Is it just me or do all search engines feel soooo bad these days?

they're pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I'm getting actual results.

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.

I'm very happy with kagi at the moment. Just crossed one year using it as my main search engine last week and don't see why I would go back.

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.

It is, and it's not just the search engines to blame.

The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn't pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.

SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.

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

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.

The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there's not much good content left to find (in % of the total)

My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?

It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.

You might want to try SearXNG

It's an Open Source search aggregator:

• Licensed under AGPL-3.0

Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.

Kagi is good. I’m very happy with it.

I'm going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or "AI" tools predating the LLMs we have now.

Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.

Kagi is pretty awesome

The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.

Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.

It's not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

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

Kagi is great. It’s a paid service but you can try 100 searches for free.

You can use the Orion browser on iOS and set Kagi as the search engine.

You only tested Google and Bing.

Qwant and DDG both use the Bing architecture.

I agree though, search engines have become noticeably worse the last 2 years.

• Dead Internet Theory

It becomes more and more true every day.

theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.

Whats funny and kind of sad, is that they know exactly what you're searching for, and don't give any fucks about showing you that, and instead will show you this cool other thing that they're getting their beak wet on thats like, eh... kinda related to what you typed in. Google didn't get dumber, they just don't have any meaningful competition which would force them to deliver high quality results, and instead of enshittified their results to the point where they're practically useless.

DDG and qwant are basically bing

There's an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you'll never see another Quora article again.

Idr the name of the extension - I'll check when I get home and follow up.

4get.ca

Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!

I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.

Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.

I've found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.

I agree with you. It has gotten worse.

I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).

Kagi is very good.

It's intentional.

Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.

A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.

PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.

Why have you not tried Kagi? If it's important to you to have good search and you don't like being spied on and having ads shoved down your throat, it's worth paying a small fee for quality instead of paying with your privacy for crap results. It's been a breath of fresh air. Searching is fun again. It also indexes Lemmy. Traditional Search has largely gone to crap, but I'm tired of everyone complaining that these mega companies offering 'free' services aren't holding their end of the deal instead of supporting the people that are doing something about it. I'm not optimistic things like qwant or searx will be sustainable or deliver high quality results, but by all means donate to them with time or money if you believe in them.

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.

Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.

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.

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

It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.

There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.

And here I thought Startpage was acting up...

So what about open source self hosted search engines? If it requires some hardware I'd gladly team up with a small group of people to finance a bigass server that just gets us our personal search engine

Any good ones out there?

Thank god I can find everything I need in wikipedia and reddit

I wanted to make a joke about my first search engine, MetaCrawler, and then found out it's still around and still does search. Going down that rabbithole, it's changed hands a ton and was only relaunched kinda recently at some point. Is it any good? Nah, probably not.

I guess I'll just have to rely on my other aggregate search engine, SavvySearch (no, no the first search engine does not in fact still exist, much to my disappointment).

“Perplexity AI”

Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed

EXPONENTIALLY worse.

Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market

Funnily enough I've found using an LLM to parce the data, then cross checking it's source as well as my own sources to be superior to previous searches.

It's annoying to change the way you just mindlessly search, but if you're upset by it just mindlessly search, end of discussion.

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.

I just use chatGPT to search now. I have a super-prompt in its memory telling it how to search and to cite sources and provide links and it is so much better than Google even though it's using AI, too.

*The future is now, old men!

I don't honestly even remember the last time I've googled something. Nowdays I'll just ask chatGPT

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.