is something that can’t really be done through software alone. There needs to be a fundamental culture shift for that. Yacy is mostly good because it’s self-hosted with the option to federate to a decentralized index, and so is able to be tailored to your own needs without any external entity. However, the tailoring process means that the initial search results are absolutely atrocious compared even to Google at first, and then get much better over time. SearXNG, on the other hand, is a sort of self-hosted aggregator of search results from dozens of other search engines, rather than being a search engine in itself. It also serves as a proxy, since it is doing the searching and not you.
Complex problems will not be solved overnight, it’s true, but we can get there one step at a time!:-)
Maybe if less people sucked the dick of LLMs then it wouldn’t pervade every facet of our lives?
I need to take a screenshot the next time I see the “other users have searched” thing is almost a full page in length. It’s happened a few times recently.
This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.
I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.
I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.
The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.
Any way people could just remake ‘old Google’ that solely focuses on search and nothing else?
Part of the issue isn’t just that they added garbage, it’s that sites got better at targeting the algorithm. It’s like recipe websites that started to add stories because the algorithm prioritized that. No one was asking for it, but the algorithm was broken in unexpected ways and exploited.
So, someone could make a new search engine with a different algorithm. If it becomes successful though, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes targeted and manipulated.
Gotcha. I’m not tech-smart so that’s interesting to hear
So, someone could make a new search engine with a different algorithm. If it becomes successful though, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes targeted and manipulated.
I can think of a solution to this. Once your new search engine is starting to get targeted, you find out who is offering these SEO services. Then you hire a gang of thugs to beat the living shit out of them.
I was actually thinking of a real way to fix it, and I think it’s partially solvable. First you add noise and length preferences (short or long) to the search. Then you make those customizable by the user, so everyone can have different settings. If everyone is using different settings, you can only optimize for what is shared. Obviously the issue is of there becomes a “meta” for search settings, then it doesn’t work.
