Technology

ecosia pro-privacy stand is only in marketing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713269

It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.

Same here. DDG is so much better. And I love that I can do !mcwiki diamond to search the minecraft wiki for "diamonds"

I ended up switching because Google changed their image search design that was just so much more difficult to browse

There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you'd see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they're still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)

It'd be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the "top" results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).

DDG is mostly sourced from Bing already. It isn't hard to test this, just do a search on both sites in private mode and you get the same top results.

Kagi has been shockingly good, honestly.

Same here - only Reddit results.

Doesn't work but it does change the results??? https://i.ibb.co/wg4fdz2/Screenshot-20230706-080245.png

Catering to natural language search queries are fine, I used to think, as long as we could optionally use our search operators.

Now they took the operators away, and all search results are either blatant ads or SEO spams pretending not to be spams.

Fuck.

I hope you are asking that rhetorically.

But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.

I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it's really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.

If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.

Honest question from someone ignorant on this topic -- what do you recommend for a search engine other than Google?

It still returns better results for many queries than the alternatives. My ability to weigh usefulness against ideological concerns is pretty limited at times, so I'll use which search engine gives me the best results.

That seems rather risky, considering that they don't really check that they output accurate information, and OpenAI specifically recommends against using it for that due to the possibility of their GPT models outputting falsehoods as fact.

ChatGPT is not a search engine, it's a language model. It does not provide correct answers, it imitates what correct answers sound like.

The issue with LLMs that I have is that while they are great at certain tasks, they are bad at anything, let's call it factual, due to their nature.

I can for example use it to quickly draft up a email or a piece of python code, and I can immediately see whether or not the response it generated is actually what I want.

If I go ask it what the hottest day in a given country was or ask it to explain something, I have absolutely no idea whether it's bullshit or not and I will have to double check it anways.

I think the learning curve with LLMs as a tool is to be able to know when to use it and when to rely on other sources instead.

Can't reproduce on mobile from EU. May be goe-limited or a study (google tests potential features on subset of users)

So weird, check this out: https://postimg.cc/f3JYZmff