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/
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
Yay, worse search
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.
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.
even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
Like Gemini replacing Assistant. Holy shit, what a dumpster fire.
Absolutely nailed it.
Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
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.
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
Agreed, and for the moment the “AI experience” is better than what Google Search was a couple of years ago… but I have faith, they’ll sell this one out too, after all: users are the product.
That is the point. Search is free. You will be paying for ai soon. If you don’t then you’ll get the low-quality results. This is nothing more than greed. They were making lots of money with search, but like everything in the modern world, businesses only exist now to extinguish what was free or a good value and sell the same thing back at an extreme markup.
Furniture was made of wood. Now it’s mostly disposable composite junk. Wood, now commands a high premium.
Household goods like toasters, irons, lamps, sofas were all at one point made to be durable. Many people would buy these things and maybe replace them every 15-20 years. Now the same stuff lasts five if you’re lucky.
paying for ai soon. If you don’t then you’ll get the low-quality results.
That is already the reality.
I frequently point out that “Organic” food is basically what we got as normal food in 1972.
SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.
Yup, easy peasy. And if you really want AI deep research, how about plugging it into your own local LLM with Vane
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 searching with -AI not going to work?
They’re getting rid of search entirely and making everything AI summaries. It’s literally just AI responses and nothing else.
I’ve had times where it refuses to search with the -ai flag.
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.
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.
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!
