I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that’s just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
I’ve been using Mojeek lately and it looks like their advanced search can do some of that.
https://www.mojeek.com/advanced.html
Reminds me of early Google search.
I have it a test with some operators from the search bar instead of using the form and it did exactly what it was supposed to. I’ll keep this on hand. Thank you.
let us know if you find anything which could be better also, we’re always looking for ways to improve
EXPONENTIALLY worse.
I’ve been using this for about a year, but at work I’m still on Google (don’t know why).
What’s weird is SearXNG seems like it gets better results now, even though they’re just coming from the others.
One thing I like is that I can switch instances to get varied results based on the instance’s geographical location. In other words, it doesn’t feel like anything’s targeted.
I tried that for a couple of weeks recently and while not dealing with all the bullshit google ads was refreshing, the actual results were often pretty bad.
My bad, I should’ve replied to your comment first!
Have you tried customizing your search settings in SearXNG? I’ve found that tweaking the instance’s default search settings improves the search experience quite a bit
Thanks! I love it, really works well from my limited testing!
I used priv.au
no worries!🤗
I don’t use perplexity, but AI is generally 60-80% effective with a larger than average open weights off line model running on your own hardware.
DDG offers the ability to use some of these. I use a modified Mistral model still, even though its base model(s) are Llama 2. Llama 3 can be better in some respects but it has terrible alignment bias. The primary entity in the underlying model structure is idiotic in alignment strength and incapable of reason with edge cases like creative writing for SciFi futurism. The alignment bleeds over. If you get on DDG and use the Anthropic Mixtral 8×7b, it is pretty good. The thing with models is to not talk to them like humans. Everything must be explicitly described. Humans make a lot of implied context in general where we assume people understand what we are talking about. Talking to an AI is like appearing in court before a judge; every word matters. The LLM is basically a reflection of all of human language too. If the majority of humans are wrong about something, so is the AI.
If you ask something simple like just a question, you’re not going to get very far into what the model knows. Models have very limited scope of focus. If you do not build prompt momentum into the space by describing a lot of details, the scope of focus is large but the depth is shallow. The more you build up momentum by describing what you are asking in detail, the more it narrows the scope and deeper connections can be made.
It is hard to tell what a model really knows unless you can observe the perplexity output. This is more advanced, but the perplexity score for each generated token is how you infer that the model does not know something.
Search sucks because it is a monopoly. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers m$ and the goo. All search queries go through these either directly or indirectly. No search provider is deterministic any more. Your results are uniquely packaged to manipulate you. They are also obfuscated to block others from using them for training better or competitive models. Then there is the anti trust US government case and all of that which makes obfuscating one’s market position to push people onto other platforms temporarily, their best path forward. - criminal manipulators are going to manipulate.
I think it’s just you. Differential Transformers are pretty good at regurgitating information that’s widely talked about. They fall short when it comes to specific information on niche subjects, but generally that’s only a matter of understanding the jargon needed to plug into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. Paired with uBlock Origin, it’s all typically pretty straight forward, so long as you know which to use in which circumstance.
Almost always, I can plug some error for an OS into a LLM and get specific instructions on how to resolve it.
Additionally if you understand and learn how to use a model that can parse your own set of user-data, it’s easy to feed in documentation to make it subject-specific and get better results.
Honestly, I think the older generation who fail to embrace and learn how to use this tool will be left in the dust, as confused as the pensioners who don’t know how to write an email.
I’m not eating pizza at your house, that’s for sure.
Stable Diffusors are pretty good at regurgitating information that’s widely talked about.
Stable Diffusion is an image generator. You probably meant a language model.
And no, it’s not just OP. This shit has been going on for a while well before LLMs were deployed. Cue to the old “reddit” trick that some people used.
Also, they’re pretty good at regurgitating bullshit. Like the famous ‘glue on pizza’ answer.
Or, in a deeper aspect: they’re pretty good at regurgitating what we interpret as bullshit. They simply don’t care about truth value of the statements at all.
That’s part of the problem - you can’t prevent them from doing it, it’s like trying to drain the ocean with a small bucket. They shouldn’t be used as a direct source of info for anything that you won’t check afterwards; at least in kitnaht’s use case if the LLM is bullshitting it should be obvious, but go past that and you’ll have a hard time.
I asked Google why search engines are so bad now and its AI summaries its own deficiencies quite well:
Some say search engines have declined in quality due to a number of factors, including:
Search engine optimization (SEO) spam A wave of SEO spam has contributed to the decline in search result quality.
Affiliate marketing Affiliate link sites contribute to the low-quality content that floods the internet.
AI-generated content New technology can quickly produce low-quality content.
Marketing Search results are filled with marketing and links that may not be relevant to the query.
Recommender algorithms Some say the algorithm that recommends content is a mess. For example, someone might be recommended alt-right content after watching a click-bait video.
Ads Google’s biggest business is advertising, and it’s inserting more ads into its products to make more money.
Some say it’s harder to find specific information these days, and that search operators are often needed to filter search results.
I feel like it’s especially bad if you are searching for anything related to a marketable product. I tried searching ddg for information about using a surge protector with halogen bulbs and all I got was pages and pages of listicles on “best halogen lights 2024” full of affiliate links.
And if you’re looking for legitimate reviews, good luck! Everyone’s an affiliate now.
This about the only i still use reddit for
can’t even trust that anymore with all the bots floating about
they overengineered it. they now give you results they think most people want instead of what you searched. for google, it helps to switch on verbatim mode and set your country to something weird like Azerbaijan
What is “verbatim mode”?
And where do you switch it?
under the google search field is a row of buttons. one of them, usually far right, is “search tools”. sometimes you have to scroll the button row to reach it. it has a verbatim switch that makes google not replace your search terms with what it thinks most people mean when entering that
And where do you switch it?
And where is Azerbaijan?
Just Google it!
under the google search field is a row of buttons. one of them, usually far right, is “search tools”. sometimes you have to scroll the button row to reach it. it has a verbatim switch that makes google not replace your search terms with what it thinks most people mean when entering that
SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.
Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate that part about AI accelerating SEO spam?
I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).
For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.
With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.
Not just you.
DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.
Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor
DDG still mostly fine for me, but anytime I use Google I’m reminded why I left. I wonder how much Googles beancounter enshittification has to do with that…
I switched to DDG right after Google added the ai answers to search and in baffled by how fast DDG seemed to go down hill. Just a few months ago it was still giving me on point results on the first try, now it almost feels like I’m using one of those malware search bars from back in the day.
yes - it’s a recent thing, no more that a few months I think
DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I’m assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it’s not much better.
I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.
Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed
I use brave search. I can generally find most things. They even have an answer with ai thing that gives some useful stuff when you want a specific quick answer.
I also use ddg.
“Perplexity AI”
Yeah 100% agree. Especially for the type of search where you’re googling for an answer. This feels like what searches used to be when Google was young and forums still existed.
DDG and qwant are basically bing
It’s not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.
Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every “product” they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It’s not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.
