[HN Gopher] Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and C...
___________________________________________________________________
Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
Author : 882542F3884314B
Score : 788 points
Date : 2023-12-31 02:32 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| cratermoon wrote:
| "Going back to the debate between folks like Xe, who believe that
| straightforward search queries are inundated with crap, and our
| thought leader, who believes that "the rending of garments about
| how even google search is terrible now is pretty overblown", it
| appears that Xe is correct."
|
| Also, the article tested Mwmbl as well, not mentioned in the
| title here.
| coldcode wrote:
| Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now
| it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing
| again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still
| avoiding all the crap.
| packetlost wrote:
| Search probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very
| different.
| jader201 wrote:
| Yeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality
| content, that search doesn't (or can't) do a good job of
| surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal
| left, but it's such a small fraction that it's much more
| difficult to filter it out.
|
| Having said that, I'm usually still able to find what I'm
| looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the
| keywords to use to find it. But it's much harder nowadays for
| sure.
| amlib wrote:
| I wonder how much influence google had in lowering the
| content quality over the years? After all, most SEO spam
| was a direct response to all the ludicrous requirements
| they've forced the whole web into, which eventually only
| SEO spam were willing to commit to.
|
| I also wonder if google just stopped existing, would the
| web heal over time?
| genewitch wrote:
| i have a radio that can "hear" down to -130dBm, i've proven
| this empirically. Cellular signals work at -12dB or more
| below the noise floor, wspr works even lower than that.
| Lightning is broadband noise, and yet i can still use
| digital stuff when there's lightning storms.
|
| I don't buy the signal to noise argument. For example,
| whenever i get on youtube and get fed some content, i can
| immediately tell if it's had AI involved anywhere, and
| thumbs it down. I won't recommend it, i've called people
| out for linking such tripe to me (or others).
|
| Hear me out - google got bad about 11 years ago when the
| dorking stopped being effective, right around the time of
| the spotlight search results and the sponsored junk taking
| the top results. Around this time, various agencies (news,
| etc) started gaming the SEO to respond to any remotely
| related search with whatever the news was currently. Google
| chose not to "fix" this, because we're not the customer.
| DDG was better for a few years for real results, too, but
| that has gone downhill as well.
|
| The current zeitgeist uses stuff like tiktok and facebook
| for "web searches" - "food trucks near Austin, TX" or so.
| No one really uses web search like people on this site do,
| and google couldn't care less if we don't like the search
| results.
| Libcat99 wrote:
| Is it actually more complex to provide good results, or is it
| just more profitable not to?
|
| I have a hard time believing an organization like Google
| doesn't have the resources to provide a search engine that's
| just as usable as what they had 6 years ago (around the time I
| feel like the decay really set in). Seems a lot more likely
| that it's just more profitable to serve up garbage sponsored
| content.
| jmye wrote:
| Definitely more profitable not to. Especially as Google is an
| ad company, not a search company.
|
| I'd rather see a world with numerous paid/subscription search
| engines, that are motivated to do nothing but return search
| results well. I expect you would see some of the SEO crap
| getting solved.
| w-ll wrote:
| i cant remember where i read this, but something about how
| google ranks site that have google ads higher than sites
| that dont. makese sense, its evil, but makes sense, thats
| why we get all this scrapped spam. is there any more info
| on this?
| mixdup wrote:
| this is like focusing on one single problem as being the
| cause of the decline of the United States. It's actually
| a lot of things combining and there's not going to be one
| fix
| w-ll wrote:
| wtf decline of the United States are you talking aboout
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Intentionally ranking sites with Google ads higher would
| be a huge antitrust liability, so no way they're doing
| that.
|
| On the other hand, they can achieve virtually the same
| outcome while keeping plausible deniability by just not
| doing anything that would downrank sites with ads (of
| which a significant chunk is likely to be Google's).
|
| Spam sites often include ads.
| w-ll wrote:
| i dont think they public disclose that fact
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It doesn't need to be public to become an antitrust
| liability. Internal written material can still come up
| during discovery, potentially even in unrelated cases.
|
| Therefore the safest option is to never openly discuss it
| or intentionally do it and instead use other means to
| achieve the objective (don't intentionally rank spam
| higher, just defund/cancel any projects that would make
| it rank lower).
| zihotki wrote:
| Google, or Alphabet, is not a search emgine company. It's an
| ads company and that's what they are optimizing for.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The problem is that even if providers of the service are 100%
| trying to provide a great service, everyone on the web will
| always be min-maxing to appear on top.
|
| So it's inevitably going to become crap.
| jmclnx wrote:
| To me it is only due to the ads, google and bing return nothing
| but ads on the first page. Plus for me to have the joy of
| seeing these ads, I need to got through a CAPTHA that I need to
| try multiple times.
|
| But all in all, a very good article
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The golden era of search results is very much over. Welcome to
| the pot-metal era.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I reckon these days search is pretty difficult and everyone knows
| how to game it. I recommend using a search engine that lets you
| effectively change which sites are shown. You can do this with
| Kagi, or with Google's Programmable Search Engines - I'm sure
| there are more too.
|
| In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't sometimes
| correct, but because I don't want videos polluting the regular
| results - it just takes too long to get info from videos.
|
| An ability to upvote results for a given query seems tantalizing
| but I bet it would be gamed too. The DIY approach seems to be the
| only tractable one.
|
| In my case I only only results from domains I believe are
| correct. The whitelist approach does have downsides. Usually I'll
| vet new potential domains through social means like Reddit and
| this site, rather than identifying them through the search
| results. I believe there's an inherent tradeoff between
| discoverability and the gameability of the results.
|
| Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008 Google
| Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude less
| content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable your
| place is on your business and thus no SEO.
|
| I also personally disagree that yt-dlp is the "correct" result
| for the average user when they search Youtube Download. I highly
| doubt the average user would know or care to use the command
| line. A website front end would be more actionable for them.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the non commercial site search engines because
| of the gaming aspect. If you're not generating revenue from the
| clicks the game mostly goes away.
|
| I'm not saying people aren't entitled to make some money, but
| it clearly incentivizes user hostile behavior.
|
| Maybe make it an option because legitimate sites like
| journalism also use this model.
| Renaud wrote:
| Subscription model like Kagi seems to work pretty well
| against gaming the results.
|
| Their only remaining incentive is to be good enough that
| people keep paying for the service.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It works not because they're somehow smarter or have more
| resources than Google at detecting spam/SEO, it's because
| unlike Google (and other ad-supported search engines), they
| make money from result quality and have an interest in
| blocking spam.
|
| Google on the other hand makes money off ads (whether on
| the search results page itself or on the spam sites), so
| spam sites are at best considered neutral and at worst
| considered beneficial (since they can embed Google
| ads/analytics, and make the ads on the search results page
| look relatively good compared to the spam).
|
| Black-hat SEO has been around since the early days of
| search engines and they managed to keep it at bay just
| fine. What changed isn't that there was some sudden
| breakthrough in malicious SEO, it's that it was more
| profitable to keep the spammers around than to fight them,
| and with the entire tech industry settling on
| advertising/"engagement" as its business model, the risk of
| competition was nil because competitors with the same
| business model would end up making the same decision.
|
| The same reason is behind the neutering of advanced search
| features. These have nothing to do with the supposed war on
| spam/SEO, so why were they removed? Oh yeah because you'd
| spend less time on the search results page and are less
| likely to click on an ad/sponsored result, so it's against
| Google's interests and was removed too.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Kagi works because there is no incentive for SEO
| manipulators to target it since their market share is so
| small.
|
| Super tinfoil hat to believe Google wants to send users
| to blog spam websites (e.g. beneficial to Google).
|
| Anytime there is money to be made, there is an
| effectively infinite amount of people trying to game the
| system.
| lanstin wrote:
| Google is a complex system so "want" can just include we
| are making money from the blog spam and while we don't
| like it other things take priority over fighting it as
| effectively as we could.
| ZeePelli wrote:
| It's never tinfoil-hat to assume that a corporation is,
| at very least, making sure not to fight too hard against
| any activity that brings it more revenue.
| whakim wrote:
| But the author tried Kagi and the results don't appear to
| be noticeably different, filled with scammy adspam just
| like Google and Bing. Kagi's results seem to mostly
| aggregate existing search engines [1], so this isn't much
| of a surprise. Perhaps a subscription-based service that
| operates an index at Google's scale might help, but no such
| thing exists to my knowledge.
|
| [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| greggh wrote:
| Right, but Kagi has built in tools to make it easy to fix
| that. Blocking those spammy sites from ever showing up
| again. Moving certain sites up the ranking, and so on.
| These features mean that over time my Kagi results have
| become nearly perfect for myself.
| whakim wrote:
| This is addressed in the article. As Hacker News readers
| and expert computer users, we have a bag of tricks that
| we can reach into in order to make our searches perform
| better. With a similar level of effort and an expert
| user's intuition you can get good results out of any
| search engine. Not so for the average user. In fact,
| again paraphrasing the article, Google's original claim
| to fame was that you _didn 't_ have to spend a lot of
| time doing exact keyword matching and fancy tricks in
| order to get good results.
| ysavir wrote:
| > In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't
| sometimes correct, but because I don't want videos polluting
| the regular results - it just takes too long to get info from
| videos.
|
| Funnily enough, lately I've been prioritizing YT videos more
| when searching. So many sites now are just regurgitated SEO
| farms with minimal quality, and easy to see why: it's minimal
| effort to produce and cheap to host. But making a video takes
| time and effort, so has a much higher barrier to use as a click
| farm.
|
| More than once when traditional search failed me, I went to YT
| and found some video from 2009 clearly and eloquently
| explaining what I'm looking for in detail, and without any
| distractions because the person authoring the video clearly
| didn't specialize in the media format or show interest in
| experimenting.
|
| I've found it to also be a better source when looking a product
| to buy. Want to know which fan to get? Turns out there's a
| channel from a dedicated guy who keeps finding ways to test
| different fans and their utility and with multiple videos
| demonstrating his approach and findings. The mainstream
| channels aren't all that useful, but there's a ton of "old web"
| style videos (some even recent) passionately providing details
| for almost anything you'd think to search. And they're a gold
| mine.
| robrenaud wrote:
| Would a browser feature that skipped to the relevant parts of
| the video based on closed captioning and understanding search
| intent be useful? It seems like this would be a good way for
| Google to fight to stay relevant in UX vs having the chat
| bots just quickly spitting out a readable answer. Hunting
| through ad laden webpages is annoying. Seeking to the
| relevant section of the video is a solvable problem,
| especially for videos above some viewership threshold.
| nulld3v wrote:
| I've definitely seen Google do this already:
| https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-suggested-clip-
| sea...
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Google seems to be taking much more advantage of
| YouTube's transcription feature lately. The first
| addition was the (ok, gimmicky) animation on the
| Subscribe button when someone says the dreaded like.
| Hopefully a sign of things to come.
|
| Overall AI summaries are very welcome for a certain
| subset of YouTube which is sadly dominated by sponsored,
| clickbait, and ad-driven content.
| dcow wrote:
| Didn't Google try this already? It seems useful to me, at
| least. IMO the next frontier of search is not better
| hypertext, it's podcasts, audio, and video.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Seeking to the relevant section of the video is a
| solvable problem
|
| ...and it has already _been_ solved, though partially:
| SponsorBlock allows people to add a "Highlight" section to
| a video, which denotes the part of the video which the user
| most likely wanted to see (sans the "what's up guys", "like
| and subscribe", etc.)
|
| Of course, it's not perfect: it relies upon humans doing
| the work, though some may see that as a positive over
| something more computerized.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Do you have some tips for finding concise videos that answer
| the question you are asking? I am finding more and more
| obvious LLM bullshit in results, so I am willing to try some
| other tactics. But I am not ready to spend the minutes
| watching videos to see if it is actually relevant or a waste
| of time, always artificially long to increase ad revenue.
| crznp wrote:
| For me, it really depends on the type of video. For fixing
| cars, I'm usually looking for something specific enough
| that there isn't a lot of chaff. It was probably recorded
| and edited on a phone just to splice the clips together.
| Probably the default thumbnail that youtube extracted from
| the video.
|
| For product videos, if Project Farm did it, look there
| first. Otherwise, I look for someone has a lot of videos
| for competing products with basically the same format, not
| over 10 minutes.
|
| Tech videos are the hardest, I often still prefer text.
| Maybe look for links to the docs in the description? I
| still get duds though.
| williamcotton wrote:
| I don't know much about fixing cars, but yeah, YouTube is
| a treasure trove for tacit knowledge.
| ysavir wrote:
| Wish I did, but here you're at the algorithm's mercy,
| unfortunately. One possibility is subbing/accruing watch
| time on channels that you find provide you the right value,
| so that the algorithm might recommend similar channels on
| other subject matters.
| imiric wrote:
| > But making a video takes time and effort, so has a much
| higher barrier to use as a click farm.
|
| > The mainstream channels aren't all that useful, but there's
| a ton of "old web" style videos (some even recent)
| passionately providing details for almost anything you'd
| think to search. And they're a gold mine.
|
| This won't be the case for long. YT is already starting to be
| polluted with spam and AI generated content, which will get
| more and more common. The same thing that happened to the web
| in text form, will happen to videos.
|
| I think the only solutions are using allowlists for specific
| domains, and ironically enough more AI to filter specific
| results. Or just straight up LLMs instead of web search,
| assuming they're not trained on spam data themselves.
| danieldk wrote:
| Yeah. I was recently looking for videos comparing two
| smartphones and among top ranked videos there were videos
| that just show the phones side by side and the video
| consists of showing specs side by side and videos that just
| have LLM-generated text, added to the video with TTS.
| ysavir wrote:
| One critical difference is the date attached to youtube
| videos. It's easy to verify that a video was made before
| this tech was available, but you can't do that with
| websites, or search engine result pages.
|
| It does limit utility for more modern needs, unfortunately.
| lrem wrote:
| Note that the problem of filtering bad data out of learning
| material isn't inherently easier than filtering same out of
| search results.
| necovek wrote:
| That's curious, I generally hate video due to inability to
| glance over content, and the few attempts I made to actually
| find useful information I searched for resulted in... spammy
| extra low effort video content that did not answer my
| questions.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Depends on what you're looking for. A blog post about how
| to play Search and Destroy by The Stooges is not as useful
| as a video of James Williamson himself showing you the
| riffs!
| teeray wrote:
| > it just takes too long to get info from videos.
|
| I can't wait until video transcripts get fed into LLMs just to
| eliminate the whole "This video is sponsored by something-
| completely-unrelated, more about them later. What's up Youtube,
| remember to like, share, subscribe... _5 entire minutes pass on
| similar drivel_ ... _the actual thing you want, but stretched
| out to an agonizing length_ "
| execat wrote:
| You need SponsorBlock.
|
| Usually people leave a "highlight" marker which tells you
| where you're supposed to jump to. Along with the regular
| "This video was brought to you by <insert>VPN".
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008
| Google Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude
| less content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable
| your place is on your business and thus no SEO.
|
| That was a decade after Google was created and people certainly
| understood SEO and Google was constantly updating its algorithm
| to punish people who were trying to game the algorithm.
|
| The wikipedia page on "link farming" for example references it
| happening as early as 1999 and targeting SEO on inktomi:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
|
| I remember some internal presentations at Amazon around ~2004
| about how boosting Google SEO on Amazon web pages increased
| traffic and revenue (and Amazon was honestly a bit behind-the-
| curve due to a kind of NIH syndrome).
| bee_rider wrote:
| At the time it seemed like Google was winning, though. SEO
| seems to have gotten really good, or maybe Google just gave
| up.
| stevage wrote:
| I have a hard time believing it's so difficult for a search
| engine to distinguish between a credible, respected website
| that has been around a while with some generated garbage that
| exists to be a search result. We humans can tell them apart, so
| in principle, computers can too.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Yes, this should be table stakes for a classifier - a company
| with the resource of Google can definitely solve that problem
| if they weren't themselves in the business of spam
| (advertising) and benefited from spam sites (as they often
| include Google ads/analytics).
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Google is quite quick in plugging holes in AdSense but
| AdWords.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I guess this brings up the question of how good are humans at
| doing this across a wide number of domains on average?
|
| The other question I have is how long do these garbage
| results stay up for a particular query on average?
| dandrew5 wrote:
| Google's PSE is neat but there isn't a good way to manage
| switching between them. They could easily add a little dropdown
| to let you select which one to use as part of the public link
| UI they provide for each one individually. Giggle[1] gives me
| this ability and I run it locally (alongside Kagi) for more
| specific things to target domain lists I've been building over
| the years.
|
| 1. https://github.com/dan-lovelace/giggle
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I got different results for Google on "ad block".
|
| And changing the query to "ad blocker" like Google suggested
| raised ublock origin way up in the results
| jeffreyw128 wrote:
| The issue with traditional search engines is that keyword-first
| algorithms are extremely gameable.
|
| Try https://search.metaphor.systems - it's fully neural
| embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what
| the actual content of a webpage is.
|
| So in the mentioned example of searching for Youtube downloaders,
| with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders
| (https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20b...)
|
| Full disclosure - I work there :p
| charcircuit wrote:
| >it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only
| an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is.
|
| What prevents websites from gaming their embedding? Switching
| to a similarity search doesn't prevent the results from being
| gamed.
| marcinzm wrote:
| How is that different from keywords? Embeddings aren't magic,
| they're just page content. Content is trivial to game since
| it's controlled by the website owner.
|
| edit: The results are also from my quick QA not that great.
| Searching for "what is the best mouse to buy" leads to links to
| buy random mice versus review summaries or online discussions
| on mice. One of the recommended queries of "Here is a great fun
| concert in San Francisco" leads to some really bizarre results
| in non-English languages that have nothing to do with either SF
| or concerts.
|
| edit2: Also, Google has been using LLMs part of their search
| since at least 2018 so definitely not just keyword matching
| there.
| jeffreyw128 wrote:
| Yup, definitely still gameable but if the model learns what
| high quality content is like and what high quality webpages
| there are (which it does), then the only way to game would be
| to be great :)
|
| For your search - I would recommend turning autoprompt off
| and searching something like "Here is a great summary of the
| best computer mice to use:".
|
| Our embeddings model is trained on how links are talked about
| on the Internet, if that helps with querying. So you have to
| query like how someone would refer to a link before sharing
| it
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Our embeddings model is trained on how links are talked
| about on the Internet, if that helps with querying. So you
| have to query like how someone would refer to a link before
| sharing it
|
| So it's not high quality web pages but web pages that
| people talk about a lot which is expected since no one has
| an oracle that says what high quality is. The embeddings
| are merely a proxy and generalization for "how links are
| talked about on the Internet." That can be gamed at scale
| just like every other signal any popular search engine has
| been based off of.
| jeffreyw128 wrote:
| That's true. Although should be much harder
| optshun wrote:
| This is excellent!
|
| Definitely excited to see how it holds up to daily use.
|
| So far it gave me exactly what I wanted at the top for all of
| my test queries that were well formed.
|
| As for asking "ignorant" questions both your service and the
| goog failed where phind gave me an actionable starting point
| (after a prodding follow up question:
| https://www.phind.com/search?cache=hmul4znpn7y4ei6qa64fosmc )
|
| "max-height like css property for top and left"
|
| Unsure if this sort of thing is even a goal of your project,
| but you won over a new user.
|
| Wish you and your team all the best.
| croes wrote:
| Just wait until the content farms adapt
| standardUser wrote:
| How do you deal with dynamically/contextually generated
| content? And how about paywalls and login-required content?
| jeffreyw128 wrote:
| Do our best at getting the right content.
|
| For paywalls/login - we play pretty straight, always obey
| robots.txt, etc.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| So far so good. I'll try using this first from now on, and see
| how it does. Good luck!
| ec109685 wrote:
| https://getthatvideo.com/ Is the first result for downloading
| YouTube videos. Seems super sus (especially since the site
| doesn't load).
|
| Auto-prompted to: "Here's a helpful website for downloading
| YouTube videos:"
|
| Also, this result is horrible:
|
| "What does it mean if someone is not covered in nfl football?"
| anonymoushn wrote:
| The first result vtubego.com is a 144MB downloader app. The
| page contains "Pricing Plans Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
| placerat verterem luptatum phaedrum vis, impetus mandamus id
| vix fabulas vim." above its 3 paid plans (there is no free
| plan).
|
| I haven't installed the downloader app, so I'm not sure if it
| lets me download youtube videos for free.
|
| The second result "ytder.com" is a redirect to
| "https://poperblocker.com/edge/" which seems to be a browser
| extension for Microsoft Edge that protects the user from the
| Holy See. I'm not using Edge and I'm trying to download a
| Youtube video.
|
| The third result download-video.net says that it can download
| videos from a list of sites. Youtube is not in the list, but
| let's try anyway. If you put
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box
| and click "download" you get "500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token
| '<', ""
|
| At this point I gave up, but please let me know if any of the
| results work.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| While I've made huge improvements to the algo recently, I do
| think Marginalia Search got a bit lucky with the sample queries,
| as it is still IMO far more hit and miss than many alternatives,
| but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is.
|
| Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that
| it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.
| bombcar wrote:
| I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single
| developer can do so well ;)
|
| I do think that search has gotten much worse but my ability to
| know the magic words like "ublock origin" instead of "Adblock"
| and "yt-dlp" instead of "download YouTube" and phrase my search
| has gotten better.
|
| We've all been doing prompt engineering against the Internet-
| wide LLM that is the spam houses.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single
| developer can do so well ;)
|
| As much as I enjoy the notion of somehow being a 10,000X
| developer, it's probably mostly that modern search is a
| filtering problem, and MS does filtering fairly well.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > [...] but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search
| quality is.
|
| Would you be able to share some of your personal highlights
| regarding this?
|
| I've partially kept up-to-date with the DIY, non-corporate
| search space (YaCY and friends). I'd love to understand a bit
| more behind the engineering decisions made when creating a
| search engine; it seems like a very hard problem to solve.
|
| P.S. Marginalia is a very impressive piece of work, overall --
| I've heard nothing but positive remarks from users on here.
| I've been meaning to try it for a while, but time constraints
| have... well, constrained, thus far.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Honestly I understand it well enough that I see it is
| surprisingly hard, but not enough to have good solutions...
| golol wrote:
| I just tested Mariginalia and it was completely unable to
| lead me to a Wikipedia or imdb page when searching for
| "driver ryan gosling" and variations. It just listed lots of
| random articles.
| wisemang wrote:
| That.. is kind of the point of this particular search
| engine.
|
| > This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on
| non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you
| perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you
| probably already knew existed.
| golol wrote:
| Well that makes sense, but I wanted to push against the
| result that the OP seems to take away from their test,
| which was that Marginalia seems to work well for the
| common user.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There's also a known bug with Wikipedia in particular, I
| do index it but the results are never ranked particularly
| high. I haven't fixed it because I don't want Wikipedia
| to be the #1 result for every search. Feels like most
| people are aware of Wikipedia and don't need help finding
| it.
| lbalazscs wrote:
| I often do a Google search, and then go directly to the
| Wikipedia result. My reasoning is that during the initial
| search, I don't know if there's a Wikipedia page about
| that topic, and I might need a fallback option.
| treetalker wrote:
| Thanks for your work!
|
| I have a suggestion for the "About" section at the top of
| Marginalia's landing page. I think it would read better
| like this:
|
| > This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses
| on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites
| you perhaps weren't aware of [instead] of the sort of
| sites you probably already knew existed.
|
| Showing one thing "in favor of" another seems
| contradictory in this case.
| ta988 wrote:
| Just my feedback after trying to finally get to what it is
| exactly.
|
| I tried to find marginalia on DDG, not on the first page.
| Google has it after some garbage. If I go to marginalia.nu I
| get a SSL error. search.marginalia.nu works
|
| If i search on marginalia for duckduckgo there first link is
| somewhat relevant but is about the app, all the other links are
| related to DDG but of curious relevance.
|
| If I search for ublacklist mentioned above, I do not see
| anything directly relevant.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Hmm, what's your browser? I renewed the cert today... Only
| thing I can think of is that it might not like a wildcard
| cert for the bare marginalia.nu domain.
| ta988 wrote:
| Firefox android
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Hmm, can't reproduce it myself, but firefox has a nasty
| habit of quietly "repairing" these types of
| misconfigurations by redirecting from one subdomain to
| another. I've added marginalia.nu as a SAN, should
| hopefully work now.
| jldugger wrote:
| Safari doesn't like https://marginalia.nu. Probably because
| *.marginalia.nu is not valid for the base domain. Add it as
| a Subject Alt Name
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Try now?
| jldugger wrote:
| Looks like you've fixed your bug.
| happytiger wrote:
| I feel like you could reboot yahoo directory and have more
| utility that most searches.
| kristofferR wrote:
| The !bang directory for Kagi is honestly pretty good, found
| some cool sites there: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
| louthy wrote:
| Did you mean to say Kagi or Bing?
|
| Anyway, here's Kagi's bangs:
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html
| kristofferR wrote:
| > Note that Kagi supports all DuckDuckGo-style bangs.
|
| You can also make your own bangs.
|
| That said, my point was that the bang directory has a bunch
| of the most useful sites in each category.
| flenserboy wrote:
| The return of something like Yahoo Directory would be most
| welcome. There is great utility in having more than one
| approach into a data space. That we have been stuck with
| essentially one way in for over a decade means that there is a
| great deal out there which would be great to access but which
| has been rendered invisible.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| https://ooh.directory/
| flenserboy wrote:
| Nice. Thanks!
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| this is awesome! thanks
| infamia wrote:
| Categorization sounds like a good job for AI. Yahoo execs, are
| you paying attention? :)
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I use serpapi for my hot RAG and the results are fine.
|
| Brave search API is obscenely overpriced. I hope someone is
| working on Search because Google has become a singularly garbage
| company. Propping up DEI is sinful enough but just failing to
| compete is lame. /shrug
| toomim wrote:
| Do search engines censor political topics these days? If you
| search "truthsocial" on ddg, the truthsocial.com website is the
| first hit. But if you search "trump truthsocial", it doesn't give
| you trump's truthsocial page, and doesn't even give you
| truthsocial.com within the first few pages of search results.
|
| Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at
| bing? It looks like google results are similar.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I doubt you're seeing censorship. If you search for
| "truthsocial trump" on ddg, you'll see his profile, for better
| or worse.
| toomim wrote:
| Oh, interesting. So it depends on the order of the terms:
|
| - "truthsocial trump" works
|
| - "trump truthsocial" doesn't work
| Springtime wrote:
| DuckDuckGo (and by extension perhaps Bing, assuming identical
| upstream results) has some terrible results when trying to
| filter by all kinds of domains.
|
| There's a power tools review/news site that returns zero hits
| for the actual domain when searching its name (which is the
| same as its .com address). While for some domains even
| searching using the `site:` parameter will give far fewer
| results when paired with a query than just searching the domain
| name + query sans the TLD (the router firmware site openwrt.org
| is among such).
|
| It's a mess and reporting it hasn't any difference ime in the
| past 3 years. So I'd be reluctant to say irrelevant results are
| due to censorship unless there was more evidence.
| senderista wrote:
| I have concluded that Google definitely censors search results
| relating to the Ukraine war, after vainly searching for
| articles about documented Ukrainian war crimes (reported in
| mainstream Western media like NYT/WaPo).
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| I'm not seeing this. I Googled "war crimes by ukrainian
| soldiers" and the top link was an Amnesty International
| Article, "Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger
| civilians".
|
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-
| ukrai...
|
| I use Google as little as possible because I don't like
| surveillance advertising but fair is fair.
| senderista wrote:
| You're right: I just checked and there are several hits for
| events that happened over a year ago that I couldn't find
| at all with Google back then. Shame on me for not checking
| before I posted. I have no idea what happened but
| apparently it's now fixed.
| johnfn wrote:
| I noticed that the author uses ChatGPT3.5 rather than 4, which is
| a rather large difference. I don't have the knowledge to rerank
| all questions the author asked, but I will say that a test of
| ChatGPT 4 leads me directly to youtube-dl, which is better than
| every other search engine listed.
| taberiand wrote:
| That was the first thing I checked reading the article.
| Although the argument would be 3.5 is free - any comparison of
| systems against ChatGPT that isn't using ChatGPT 4 can be
| dismissed almost out of hand; there is not much point talking
| about ChatGPT if it's not using ChatGPT 4 and making proper use
| of its capabilities.
|
| That is not to say that there aren't valid criticisms of and
| shortcomings in ChatGPT 4 - just that it's not useful to say
| ChatGPT when it's referring to 3.5
| bombcar wrote:
| He gives the full queries - do you have chat 4.0 that you ran
| run it against?
| Dah00n wrote:
| >any comparison of systems against ChatGPT that isn't using
| ChatGPT 4 can be dismissed almost out of hand
|
| Does everyone or even most use ChatGPT 4? The most used
| version is -of course- by far the most relevant.
| vitaflo wrote:
| This is silly, most people aren't going to pay for ChatGPT,
| just like they won't pay for Google or DDG. So using 3.5 in
| this case is perfectly acceptable when we're talking about
| free software.
| taberiand wrote:
| Kagi isn't free, that's on the list
| huytersd wrote:
| I've come to recognize that any article that uses 3.5 has an
| agenda.
| airstrike wrote:
| I also suspect as much, but obviously can't know for sure.
| IMHO it's intellectually lazy if not dishonest to benchmark
| against 3.5 and not make that fact clearly known upfront
|
| A better benchmark would have had two entries for ChatGPT,
| showing both 3.5 and 4 results
| xigoi wrote:
| The agenda of not wanting to pay for something just to test
| it out when there is a free version?
| latexr wrote:
| > I will say that a test of ChatGPT 4 leads me directly to
| youtube-dl
|
| And yet to other people it starts rambling about how that's
| wrong and you shouldn't do it and doesn't give a usable answer.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38822040
|
| I boggles the mind the extent to which people salivate over a
| system that cannot decide between a correct straight answer,
| something wrong but plausible, something wrong and impossible,
| or outright refusing to answer.
| johnfn wrote:
| That's GPT 3.5. It sounds like you have a bit of an axe to
| grind with ChatGPT, but if you're going to do so, do try to
| grind it on the correct version.
| latexr wrote:
| The comment says it's v4. Since there's no information on
| the page either way (funny, considering the original
| complaint), I took them at their word. If you don't believe
| them, that's up to you.
|
| For what it's worth, I do have access to v4 and it did give
| me an answer right now. But since I also know even v4 can
| give you wildly different answers to the same question even
| if you ask them one right after another, that doesn't prove
| it either way.
| Osiris wrote:
| I have recently started using kagi after seeing a recommendation
| here.
|
| From what I understand, it aggregates results from multiple
| sources rather than having their own indexer.
|
| The results aren't really any better, but the lack of ads and
| videos in the results makes for a cleaner experience.
|
| I also haven't yet taken advantage of the extra features to block
| certain websites from results.
|
| Personally, I pay the $5 mostly in an attempt to support another
| competitor in the space.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Kagi is awesome, so much better experience than Google!
|
| Start using bangs, lenses and customized results ASAP, that
| makes a big difference.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I actually find myself using bangs way more since I switched
| to Kagi from DDG. I think it's the AI bangs like !chat and
| !expert that got me in the habit of using bangs besides !g
| (which I never actually use anymore).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Pretty sure the reason Kagi is better isn't because they use
| multiple sources, it's just because they can use the presence
| of ads as a negative ranking signal, something that none of the
| major public search engines will ever do as it goes against
| their own business model.
| elcook4000 wrote:
| I have found appending site:edu remarkably improves google
| results.
|
| For both the tire question and with respect to a youtube
| dowloader, the first results were on the nose with the addition
| of site:edu on Google.
|
| Why this is needed and whether a noncommercial, information rich
| web portal should exist are questions for another thread.
| fantasybroker wrote:
| I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In _my_
| handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia.
|
| #1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows
| "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon
| Ramsay and shows relevant results.
|
| #2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian
| Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows
| Wikipedia, Al Jazeera, etc up-to-date summaries about the war.
|
| #3 "Dildo". Top post on Marginalia is "Students for Concealed
| Carry Embraces UT Dildos | Students for Concealed Carry". Top
| posts on Kagi are Wikipedia (read) and Amazon (buy).
|
| > How is Marginalia, a search engine built by a single person, so
| good?
|
| Because it's not good?
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| I had a similar experience when testing Kagi after reading
| this. The top result for the "wider car tires" query on Kagi
| was a link to Physics StackExchange with some marginally
| informative answers [0], which would be easy to expand on in
| future searches. The second result was Reddit. Then a couple of
| incorrect/irrelevant pages but they don't look like scams
|
| [0]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29903/why-do-
| peo...
|
| Edit: I did just realize that I have StackExchange customized
| to be up-ranked. So that probably helps. But yeah, I guess this
| is why I usually get good results, which is something that
| generally still fails with Google for me.
| hattmall wrote:
| I don't disagree with your assessment in full, but I don't
| exactly consider wikipedia and Amazon good results. Like they
| are big enough that if that's the result I want I can go to
| them directly. So like they aren't bad or wrong, but I can see
| the case for excluding them. Should something like Webster's
| dictionary be a top result?
| fantasybroker wrote:
| I think for single word queries like that Wikipedia covers
| more ground than a dictionary. Personal preference, perhaps.
| If I need a definition I search for "define dildo" (Kagi
| shows Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc dictionary entries).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Marginalia supports the old Google syntax, e.g.
| "define:dildo"
| fantasybroker wrote:
| Thanks! If you are that "single person" who built
| Marginalia... hope you are not taking my criticism
| personally. I am more annoyed by this blog post that uses
| a few handpicked queries to present generalized long
| winded conclusions that are completely disproven when
| using a different set of queries.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, its me, and to be fair I made a comment to a
| similar effect myself. Assessing search result quality is
| very hard, and this is definitely a pretty flattering
| selection of queries.
| fantasybroker wrote:
| On the plus side - in addition to Marginalia's own
| success, you can take partial credit for how good Kagi
| search results are (IIRC Marginalia's index is one of the
| sources for Kagi search results). So... thank you for
| that!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Marginalia Search isn't trying to be a universal knowledge
| engine, it's just a website finder.
|
| That's bad if you're looking for a simple answer or basic
| fact, and good if you're looking for a few hours of reading.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| It seems to me that the name "marginalia" is not just a random
| set of syllables. It sounds like it's doing what it says on the
| tin, which is gooder than not doing what it says on the tin.
| (distinct from whether what it says on the tin is something you
| want)
| aworks wrote:
| The appendix describing the individual search results is both
| entertaining and scary e.g.
|
| "Two of the top three hits are how to install the extension and
| the rest of the top hits are how to remove this badware. Many of
| the removal links are themselves scams that install other
| badware."
| fgblanch wrote:
| I would love to see Perplexity.ai in the benchmark. It has
| completely replaced Google/DDG for information questions for me.
| I still use DDG when I want to do a navigational query (e.g. find
| the URL for a blog i partially recall the name).
| rr808 wrote:
| Me too. I only heard about it this morning and it looks kinda
| perfect so far.
| larve wrote:
| While kagi was the product that most brought me joy in 2022,
| perplexity.ai has been the one for 2023, even though i only
| recently started using it. It's just been a joy to be able to
| iteratively discuss most of my searches.
|
| EDIT: here's a search for tire (I don't know anything about
| tire, so maybe there's much better links out there, but this is
| pretty much what I was expecting. Not an ad or SEO in sight.)
| https://www.perplexity.ai/search/tire-3iuI9T6BQUSvu2tAhgsRmA...
| freediver wrote:
| I am wondering if you can use AI chat exclusively for your
| search needs? If not, what does the perfect integration looks
| like?
| lhl wrote:
| I've been really enjoying Perplexity as well. It's a _much_
| better Internet /search focused experience than ChatGPT, Bing,
| or Bard. For anyone interested, until the new year (~20 more
| hours?) there's a code for 2mo free Pro:
| https://twitter.com/perplexity_ai/status/1738255102191022359
| (more file uploads, choose your model including GPT4)
| infamia wrote:
| Try uBlacklist, it's like uBlock, but for search results.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
|
| You can sync the settings and your personal blocklist to either
| Dropbox or Google Drive. It also has the ability to subscribe to
| blocklists. Mind, you need to manually turn on search engines and
| subscribe to lists. The uBlacklist subscriptions setting doesn't
| have any built-in feeds yet though. :(
|
| edit: THere are some feeds on the uBlacklist site though.
| https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions
|
| edit edit: Found an even better list of feeds.
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-fi...
| tentacleuno wrote:
| uBlacklist is absolutely excellent: I've been using it for a
| few years now, with absolutely no problems.
|
| Quick tip: turn on the 'Skip the "Block this site" dialog', and
| disable 'Hide the "Block this site" links' settings -- they
| make it much quicker to block spam websites (of which there are
| many on regular search engines).
| skygazer wrote:
| Just today I was looking for an extension just to block Quora
| from search results. (Talk about a useless site that seems to
| uselessly outrank Wikipedia on google lately -- what on earth
| is Google up to?) I'm thankful I saw your and your parent's
| post.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| When Quora was new I followed some topics, got to read
| interesting answers to interesting questions, but then some
| kind of enshittification happened. I've blocked it in Kagi
| now.
| ic_fly2 wrote:
| This is amazing, I was maintaining my own custom solution that
| did this.
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is a feature of Kagi already. You can promote or blacklist
| domains in your search results.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Kagi is just the best, it feels like Google did before a
| decade+ of enshittification and ad tech.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Did anyone notice that Kagi showed as barely better than
| Google in the article?
| _benj wrote:
| Yeah, for the the results of kagi are so much better than
| anything else, that it makes me wonder how objective can
| one be measuring search results.
|
| I use google in a clients computer and it's just
| horrible.
|
| But it could also be a factor of the customizations I've
| made for my kagi. Ban quick a few paywalls sites, always
| put Wikipedia articles on top, prefer blogs than
| stackoverflow stuff...
| l8_to_catch_up wrote:
| I just tried it (free account), and it felt underwhelming,
| not many search results, or particularly interesting ones,
| for the image and video stuff I searched.
|
| There was little to no spam, though, but not much to look
| at either. Maybe it might be useful when searching for
| stuff that usually has high amount of confusing spam, but
| otherwise not really useful for me...
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| Kagi is still very weak for searching for videos and
| images. For those, I still use Google.
|
| Kagi really shines when you are doing a standard search,
| though, which is what most people do most of the time.
| KomoD wrote:
| But I can't do regexes, wildcards or anything like that as
| far as I can see, like I can in uBlacklist
|
| And it seems like they also have a 1000 domain limit?
| brobinson wrote:
| Does this exist for DDG?
| infamia wrote:
| Yes, it works for most search engines.
| brobinson wrote:
| The addon you linked (on the Firefox version) only requests
| permissions on google.* sites so I don't think it will work
| for DDG. Is there a separate extension, or am I
| misunderstanding something?
| gzer0 wrote:
| Appreciate you sharing this; I've been searching for something
| similar for quite some time.
| KomoD wrote:
| I use uBlacklist with my own blacklists and Google has been
| pretty usable, it's great.
| thsksbd wrote:
| Honestly, if you have to search something remotely technical, try
| HN's search function with comments enabled.
|
| If the topic has ever come up the discussion and links are likely
| to be more relevant and better than your avg. wiki article
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| More incorrect usage of "hallucinated" for simply made-up or
| inaccurate results.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Blah blah blah. Could you lay this article out any worse? What
| are the queries you used to test? I want to try them too. Buried
| in here somewhere.
|
| Using an adblocker is not expert anything.
|
| That you've defined your own opinion for what some of the results
| _should_ be blows the thing up.
|
| Searching youtube downloader, many people would be _fine_ with
| some of the ad covered but totally functional sites that pop up
| on Google. I use some of them every day for quick conversion
| tasks. I don 't want any youtube-dl result. The average users
| don't either.
|
| Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No
| one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download a
| program.
|
| Why do wider tires have better grip? .. what, sites like
| roadandtrack, prioritytire, reddit, some physics and
| stackexchange sites aren't good enough? they are.
|
| The Vancouver snow report one also. Lots of major news sites.
| Some weathernetwork and almanacs. All totally acceptable results
| for a sort of variable question.
|
| blah blah this is just a hate on for Google and a HN/nerd view of
| the world that the average user is nowhere near living in.
| SnazzyJeff wrote:
| > Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No
| one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download
| a program.
|
| They are if the first six results are SEO bullshit. Which is
| the de-facto state of affairs for Google today: advertising
| traipsing around as search.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| heh, they're not. They're all variations of mozilla download
| pages and site posts.
| navjack27 wrote:
| Completely agree. I personally thought searching "Vancouver
| snow report" to be extremely strange. Just search zip code or
| city name and weather. Two words. That's all you need to get
| results. What the hell is snow report? Do you even think you
| can trust weather reports 10+ days out?
|
| Whole article is rambling and silly and assuming.
| shaldengeki wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, I think your comment would be a whole
| lot more convincing without its first and last lines, which had
| the effect of making you sound (at least to me) like you're
| shallowly dismissing the article.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Which web site did you use to successfully download a youtube
| video, and which youtube video did you download?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Can someone tell me why Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to
| prioritizing local results? I'll search the most inane things,
| like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses
| containing maybe one word in common.
|
| It's most frustrating with phone numbers. I picked up the habit
| of searching the random numbers that called me, to try and find
| out if they were possibly important. I used to get a bunch of
| spam sites that clearly existed to profit off me making those
| searches.
|
| Both Google and DDG have removed those spam sites, even though
| they were useful at times. Google will tell me the number is in
| some random PDF that contains a few of the digits, then no other
| results. DDG will say the top result is my local police
| department, something that freaked me out the first few times.
| teeray wrote:
| > I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and
| get results for local businesses
|
| Query: "I'm coming out of my cage..."
|
| Result (Ad): "You'll be doing just fine with these amazing
| year-end closeout prices at Al's Discount Car Barn. Gotta come
| down--you'll want it all!"
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Ads would make sense, but there's no way my local city
| council is paying Bing and they are the most frequently
| listed result.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It was only a list, how did it end up like this?
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Maybe it was an attempt to make better their results for local
| results?
|
| When searching for results from my country in DDG (picking the
| country in the drop-down below the search box) still returned
| results from the USA or other countries. Even when searching
| stuff in the local language. Maybe they tried to fix that
| because it really sucked, so much I never used it again for
| searching into local websites.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| This is the one area it still ignores my location. I live in
| a town named after a UK city, there's several bigger towns in
| the US with the same name. I just searched "McDonalds _city
| name_. " I got results for the locations at least half the US
| away from me, as well as Uber Eats GB.
| skygazer wrote:
| If you're going to search for phone numbers you'll want to
| ensure you enable verbatim searching under tools on Google, and
| put the number in quotes, perhaps in "xxx-xxx-xxxx" OR "(xxx)
| xxx-xxxx" forms. Many of the sites you mention are fake sites
| with fake contacts just for ad serving, and I've read in some
| few cases the scammers seeded the spoofed numbers they appear
| to call from on to the sites they control to see who googles
| their phone numbers.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Reverse spoof the numbers of FTC investigators and Google
| employees?
| berkut wrote:
| Yeah, I've noticed this as well with DDG recently: even with
| the localised checkbox disabled it still prioritises them,
| which often is very frustrating as the results are then almost
| totally useless.
|
| However, more generally, I've personally found that DDG (and
| maybe Bing's then?) localised results are just _really_ bad,
| and have been for the multiple years I 've been using DDG and
| it's had this feature: I'm in New Zealand, and enabling
| localised / region-based search still often provides results to
| pages with TLDs like "co.uk", ".ca" and ".pl" (these latter are
| really common for content-generated spam in my experience),
| which I just can't understand...
|
| Unfortunately, I have found that Google's results are usually a
| lot better in terms of being "location-aware" than DDG, at
| least when that's what you want...
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| I habe the same experience from Germany. There's the slider
| but it's not doing mich.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| That's a bit surprising that you're seeing spam sites with
| .ca, those are illegal here and all .ca domains must be
| registered by someone in Canada.
|
| You can report them: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canada-
| anti-spam-legislatio...
| alexforster wrote:
| DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember
| looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago,
| and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their
| foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping"
| equivalent of search engines.
| behnamoh wrote:
| hope kagi takes ddg place in terms of adoption. never really
| liked ddg even though i always care about privacy.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I really don't get that sentiment. Currently Kagi is just
| as dependent on Google as DuckDuckGo is on Bing. That might
| only be temporary of course and Kagi does seem to be
| working on a search engine of their own.
|
| Rather than wanting Kagi to take the place of DuckDuckGo,
| it would would be better if Kagi could take users from
| Google, and then when ready, drop Google as a search
| provider.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Kagi mixes google, bing, some non-profit small-web SE,
| and their own index.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't think they use Bing, but yes, Google, Marginalia,
| Yandex, Brave and others. I still fail to see how that's
| different to DuckDuckGo, who also run their own crawler.
| It's really weird that people are almost hating on
| DuckDuckGo for how they run their search engine, while
| applauding Kagi, for doing the same, but with a different
| business model.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I also assume that Kagi uses some shady residential IPs
| proxies and similar tricks to scrap Google while DDG has
| access to the Bing API.
| mrweasel wrote:
| You can buy access to the Google Search API, which is
| what I assume Kagi does. Building your product on being
| able to circumvent some Google restrictions seems like a
| bad business move, if you can buy the same service for a
| reasonable price.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Where can I buy it?
| bigtunacan wrote:
| https://developers.google.com/custom-search
|
| It's been available for ages. We used it to power the
| company internal search for a large enterprise I worked
| at 17 or 18 years ago.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes this isn't an API to make a generic search engine.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Only if they changed that (which they might have as part
| of their cost-optimization). They said they mixed bing
| and google results back then.
| feanaro wrote:
| Kagi should hire the Marginalia author.
| freediver wrote:
| We already include Marginalia results in Kagi [1]
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| Kiro wrote:
| DDG used to be the HN darling and you would get downvoted
| for saying anything negative or even insinuating that
| they are relying on Bing. Now the spot has been overtaken
| by Kagi but it looks like it suffers from the same
| problems. The counterargument that they have their own
| index as well is the same that was used for DDG, when the
| reality was that it was only used for widgets and other
| fluff. Let's see how it plays out for Kagi.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I suspect it's a failure to distinguish mobile searches (where
| people are legitimately looking for a business) from desktop
| searches.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| you can use true person search for numbers
| callalex wrote:
| I'm confused, you are searching for, specifically, a local
| phone number and you are upset that the machine interprets that
| as you looking for a local result? That's what most people
| expect from a local number search.
|
| Perhaps the incorrect thing is not your internet search
| results, but actually your phone carrier for lying to you and
| telling you that a caller has a local number?
| tedunangst wrote:
| If I search for a ten digit number, it is not helpful to
| return a local business that shares the last four digits.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The number is local, and occasionally I've searched and found
| the number was a local clinic or business that had legitimate
| reason to call me but not leave a message. In those
| scenarios, close to all ten of the numbers are found on the
| page.
|
| The top result being my local police department because it
| shares the same area code and has maybe one other number in
| common is clearly a bad result. It does this even if the
| phone carrier isn't lying to me and the caller does have a
| local number, like the increasingly common political spam
| calls.
| csnover wrote:
| Man, thank you for saying this. Stuffing results with
| geolocated local junk despite explicitly opting out by choosing
| "All regions" is so frustrating. This wasn't happening a year
| or two ago. I submit negative feedback about it constantly, but
| I guess not enough people are doing that for anyone to notice
| or care.
|
| I've also noticed a significant increase in attempts to stuff
| news into regular search results. I _really_ do not appreciate
| being force-fed mental health poison. I don't need it ever, but
| I _especially_ don't need it when I'm searching for some
| specific technical thing and then get emotionally sabotaged by
| some clickbait headline because ... why? Some bullshit KPI? Why
| are tech companies so obsessed with pushing news into every
| orifice?
| stavros wrote:
| Hah, calling the news "mental health poison" is the most
| accurate thing I've read all day.
| mattigames wrote:
| In my country (Colombia) Google still has not removed those
| spam sites that just generate all possible numbers.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Nearly every local search is a leading indicator of buying
| intent and, therefore, is worth more money when served as a
| response instead of an authoritative response.
| bscphil wrote:
| > Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local
| results
|
| From what I can tell this is an issue with the Bing API that
| DDG uses that the DDG folks have been unable to resolve. I've
| tried many identical queries between DDG and Bing and while
| Bing does occasionally return incorrect local results, the
| _completely irrelevant_ local results that appear on almost
| every DDG search do not seem to happen with Bing itself.
|
| From what I understand, DDG is aware of the issue. I don't know
| why it isn't more of a priority.
| binarymax wrote:
| Long time DDG user (>10 years) here, and it's astounding to
| me that they haven't prioritized making their own independent
| index to switch off Bing. I would have expected them to do it
| like 5 years ago, but there's afaik no initiative to do so.
| It's unfortunate and am now trying other engines like Brave
| search.
| nsagent wrote:
| I also occasionally try Brave search when a DDG search
| fails. Sometimes Brave finds what I want, but I frequently
| get Captcha (and now proof of work) challenges that are
| quite annoying. I don't get this with any other search
| provider (though StartPage would frequently do this a while
| back). I hope this is just a phase, because I would likely
| use Brave Search more if not for this issue.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Have you tried perplexity.ai? It's like ChatGPT and Google had a
| baby. Looks very promising and I'm seeing a lot of tech leaders
| (example Toby of Shopify) moving to it.
| dartharva wrote:
| Aren't Bing Chat and Kagi FastGPT the same in effect?
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| No, FastGPT is GPT-2 based. I actually prefer FastGPT because
| its fast (duh!), and as it gives very concise answers and all
| the generated response carries footnotes with the link to the
| source.
| freediver wrote:
| Just to correct, FastGPT uses claude-instant.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I will admit that I can't read between lines here and just go
| ahead an ask: What does "bluesky thought leader" suppose to mean?
| (1) Any guesses who this may be? Why is he not quoted directly?
| (btw, the term is used 3 times, presumably to refer to the same
| person).
|
| 1: my reading is that this is a sarcastic denomination for
| someone that is supposed to be an innovation thought leader but
| actually is just defending the broken search landscape status
| quo.
| 0x38B wrote:
| Re: Kagi, I heard about it on HN, tried it for 100 searches, then
| subscribed. When I search for random JS and CSS things, MDN is
| the first result, and if it isn't, I can downrank whatever spammy
| site(s) are on top.
|
| ---
|
| I wish I had a local LLM trained to detect clickbait and or low-
| effort content. I imagine searching YouTube and having all the
| clickbait collapsed together (just like Kagi condenses
| listicles), with the remainder being potentially high-quality
| content. Don't know how feasible this is right now.
| shados wrote:
| I became a huge fan of Kagi after seeing it on hacker news too.
| It's amazing how good a search engine can be when it's not full
| of ads.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Yeah. At first I primarily used Kagi to move away from Google
| as a company, hoping for results that were equally good. But
| Google search actually feels crappy now in comparison.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Just use the Kagi Summarizer on YouTube videos and you don't
| have to waste time watching trash. It's a great life hack.
| xigoi wrote:
| How does that work? Does it scrape the auto-generated
| captions?
| qudat wrote:
| Been paying for Kagi for 6+ months and very happy with it. I'm
| pretty anti subscriptions so that's saying a lot for a service
| that is otherwise free.
|
| I do have to dump into google for local searches every once in
| awhile, but otherwise happy with it.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Look at the source for that page. Is it hand-coded? (I think it's
| great.)
| zzleeper wrote:
| For me the problem is not just that searching on Google is bad,
| but that sometimes it COMPLETELY hides exactly what I'm looking,
| for no good reason.
|
| For instance, I wrote an R ggplot2 package called "fedplot"
| (following the convention of calling the package for the figure
| style it replicates, as in "bbplot" for BBC-style charts).
|
| Try searching for it on Google: "github" "fedplot" doesn't get
| you anywhere. Meanwhile, every other search engine gives you
| exactly what you want if you just type "fedplot". I even tried to
| add the relevant websites through google's suggested tools, and
| nothing happened :|
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Their black box semantic guesser has been told not to feed the
| radicalizing conspiracy theorist fires about federal plots.
|
| Who needs to know anything about government owned land anyway?
| Dah00n wrote:
| Searching for "fedplot" looking for
| https://github.com/sergiocorreia in the results:
|
| Qwant: Result 1
|
| Bing: Result 1
|
| Google: Result 2
|
| Marginalia: Zero results
|
| ChatGPT 3.5: Some Federal Reserve dot plot nonsense and no
| useful results.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You're never going to find github results on Marginalia as
| long as they block 3rd party crawlers :-/
| Dah00n wrote:
| Well, zero results are better than spam ;-)
| zzleeper wrote:
| I would say Google has zero results, as it does not find
| https://github.com/sergiocorreia/fedplot nor
| https://sergiocorreia.github.io/fedplot/ ; even with the
| advantage of the latter being manually added to the Google
| Admin console.
|
| Meanwhile, both Bing and Qwant give me exactly what I want
| viraptor wrote:
| I really don't agree with some of the expectations around
| results.
|
| > Download youtube videos
|
| > Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical,
| wrapper around yt-dlp. Links to youtube-dl or other less
| frequently updated projects would also be ok.
|
| That's not what a random person expects. yt-dlp or youtube-dl
| have no meaning to a normie. The first result is an online
| downloader and that's what an average person is after. I checked
| the first result in Kagi and it's a valid youtube downloader.
|
| If you're after a commandline tool, ask for it: "commandline tool
| download youtube videos" gives youtube-dl as the top result with
| valid options afterwards:
| https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+...
|
| "Ad blocker" seems to ignore other options exist. Yes, ublock
| would be preferable for most, but ABP is not "very bad". Kagi
| mentions ABP at position 1 and ublock at position 8:
| https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOt...
| (But for a query like that, I'd be happy with a wikipedia article
| about adblockers, because why not?)
|
| I'm not disagreeing that results have been getting worse for
| years, but... this is a really bad scoring system. It feels like
| that one very new person jumping on SO posting something like
| "syntax error: if 1 {" - what are you even asking for? (To be
| honest, the search engines could also give you the equivalent of
| "this is a very vague, would you like to specify what you're
| actually after? here are some suggestions: ...", but that's
| beyond the scope here.) The search returning not the exact thing
| you want to see for a super generic query, but returning a valid
| answer to a question is not "very bad".
| linusg789 wrote:
| My thoughts exactly.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| If you try using it, the first result doesn't help you download
| a youtube video and does try to get you to install malware.
| shutupnerd0000 wrote:
| Speaking of bad software, anyone getting a huge amount of
| horizontal scroll on mobile on this blog post? What should I add
| to my bag of tricks to work around that
| jraph wrote:
| Reader mode might do the job.
| gniv wrote:
| I am not (Chrome on iOS).
| nneonneo wrote:
| Honestly, this is depressing. Back in the day, AltaVista and
| AskJeeves existed but returned terrible results, and Google
| showed up to disrupt them all. It seems like we should be on the
| verge of repeating this cycle.
|
| Maybe LLMs will help, but I can't shake the nagging feeling that
| the situation will simply get worse with LLMs, not better, due to
| hallucinations and the apparent "gullibility" of LLMs: I would
| not be surprised if SEOing an LLM turns out to be easier than
| SEOing Google.
| jimmytucson wrote:
| If you wanna know why Google (or any search engine) sucks, just
| look at how it measures its own search results. Most search
| companies do this "at scale" according to very specific
| guidelines, like what the author did here but on steroids. For
| example, take a look at Google's 168-page instruction manual for
| search quality raters:
|
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
|
| It talks about figuring out a query's meaning(s), judging the
| user's intent (were they looking for some specific answer, etc.),
| evaluating the "quality" of a website, rating the site's
| usefulness in relation to the query's meaning/intent, etc.
|
| All this is to say, it's not that search companies don't do
| exactly what the author did here, it's just that they have
| different standards than the author. And I'd venture their
| standards match their users' better than the author's, but maybe
| not or not forever, anyway.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Why would an average user want blog spam search results?
|
| My hope is as LLM's improve, they can be more discriminating
| about the results returned.
| jimmytucson wrote:
| > Why would an average user want blog spam search results?
|
| I didn't say they would :)
|
| In fact, I can't figure out how your comment relates to mine.
| Are you claiming that Google doesn't factor blog spamminess
| into its evaluation of search results? If so, that's quickly
| put to bed by the document I linked, pretty much section 4.6.
| Excerpt:
|
| > Creating an abundance of content with little effort or
| originality with no editing or manual curation is often the
| defining attribute of spammy websites.
|
| You could claim that they fail to capture some essential
| quality of "blog spamitude" or that they don't weight it
| heavily enough in their eval but to say they just, like,
| don't know about blogspam over there, is pretty far fetched
| IMO.
| whakim wrote:
| I really don't think that's true. For example, page 29 of your
| link describes "Lowest Quality Content." Most of the search
| results that the author rated as spammy or scammy clearly fit
| these guidelines, which means that either (1) the raters aren't
| knowledgeable enough about the subject matter to determine that
| the website they're rating is harmful or misleading; or (2) the
| raters _are_ rating these sites correctly, but it still isn 't
| having the desired effect.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > If you wanna know why Google (or any search engine) sucks
|
| While I obviously don't know it may be related to how Google
| believes a "normal" person search. I have come to view Google
| as a product search engine/price comparison site, that's what
| it's great at. Google can find you the most relevant products
| for any purchase you may consider, so maybe that's what Google
| has optimized for. The majority of my searches are related to
| IT, programming, software and computers in general, but what
| does "normal" people search for. They search for products,
| news, opening hours for a store, Google is pretty decent at
| that, but the money is in the "go buy something". The ads on a
| product search on Google is always way more accurate than the
| actual search result.
|
| I think Google has optimized for selling products.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Search engines are not designed to give you the information you
| desire. They are designed to sell ads or metadata. "Result
| quality" is of no consequence.
|
| If you actually wanted accurate results you wouldn't use a tool
| that is literally attempting to read your mind like a fortune
| teller. It is impossible to know what you want just by the word
| "snow". Jesus Christ engineers are so dumb.
| naet wrote:
| I think the result grading is too opinionated here.
|
| For example, the first query is "download YouTube videos", for
| which Google is ranked "terrible" for not showing you a command
| line open source program. But the literal first result is an ad
| supported site where I can paste in a YouTube link and download
| it right from the browser. That seems like exactly what most
| people would want or to the CLI tool the author is searching for.
| The author seemed to be looking for sites without ads as what
| they wanted to see in search results more than search relevance.
|
| Search is a very gamed system with a lot of SEO spam type
| results, but I think a much better analysis could be done for
| more meaningful results. Also I recreated some of the searches
| and got very different results (including ublock origin in the
| top three responses). Again, a more scientific ranking system
| could help uncover better data on searches.
| shaldengeki wrote:
| The author describes that site as such, which seems fair to
| rate as "terrible":
|
| > Some youtube downloader site. Has lots of assurances that the
| website and the tool are safe because they've been checked by
| "Norton SafeWeb". Interacting with the site at all prompts you
| to install a browser extension and enable notifications. Trying
| to download any video gives you a full page pop-over for
| extension installation for something called CyberShield. There
| appears to be no way to dismiss the popover without clicking on
| something to try to install it. After going through the links
| but then choosing not to install CyberShield, no video
| downloads. Googling "cybershield chrome extension" returns a
| knowledge card with "Cyber Shield is a browser extension that
| claims to be a popup blocker but instead displays
| advertisements in the browser. When installed, this extension
| will open new tabs in the browser that display advertisements
| trying to sell software, push fake software updates, and tech
| support scams.", so CyberShield appears to be badware.
| naet wrote:
| That's how he described it but I tried it myself and found it
| perfectly functional to download a video with different
| options for size / quality. It has ads but not nearly as bad
| as described.
|
| It's a service that is quasi illegal and explicitly breaks
| the YouTube terms of service. I think the search engine did a
| good job surfacing what was searched for, there just aren't
| going to be any free online YouTube downloaders without
| advertising.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Which web site did you use to successfully download a
| youtube video? Which youtube video did you download?
| shaldengeki wrote:
| It'd be useful to know what site you used to verify - but
| if we're talking about the same site, IMO a website that
| presents Dan's experience sometimes, and your experience
| sometimes, is actively harmful.
| j7ake wrote:
| Yeah, if one typed "YouTube downloaded cli" you the results the
| author was thinking.
|
| It seems like the author wants to search to read their kind
| without specifying what kind of YouTube downloaded they want
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about
| ChatGPT uses 3.5. It's pretty misleading as to the results you
| can get out of (the best available version of) ChatGPT.
|
| For comparison, here are all the author's questions posed against
| GPT4:
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7...
| refulgentis wrote:
| It's a bit hard to use for most, either $20/month fixed for a
| limited # of messages, or you need to be able to reason through
| how to get an API key, or get another 3rd party service with
| similar cost & limits.
| simonw wrote:
| You can use GPT-4 for free via Bing - though I find it a
| little hard to explain to people how they can do that because
| I'm never sure what the rules are with regards to creating
| Microsoft accounts, whether you can use any browser or have
| to use Edge, what countries it's available in etc.
|
| Actually maybe the recommendation should be to use GPT-4 for
| free via https://copilot.microsoft.com/ instead now.
|
| (Except I can't tell which version of GPT that's using yet -
| there was a story on 5th December that said GPT-4 Turbo was
| "coming soon", not sure when "soon" is though:
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/12/05/celebrating-
| the-... )
| vitorgrs wrote:
| FYI: Balanced doesn't run pure GPT4. Balanced uses a
| combination of multiple models. Precise and Creative is
| pure GPT4.
|
| About GPT4 Turbo, to check if you are on Turbo, ctrl+U >
| ctrl+f > check if "dlgpt4t" exists. If it exists, you are
| running turbo.
|
| You can also double-check by, well, asking stuff after 2021
| knowledge cut-off as well ("What are the oscar winners?")
| with search disabled.
|
| But you'll notice because turbo is much faster on bing (and
| better too).
| apapapa wrote:
| But that gpt-4 says it can't code
| airstrike wrote:
| IMHO TBF the "limited # of messages" is continously
| increasing, to the point I hardly remember it exists these
| days
| tedunangst wrote:
| Why does OpenAI continue to offer chatgpt 3.5 if it's so bad?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Cheaper and faster.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| GPT 4 is THIRTY (30) times more expensive.
|
| In the llm-assisted search spaces I'm involved in, a lot of
| folks are trying to build solutions based on fine tuning and
| support software surrounding 3.5, which is economical for a
| massive userbase, using 4 only as a testing judge for quality
| control.
| antupis wrote:
| Chatgpt3.5 is good enought if can give context in query.
| latexr wrote:
| > I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about
| ChatGPT uses 3.5.
|
| Because that's what most people have access to. It's absolutely
| worthless to most readers to talk about something they'll never
| pay for and it's not the job of random third-parties to
| incentivise others to send money to OpenAI.
|
| What I really don't understand is why anyone gets so hung up
| about it and blames the writer. If you're bothered by people
| using 3.5 you should complain to OpenAI, not the people using
| the service they make freely available.
|
| Anecdotally, I find this excessive fawning about 4 VS 3.5 to be
| unwarranted.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304184
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| > Because that's what most people have access to.
|
| I'd agree with this rationale if the author clearly
| communicated their choice of model and the consequences of
| that choice upfront.
|
| In this post the table of results and the text of the post
| itself simply reads "ChatGPT" with no mention of 3.5 until
| the middle of a paragraph of text in the appendix.
|
| > It's absolutely worthless to most readers to talk about
| something they'll never pay for and it's not the job of
| random third-parties to incentivise others to send money to
| OpenAI.
|
| The "worth" is in communicating an accurate representation of
| the capabilities of the technology being evaluated. If you're
| using the less capable free version, then make that clear
| upfront, and there's no problem.
|
| If you were to write an article reviewing any other piece of
| software that has a much less capable free version available
| in addition to a paid version, then you would be expected to
| be clear upfront (not in a single sentence all the way down
| in the appendix) about which version you're using, and if
| you're using the free version what its limitations may be. To
| do otherwise would be misleading.
|
| If you simply say "ChatGPT" it's reasonable to infer that
| you're evaluating the best possible version of "ChatGPT", not
| the worst.
|
| Accurate communication is literally the job of the author if
| they're making money off the article (this one has a Patreon
| solicitation at the top of the page).
|
| Whether or not "most readers" are ever going to pay for the
| software is totally orthogonal.
|
| If using GPT4 vs 3.5 would create results so distinct from
| one another that it would serve to incentivize people to give
| money to OpenAI, well then that precisely supports the
| argument that the author's approach is misleading when
| presenting their results as representative of the
| capabilities of "ChatGPT".
|
| > What I really don't understand is why anyone gets so hung
| up about it and blames the writer.
|
| Again, if they're making money off their readers it's their
| job to provide them with an accurate representation of the
| tech.
|
| > Anecdotally, I find this excessive fawning about 4 VS 3.5
| to be unwarranted.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304184
|
| Did some part of my comment came across as "excessive
| fawning"? Regardless, if this "excessive fawning" is truly
| unwarranted, this would again undermine your statement that
| using GPT4 would "incentivize others to send money to
| OpenAI".
|
| In regards to your link, I'll highlight what another
| commenter replied to you. What should ChatGPT say when
| prompted about various religious beliefs? Should it
| confidently tell the user that these beliefs are rooted in
| fantastical nonsense?
|
| It seems in this case you're holding ChatGPT to an arbitrary
| standard, not to mention one that the majority of humanity,
| including many of its brightest members, would fail to meet.
| latexr wrote:
| > I'd agree with this rationale if the author clearly
| communicated their choice of model and the consequences of
| that choice upfront. (...) with no mention of 3.5 until the
| middle of a paragraph of text in the appendix.
|
| You're moving the goalposts. You went from criticising
| _anyone_ using 3.5 and writing about it to saying it
| would've been OK if they had mentioned it where _you_ think
| it's acceptable. It's debatable if the information needed
| to be more prominent; it is not debatable it is present.
|
| > If you simply say "ChatGPT" it's reasonable to infer that
| you're evaluating the best possible version of "ChatGPT",
| not the worst.
|
| Alternatively, it you simply say "ChatGPT" it's reasonable
| to infer that you're evaluating the version most people
| have access to and can "play along" with the author.
|
| > If using GPT4 vs 3.5 would create results so distinct
| from one another that it would serve to incentivize people
| to give money to OpenAI
|
| Those are your words, not mine. I argued for the exact
| opposite.
|
| > Again, if they're making money off their readers it's
| their job to provide them with an accurate representation
| of the tech.
|
| I agree they should strive to provide accurate information.
| But I disagree that being paid has anything to do with it,
| and that their representation of the tech was inaccurate.
| Incomplete, maybe.
|
| > Regardless, if this "excessive fawning" is truly
| unwarranted, this would again undermine your statement that
| using GPT4 would "incentivize others to send money to
| OpenAI".
|
| Again, I did not argue that, I argued the opposite. What I
| meant is that even if _you_ believe that to be true, that
| still doesn't mean random third-parties would have any
| obligation to do it.
|
| > I'll highlight what another commenter replied to you.
|
| That comment has a reply, by another person, to which I
| didn't feel the need to add.
|
| > It seems in this case you're holding ChatGPT to an
| arbitrary standard, not to mention one that the majority of
| humanity, including many of its brightest members, would
| fail to meet.
|
| Machines and humans are not the same, not judged the same,
| don't work the same, are not interpreted the same. Let's
| please stop pretending there's an equivalence.
|
| Here's a simple example: If someone tells you they can
| multiply any two numbers in their head and you give them
| 324543 and 976985, when they reply "317073642855" you'll
| take out a calculator to confirm. If you had done the
| calculation first on a computer, you wouldn't turn to the
| nearest human for them to confirm it in their head.
|
| The problem with ChatGPT being wrong and misleading isn't
| the information itself, but that people are taking it as
| correct because that's what they're used to and expect from
| machines. In addition, you don't know when an answer is
| bullshit or not. With a human, not only can you catch clues
| regarding reliability of the information, you learn which
| human to trust with each information.
|
| _Everyone's_ standard for ChatGPT, be it absolute
| omniscience, utter failure, or anything in between, is
| arbitrary. Comparing it to "the majority of humanity,
| including many of its brightest members" is certainly not
| an objective measurable standard.
| xpressvideoz wrote:
| > However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that
| search results are still great.
|
| I think that this very sentence shows the author's bias, because
| I feel that Google's search results are not just great, but
| _better_ than what it was 10 years ago.
| realcertify wrote:
| You must be kidding, Google is becoming worse every day. Still
| better than useless Bing though.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Consider yourself part of the sizeable group of vocal folk
| then.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| While I think the article is interesting, I disagree with its
| results regarding Kagi. I like Kagi and rarely use anything else.
| Kagi's results are decent and I can blacklist sites like
| Amazon.com so they never show up in my search results.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Weird article. Basically, the author thinks that anything that is
| not yt-dlp is a bad search result, which is pretty insane.
|
| Like, for me at least, I already know yt-dlp exists. When I
| search "youtube downloader", it's exactly because I want an
| online-website page to download youtube videos.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| The author would probably accept any result that helps them
| download youtube videos. Did you find any and successfully use
| it to download a youtube video? Could you provide a link to the
| one you used?
| csours wrote:
| Wide tires by Jason of Engineering Explained:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8
|
| Better answer: learn the differential equations in this book:
|
| https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TERRAMECH...
| freediver wrote:
| Current Kagi results for those without an account to compare:
|
| youtube downloader
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=youtube+downloader&r=us&sh=_szITdy...
|
| ad blocker
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=us&sh=-BHzV2ZoCDpmgOu...
|
| download Firefox
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=Download+Firefox&r=us&sh=zkkmc_EQX...
|
| why do wider tires have better grip?
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+wider+tires+have+better+gri...
|
| why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+they+keep+making+cpu+transi...
|
| vancouver snow forecast winter 2023
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=Vancouver+snow+forecast+winter+202...
|
| I agree with the author that there is too much spam on the web. I
| think Kagi in general does a pretty good job at downranking it
| (number of ads/trackers is a negative ranking signal on Kagi) but
| we can always do better. Kagi has special search modes like
| "Small Web" which virtually eliminates spam.
|
| I welcome such scrutiny from the community. Please continue to
| keep us honest.
| asah wrote:
| Kagi gives me websites that require more clicking; Google just
| gives me reasonable answers and I don't see spam in your
| examples.
|
| "why do wider tires have better grip?"
|
| Wider tires provide more grip due to a larger contact patch
| with the road. While it's true that friction is not directly
| dependent on surface area, a larger contact patch allows for
| more even weight distribution and better traction, particularly
| during cornering. This can result in improved handling and
| stability.
|
| "why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?"
|
| Smaller transistors can do more calculations without
| overheating, which makes them more power efficient. It also
| allows for smaller die sizes, which reduce costs and can
| increase density, allowing more cores per chip.
|
| "vancouver snow forecast winter 2023"
|
| The forecast for the 2023/2024 season suggests that we can
| expect another winter marked by ample snowfall and temperatures
| hovering both slightly above and below the freezing mark. Be
| prepared ahead of time.
| poyu wrote:
| My only gripe with these quick answers or excerpts is
| sometimes it doesn't fully give the context. After it's given
| me couple wrong results I stop trusting it and always read
| the source. If I were to read the source might as well click
| into the website and read the whole thing.
| pbronez wrote:
| I often default to using Kagi's FastGPT when I want direct
| information instead of a starting point for web browsing. It
| combines web searches with LLM summarization to produce an
| integrated, sourced answer. Kinda like "New Bing" with a
| better interface. You can trigger this mode by adding "!fast"
| to your query, going to https://kagi.com/fastgpt, or using
| their API. Here's what it returned for me on those specific
| queries: ========== "why do wider tires have better grip?"
| Wider tires provide better grip due to having a larger
| contact patch with the road surface. A larger contact patch
| means the tire can disperse the weight of the vehicle over a
| wider area, reducing pressure. This allows for more friction
| between the tire and road, improving traction and cornering
| ability. However, wider tires do not necessarily provide
| better grip in wet conditions. [1][2][3][4][5] 1. wheels -
| Does a wider tire always mean more grip/traction - Motor ...
| 2. Do Wider Tires Give You More Grip? Not All the Time 3.
| Learn Me: Wider tires = more Grip? = Faster cornering?|
| Grassroots ... 4. Wide or narrow tires? Here's how your
| choice will affect driving ... 5. VIDEO: Do wider tires offer
| more grip? - BMW M3 and BMW M4 Forum ========== "why do they
| keep making cpu transistors smaller?" There are a few key
| reasons why CPU manufacturers keep making transistors
| smaller: 1. Smaller transistors allow more transistors to be
| placed on a single chip, enabling increased processing power.
| More transistors results in more capabilities and
| performance. [1] 2. Smaller transistors use less power and
| produce less heat. This allows CPUs to operate faster and
| with more cores/threads within the same power and thermal
| envelope. [2] 3. Moore's Law, an observation made by Intel
| co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, predicted that the number of
| transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately
| every two years. Following this trend has driven the
| semiconductor industry to continue shrinking transistors. [3]
| 4. Smaller transistors can switch on and off faster, enabling
| increased clock speeds. This directly leads to increased
| performance. [1] However, we are rapidly approaching the
| fundamental physical limits of transistor shrinkage.
| Transistors cannot be smaller than an atom, which is around
| 0.2 nanometers for silicon. [4] Alternative technologies like
| carbon nanotube transistors may be needed to continue
| performance growth beyond this point. [5] 1. Why does
| computer chip process size have to keep getting smaller ...
| 2. Why does smaller = less heat? - CPUs, Motherboards, and
| Memory ... 3. What Is Moore's Law and Is It Still True? 4.
| Transistors are an essential building block used in almost
| every ... 5. These Transistor Gates Are Just One Carbon Atom
| Thick - IEEE ... ========== "vancouver snow forecast winter
| 2023" Based on the context provided: The winter of 2023-2024
| in Vancouver is expected to see less snow and milder
| temperatures than typical winters. Forecasts predict a below
| average snowfall season with warmer weather
| [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Long range forecasts through December
| 2023 for southern British Columbia call for showers along the
| coast and less precipitation inland [7]. Metro Vancouver's
| fall and winter is also predicted to be a potentially 'down'
| snow year [4]. Confidence is high for a mild winter in
| western Canada with reduced snowfall amounts [5]. However,
| specific snowfall totals are uncertain given the long lead
| time [6]. 1. Vancouver winter weather: Less snow, milder
| temperatures ... 2. 2023-2024 British Columbia Winter
| Forecast Preview | OpenSnow 3. Snow Prediction Vancouver
| Winter 2023/24 -- Alblaster Snow ... 4. Metro Vancouver's
| fall, winter forecast | CityNews Vancouver 5. What will this
| winter be like? Grab the hot cocoa -- here's your 2023 ... 6.
| Canada's Winter Forecast: El Nino a critical factor for the
| season ... 7. 60-Day Extended Weather Forecast for Vancouver,
| BC | Almanac.com
| algas wrote:
| That first result re: tires is simply wrong. Wider tires
| don't have a larger contact patch; the size of the contact
| patch is determined by the weight of the car and the air
| pressure in the tires: A = W / P
|
| So the reason wider tires improve handling is more complex
| and subtle. Also, FTA: Assuming a baseline
| of a moderately wide tire for the wheel size. -
| Scaling both of these to make both wider than the OEM tire
| (but still running a setup that fits in the car without
| serious modifications) generally gives better dry braking and
| better lap times. - In wet conditions, wider setups
| often have better braking distances (though this depends a
| lot on the specific setup) and better lap times, but also
| aquaplane at lower speeds. - Just increasing the
| wheel width and using the same tire generally gives you
| better lap times, within reason. - Just increasing
| the tire width and leaving wheel width fixed generally
| results in worse lap times.
|
| A full accounting of the effects of changing tire width
| should explain all of these effects.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Pretty biased selection of queries. Article avoids the things
| that ChatGPT and the others without fresh data can't answer. Look
| at the trending searches on Google. They are all for fresh info
| that none of the others can answer. Sports scores. Google
| probably judges quality weighted by the questions their users
| actually ask, not this nerd bullshit.
| bluish29 wrote:
| Isn't any selection of queries would be biased. Even what you
| are saying is biased, you try to say that Google would be
| better for cases that it optimize for which is even weirder.
| That is like saying you want to compare highly optimized code
| that is using some C libraries vs some native python code.
| Dah00n wrote:
| How is a youtube downloader biased to fresh results? Seems to
| cover a pretty broad test.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It selects a "right answer" that suits a stale index,
| assuming that there can't have been a right-er answer
| discovered after ChatGPT's training horizon.
| shaldengeki wrote:
| What's most shocking to me is how much malware there is in all of
| this. The fact that Google et al aren't constantly in trouble for
| directly forwarding unwitting users to malware distributors
| indicates to me just how far our standards have fallen for a
| "good" search engine. I feel like we'd be happier with search
| engines that adhered to "first, do no harm" principles.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| I'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at
| all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic
| in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there.
|
| In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be
| found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some
| articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or
| command line tools.
|
| In the Adblock search, ublock Origin is #3, followed by some
| blogs about ad blocking ethics debates and the bullshit Google
| has been pulling recently.
|
| In the wider tires grip search, #3 is a physics blog that dives
| deep into the topic.
|
| In the transistors search, the first reddit link directly answers
| the question in very similar wording to the hypothetical correct
| answer spelled out in the rubric. 4/5 of the reddit results are
| on the correct topic, followed by two SuperUser questinos also on
| the correct topic, then some linus tech tips and toms hardware
| articles, also on the correct topic. No Quora questions.
|
| In the vancouver winter snow search, the first several results
| are from local news papers talking about the anticipated effects
| of el nino on snowfall, and then a couple of high-quality blogs
| and weather sites.
|
| Really wondering how Dan got such bad results.
|
| ------
|
| Aside from that, the way that the author expects all the results
| to return the same kind of thing is just... weird? Like, that's
| not how search engines are supposed to work. A search that gives
| you 10 links to fundamentally the same thing is a bad search.
| Search results should cover a breadth of reasonable guesses for
| what you should be looking for given a query. If you search for
| "download firefox", and you scroll past the first 5 download
| links, then you're probably not actually looking for a download
| link and a blog post about firefox is not "irrelevant" and
| shouldn't be points against.
|
| This opinion is even borne out in search engine quality metrics
| that have been industry-standard for decades, like mean
| reciprocal rank and distributed cumulative gain. What matters is
| how far you have to scroll to get to a good result, not what
| proportion of the first N results are good.
| throwaway0665 wrote:
| have you customized your results and lowered or raised many
| domains?
| trb wrote:
| Same here, I was curious about Kagis low ranking, and couldn't
| replicate the search results. Also saw ublock Origin on #3,
| good results for tires, transitors and snow, etc. I've never
| used any of the Kagi search result weighing features.
|
| Ctrl+F on the page for "System prompt" doesn't show any hits.
| Given how important those are for ChatGPT (another thought -
| was the author testing GPT3.5 or 4?) I'm not sure how much
| weight to put into the ChatGPT results either.
|
| Not sure how much I can take away from this comparison.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I asked GPT-4 about Youtube Downloader and it rambled on
| about how downloading videos is against Youtube's TOS and I
| should buy YouTube premium which has the download feature.
|
| Getting any useful data from GPT-4 about anything even
| remotely "illegal" is a waste of time.
| UberFly wrote:
| So it has also become one of the glitterati. That didn't
| take long.
| okasaki wrote:
| Works fine IMO
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/7dfd22d2-975c-4e6d-ba4b-c6b99
| e...
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/90fae0dc-f8fd-4603-835c-5f3a5
| 7...
| Huppie wrote:
| The author already alludes to the fact that you can
| probably prompt-engineer around this and indeed, as soon as
| I added a blurb like "these are my own videos that I own
| the copyright to" it did suggest a bunch of third-party
| tools and let me ask it about what third-party tools I
| could use.
|
| It suggested '4K Video Downloader', 'YTD Video Downloader',
| 'JDownloader' and 'Clipgrab' at first and when I asked for
| cli tools it came with 'youtube-dl', 'yt-dlp', and 'ffmpeg'
|
| Those seem pretty reasonable results to me but I'll readily
| admit I don't know (yet) if 'most users' would ask these
| follow-up questions.
| Semaphor wrote:
| With a better prompt, you can get it to list some, but it's
| very annoying to do so.
|
| Mistral showed that their medium model is far better (yet
| not good), and the same prompt as in the article gives only
| one instead of 3 paragraphs of rambling about copyright,
| and then lists 3 categories of options with examples for
| each (not good, because ytdl is not one of those listed).
|
| Funnily enough, both mistral and GPT4 apologize profoundly
| and almost with the same wording when asked "Why did you
| not mention the very popular, free and open source
| "youtube-dl" software?" and then mention how/where to get
| it and how to use it.
| freediver wrote:
| > Funnily enough, both mistral and GPT4 apologize
| profoundly and almost with the same wording when asked
| "Why did you not mention the very popular, free and open
| source "youtube-dl" software?"
|
| Likely because they were optimized for general
| population, which would not have a use for command line
| python utility.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'm clear why they didn't include it, I wanted them to
| tell me why, though. And I thought that both of them
| apologized in almost the same way, was funny.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| It's plausible that mistral trained on GPT-4 output and
| therefore has similar mannerisms.
| alextingle wrote:
| claude.ai produced pretty reasonable results.
| Scaless wrote:
| I have a new Kagi account with no custom rankings and I see the
| same terrible results. Basically the same as what he describes.
| yt-dlp is not found at all, the 2010 link to youtube-dl, and a
| bunch of spam sites.
| Semaphor wrote:
| What region? I get similarly bad results with international
| (and a quick check with region US also didn't improve things)
| and uBo at only #5, and ytdl at #12. And I already have github
| on "raise" and a bunch of domains blocked (not many though)
|
| For the transistor query, it's a very "googly" way of writing a
| query, when I saw the results I instantly felt like rewriting
| it and the first try gave much better results with "Why keep
| cpu transistors getting smaller?". Caveat that the results look
| better and more topical, I don't know what a good answer would
| be, also why I didn't evaluate the tires or Vancouver weather
| (I tried a local search for my cities weather, and while the
| first result was unreleated, the 2nd was okay)
|
| edit: This whole thread made me finally create a file for
| documenting bad searches on Kagi. The issue for me is usually
| that they drop very important search terms from the query and
| give me unrelated results. But switching to verbatim or "forced
| terms" also prevents any kind of error correction of the
| search. This used to be one of my main annoyances with DDG back
| then, and Kagi did not have that issue during the early days.
| szundi wrote:
| Kagi is awesome for me too. I just realize using Google
| somewhere else because of the shit results.
| iansinnott wrote:
| I'll second the chorus of those curious to hear how you've
| customized the search engine. I was able to reproduce the
| lackluster results, and was sadly disappointed. I expected what
| you seem to have found, that Kagi would outperform.
|
| A specific example: for "ad blocker" the first result was some
| paid ad blocker and ublock was down the page below the fold.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I use Kagi because I'm trying to remove Google from my life,
| but their text search is worse than Google in my experience,
| and the image search is abysmal. I'm wondering how long I can
| keep this up. I already revert to Google for image search, and
| am finding myself using either Google or ChatGPT over Kagi more
| and more for text as well.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi had a pretty substantial image search update just few
| days ago [1]. Do you still the issues with it?
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/changelog#2793
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Good info - will experiment!
|
| It's already performing better on a (n=1) test I tried.
|
| "Talos Principle 2". (Video game sequel) Previously (~5
| days ago), Google returned various screenshots etc from the
| game `The Talos Principle 2`. Kagi returned mostly results
| from `The Talos Principle (1)`. Now the latest Kagi results
| are a mix, mostly from 2. So, it does look like it fixed
| this query.
| gniv wrote:
| Meta: Since the text on the page is so dense, I tried reading it
| in Chrome's reading mode. Which was fine until the Appendix. All
| the results are missing, leading to confusion.
| UberFly wrote:
| I also was overwhelmed by the amount of data. I came back here
| to find the cliff notes :)
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Kagi really shines on topics that are SEO-spammed on other search
| engines. I.e. when travelling to a touristic city, searching a
| recipe, or basically any product you want to buy. I actually got
| "search anxiety" searching these topics, as I know I will have to
| navigate a lot of SEO spam, content that is artificially blown
| up, and the core information purposefully hidden somewhere on the
| page - if any. Plus the multitude of cookie consent banners and
| newsletter subscription popups on each link...
|
| I've been using Kagi's FastGPT [0] now for these searches, it
| basically removes all the bullshit and gives verifiable sources
| for any answers.
|
| [0]: https://kagi.com/fastgpt
| pbronez wrote:
| Yeah that's my go-to as well. Interestingly, I often find that
| "Fast" mode results are as good or better than "Expert" mode
| for simpler tasks.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would kinda have liked side by side screenshots so I could see
| for myself rather than a wall of text
| motoxpro wrote:
| This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad.
| Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top
| hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp"
|
| Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and
| download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are
| using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s).
| 99.999% of people are not programming tinkerers.
|
| Just makes me realize how subjective search results are. All of
| their "Great" results are my "Terrible" results.
| darkwater wrote:
| Malware or well, the actual viruses, in the '90s were a joke,
| especially because a computer was an isolated thing. Connected
| computers were the exception.
| acdha wrote:
| In the early 90s, yes. By the turn of the century the current
| industry we see today existed in basic form: malware stole
| credit cards, compromised PCs were used to send spam as part
| of botnets, etc. The only major advance was when
| cryptocurrencies made it much easier to launder money and the
| professionalism went up accordingly.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The first result on Kagi is exactly this, just tried it a
| moment ago. It processed and downloaded the video extremely
| fast. Why would any reasonable person prefer youtube-dl?
| Dah00n wrote:
| It is the same using Google.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Totally, As the sibling said, it is the same using Google. I
| am not sure, why anyone would want a programming package to
| accomplish a task that could be done in < 10 seconds.
|
| But again, I guess that's why search is so hard is because I
| have to parse that intent from 3 words.
| ufmace wrote:
| IMO, if you're capable of running yt-dlp, it's far better
| than any website.
|
| It's pretty simple to run these download tools as website,
| but it's expensive in terms of bandwidth and tends to attract
| legal attention. So a lot of websites go up supporting it,
| but even if they were started with good intentions, they will
| virtually all eventually add intrusive ads or other types of
| monetization just to break even. So there's never going to be
| a reliable website for it. If you're lucky, a search engine
| will send you to one that's working okay right now, but even
| odds you'll be fighting through a dozen malware nests.
|
| Meanwhile, yt-dlp just works every time, with only an
| occasional pip upgrade to keep it up to date.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Over here the first result on Kagi is savefrom.net which
| variously tries to install malware or sell a paid
| subscription and does not download videos.
| jcmeyrignac wrote:
| No mention of https://www.qwant.com
| DeathArrow wrote:
| The thoughts about building a better search engine than Google
| are interesting.
|
| Unlike the author, I think that building a better search engine
| than Google is possible. But it's going to be rather expensive.
| And the only proven way to monetize it is selling ads. Which will
| degrade the quality of the search results fast. For potential
| investors, there are probably many better ways to invest money
| then by building a search engine.
|
| This lets us with only one viable alternative: build it in the
| open like Wikipedia and source donations from people and from
| Google competitors like Amazon or Apple.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Is this from desktop? What region?
|
| Ublock origin in the very top result for ios device is simply a
| bad search result page. Maybe fourth position is tolerable, after
| three different working ones. Maybe it should be lower, I doubt
| myself, if my point of view is too elitist.
|
| Yt-dlp is subject to all sorts of takedown requests in different
| jurisdictions.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm not sure youtube-dl is a good answer unless you're a nerd.
|
| Which is a similar phenomenon to search. If you have sufficient
| tech skills there's a whole world of freely available software
| out there to complete your task.
|
| If you're not then you are at the mercy of a range of commercial
| offerings (some built on the free software) that range from
| arguably scams to outright scams.
| bambax wrote:
| I'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still
| very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even
| try to disable it.
|
| I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker
| "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could
| make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how
| it goes.
|
| It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading
| videos mentioning _yt-dlp_ while trying to emulate "the non-
| expert browsing experience"... Yt-dlp is a command-line Python
| utility. Talk about non-expert! Most people don't know that
| videos are files that can be downloaded; of those who do, most
| don't know about the command line or Python.
|
| Yet when searching for _" how to download youtube videos"_ the
| first result I get on Google is a link to a service called
| "savefrom.net", which appears to work well and does not seem to
| be a scam. This would qualify as "very good" in my book.
|
| When searching for _" how to download youtube videos from the
| command line"_ the first few results are about youtube-dl,
| including links to github and superuser. Granted they don't
| mention yt-dlp, but youtube-dl is a good start.
| gkbrk wrote:
| When I do a Google search in an Incognito tab for "how to
| download youtube videos", the first two results I get are the
| following.
|
| - https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/
|
| - https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/
|
| I would certainly put those in the "Terrible" category like the
| author.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I get savefrom.net in both Incognito and normal tabs, uBlock
| or not. I have no idea why you get crap results that are
| somehow different. uBlock doesn't change google results in
| Firefox for me at all. It seems you get crap _added_ , not
| removed.
| gkbrk wrote:
| I searched with Chrome, perhaps that's the difference.
| Firefox also blocks some ads out-of-the-box even without
| uBlock, so maybe it was already blocked.
|
| It could also be related to targeting, like time zone,
| location, IP address, age group etc.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I get the same search result in Edge as in Firefox. Can't
| test in Chrome, but something seems strange.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| savefrom.net is a crap result.
| cj wrote:
| My top 2 (incognito) are blog posts from pcmag.com and
| zdnet.com listing 5 ways to download YT videos. Maybe it's
| blogspam, but the listed services seem valid at first glance.
|
| savefrom.net is the 5th result (2nd page underneath 5 youtube
| videos)
|
| Edit: This is from the US. If i had to guess, these are
| regional differences. What country are you in?
| emmelaich wrote:
| I got similar to you; I'm in Australia.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Did you click either of those links?
|
| Both seem to do the job of downloading a youtube link to mp4
| for free.
| gkbrk wrote:
| Did _you_ click either of those links? They are not YouTube
| video downloaders, they just link to another downloader.
| There is nowhere on those links to even put a YouTube URL.
|
| Are you seriously suggesting that a website with the
| following "About us" with only a link to another YouTube
| video downloader is itself a good YouTube video downloader?
|
| > Good Samaritan Support Action is to reawaken the Body of
| Christ to receiving the extravagant love of The Father, as
| well as our call to respond to this love by loving God with
| all of our hearts, souls, strengths, and minds. In order
| for people's hearts to be linked to the heart of our
| Heavenly Father, we want to foster and facilitate the
| establishment of a culture of love in our churches and
| ministries.
| londons_explore wrote:
| so, there is one extra click... But for the user, the
| site does the job and takes an extra 1 second.
|
| Ideal? No. But it does the trick.
| hamasho wrote:
| Not GP, but navigating to an unrelated scammy site just
| having a link to the actual site is a terrible and
| unethical job by Google. Imagine if you search "youtube"
| and the top result is not YouTube but some scammy site
| just having a link to YouTube. It's not about click
| counts, if the youtube downloader has bad UX and requires
| extra clicks, it's a bit inconvenient but ok.
| tantalor wrote:
| Those are both garbage/scam sites
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab"
| being part of the test harness?
|
| It seems pretty arbitrary to me to disable one of the key
| features - in this case personalization - of the software
| being evaluated.
|
| Or is the evaluation not between "search engines" but rather
| "search engines without personalization"? If so, then this
| restriction does make sense. But that is not the evaluation
| that "normal users" are interested in.
| Majromax wrote:
| > I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito
| tab" being part of the test harness?
|
| It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user
| experience'. Someone who has a long account/cookie history
| with Google has plausibly trained the site to return more
| relevant results through implicit user-curation of avoiding
| obvious-to-them SEO-spam on other queries.
|
| If we posit that _every_ user eventually trains Google to
| avoid SEO spam, then this begs the question of why Google(
| /Bing) don't eliminate the SEO spam in the first place.
|
| Besides that, it's not obvious why search engine
| personalization should dramatically change the basic
| utility of search results. We should expect personalization
| to mostly address ambiguities: is 'the best way to set up
| tables' asking about furniture assembly/carpentry or SQL?
| None of the author's queries for this article supported
| such ambiguities, and besides that the results returned
| (see the final appendix) aren't[+] valid answers to a
| different interpretation of the question.
|
| [+] -- I think I'd quibble about the 'adblock' question,
| since a reasonable person might still find an adblocker
| that works but participates in the 'acceptable ads program'
| to be sufficient.
| Jcowell wrote:
| > It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user
| experience'
|
| You wouldn't be really taking the average here though
| would you? You would be capture the experience someone
| might have if they were in incognito, using google for
| the very first time, or using google on another device
| for the every first time, but not the "average
| experience".
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _It 's the closest we can easily get to the 'average
| user experience'._
|
| _Maybe_ it 's the closest we can get (though I doubt
| it), but it definitely isn't close _enough_ to tell us
| anything about the "average user experience".
|
| The average user has been using google for years, without
| taking any steps to avoid personalization. An incognito
| session (on a browser / machine / network that is
| probably fingerprinted...) is pretty much the opposite of
| that typical usage pattern.
|
| I recognize that just writing a blog post or comment on
| HN is not a research project so needs to do something
| quick, but I think it mostly invalidates the experiment.
| What would get closer would be to devise a few user
| personas and attempt to search and browse for awhile
| within those personas before trying the experiment. Or
| much better yet, put together a focus group comprised of
| real people within the personas you're interested in, and
| run the experiment using their real accounts.
|
| > _If we posit that every user eventually trains Google
| to avoid SEO spam_
|
| I don't think it's that, I think it's that every user
| trains it to return results more likely to improve the
| metric of "more likely to click one of the links", and I
| think that makes it more, not less, likely that they see
| what most of us here consider to be spam.
|
| But I don't know! Maybe that's not what this experimental
| setup would show. But it would be a lot more enlightening
| than a setup using a fresh incognito window, which
| reflects the usage pattern of a proportion of search
| queries that is a tiny rounding error above zero.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Why are you assuming all users are logged in to google
| all the time?
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Google has billions of user accounts ....
| sanderjd wrote:
| Because it is objectively the case that the "average
| user" of the internet has a google cookie in their
| browser. It doesn't require that they be logged in -
| though I believe it's likely also the case that the
| "average user" is indeed logged into a google account -
| it just requires that they use google search without
| turning off cookies or specifically blocking google's.
| Essentially everybody uses google search and essentially
| nobody cares enough (or would know how) to turn off
| cookies or block google's cookie.
|
| If this doesn't describe most people you know, you're in
| a very small bubble. (I'm somewhat in that bubble too,
| but I still have lots of family and friends who use the
| internet the normal way.)
| gkbrk wrote:
| Google gets paid when you click on an ad. It's reasonable
| to guess you're not going to click on too many scam
| software ads with your software engineer profile. So
| naturally you'll be showed less of them.
|
| In this thread we can see people both using incognito tabs
| seeing different results, it will only become worse to
| compare if they are using personalized results.
| teleforce wrote:
| I'm also in the same camp who think search results from Google
| is very good but ChatGPT based search with RAG is better,
| granted it's a paid version. The latter however is kind of
| experimental, personally would love to have another column on
| ChatGPT with RAG (Bing) and the fact the author ignored RAG is
| rather strange.
| erybodyknows wrote:
| For those (like me) wondering what RAG means: "Retrieval
| Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a groundbreaking
| approach in information retrieval, where the accuracy of
| search results directly influences the quality of generated
| answers. In essence, RAG combines traditional search
| mechanisms with Large Language Model's ability to understand
| and generate answers."
|
| (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-increased-search-
| accur....)
| jll29 wrote:
| The topic of control (in ChatGPT like models) explained:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.11701.pdf
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| If you like Bing (ChatGPT with RAG), then also give
| perplexity.ai a try - similar concept, but IMO better
| executed.
|
| https://www.perplexity.ai/
| anonymoushn wrote:
| cross-posted: Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box
| and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get
| you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new
| tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab
| and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with
| an error message saying "The download link not found." and does
| not help you download the video.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| savefrom.net used to be good but it seems they've switched
| their MO. plenty of decent alternatives filled the gap
| though.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Can you name the alternatives, and are they present in the
| search results?
| beezle wrote:
| Put me in the camp of google and the rest are horrible for all
| but very specific/unique technical terms, ie weak neutral
| currents. Anything that is more "everyday life" is an exercise
| in futility sorting through trash, often without even the terms
| you are looking for. And good luck with "verbatim" searches -
| either ignored or zero results.
| bee_rider wrote:
| An adblocker is necessary, and IMO a script blocker as well. I
| feel vaguely like search has gotten worse over time, but it is
| not a huge problem--usually a good site is on the first page or
| two, and so I can just go check them out.
|
| But if clicking a site meant I would be under attack, that
| really increases the stakes, I start to care strongly about the
| absence of bad sites, not just the existence of a good one.
|
| Other than that, people need to be trained to not download
| programs from websites in general. I think this has gotten
| better over time? This is just a human mistake. Maybe Google
| could suppress sites that link to executables. It must, right?
| pixl97 wrote:
| It would suppress linking to malware executables, but just
| general programs I don't see why they would.
| bee_rider wrote:
| By the time you know enough about a site to download some
| random executable off it and run it, you know more than
| enough to just enter the URL, so there's no point to having
| it show up in search results.
| omoikane wrote:
| > they could make a different test
|
| The takeaway I got from the article is everyone can make their
| _own_ test, as opposed to relying on other people 's sentiments
| and memes about X is bad or Y is good.
|
| Trying to emulate a non-expert experience without workarounds
| is not the common usage pattern since everyone familiar with
| their favorite tools have ways to get more value out of them,
| but this article presents a way of constructing an experiment
| (this is why I chose these queries, this is how I ranked scams,
| etc.), and I think people should follow this same spirit to
| evaluate if they are stuck in a local optimum with their
| current choice of tools.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When
| people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that
| allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And
| the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people
| that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the
| kind of search
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's the tricky mind-reading aspect about search intent.
|
| Different people have varying expectations as to what they want
| to find with the same query. I'd definitely want yt-dlp in
| favor of some website.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| it's easy: just append command line to the query like you
| would append android app if you wanted and android app
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That is a user POV solution, speaking from the search
| engine POV.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Based on your handle, I suspect you have much better
| insight into this than the rest of us!
|
| But can the search engine mind-read by assuming Windows
| users don't want to use a command-line utility?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| They can based on user tracking and profiling, but that's
| murky waters I personally don't want to dip into.
| notRobot wrote:
| I assume you meant to say you _don 't_ want to! :)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I accidentally a word.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| They do not do that, have you tried using them?
| yashasolutions wrote:
| Kagi is great, it's now my daily driver for search. This is after
| I got tired of DDG, moved to Google (through StartPage), but the
| spammy result, or just irrelevant... and the fact that sometime
| they aren't any results even... for the most trivial search. So I
| switch recently to Kagi, and so far it's been smooth sailing and
| a real time saver.
| buro9 wrote:
| mostly my search is now Wikipedia.
|
| I'm probably in a very small group who have the entirety of
| English wikipedia (without images) on my Android (via Kiwix), and
| I just search that. 99% of the time that's all I need.
|
| the only exceptions are super current things like weather
| (Windy), or travel (Navan work travel system gives me enough to
| just go direct to airlines, hotels, etc), and local (OSM via
| Organic Maps).
|
| I've almost completely degoogled (not intentionally, but driven
| gradually by Google becoming crappy incrementally), but didn't
| really find a single generic replacement as much as I found far
| better single purpose tools.
|
| I'm reminded of that Craigslist image showing how many startups
| were each competing against specific parts of Craigslist
| https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20... ,
| and this is what it feels like is happening to Google.. they're
| being beaten in specific areas, but at the same time spam and
| crap is diluting their core product.
| jimbobthemighty wrote:
| The Github link is my top result on Google. Clearly a mix of
| uBlock and Privacy Badger are more powerful than most appreciate.
| jmakov wrote:
| Using phind most of the time. Would be interesting adding it.
| ic_fly2 wrote:
| I have a small page that modifies my get requests to google by
| adding -site:... for a bunch of most annoying content farms for
| stuff I search often (docs)
| Dah00n wrote:
| Have you tried uBlacklist?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project
| such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like
| "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all
| of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term.
| Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool
| to download video from YouTube.
|
| Is that true? Do most people want to install a command line tool
| to download youtube videos?
| Dah00n wrote:
| No. They want sites like savefrom.net - which is hit number one
| on Google.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text
| box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries
| to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it,
| the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close
| the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net
| presents you with an error message saying "The download link
| not found." and does not help you download the video.
| gkbrk wrote:
| I tried this. I went to savefrom.net. First thing it does
| is ask permission to send notifications.
|
| After that there is a popup asking me if I want to continue
| in the browser or download their app. If I click download,
| it downloads a file called download_helper_2.3.27.apk.
|
| Instead of downloading their app, if I paste a YouTube
| link, it tells me I can wait or download their APK to skip
| waiting. The download link downloads an older version
| called download_helper_2.3.19.apk.
|
| When I do the process again, instead of the older APK link
| it gives me a Chrome extension link. But if you look at the
| instructions you see that it's not a Chrome extension, but
| a minified userscript. And it has `@include https://*` so
| it can basically run on any website regardless of clicking
| on an extension icon like regular browser extensions.
|
| If I try to ignore all the distractions and wait for the
| download link, I can click it and it downloads the MP4
| file. But it also opens a popunder with the domain
| https://refpamjeql.top/.
|
| Not the best experience, and seems like a high risk of
| getting malware, but it does get an MP4 file at some point.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Interesting! I tried again and got completely different
| results this time. Now there's no malware tab, and
| instead it tries to get me to pay for a subscription to
| download high-quality videos or MP3s. If I click the
| barely-visible "Just let me download in my browser with
| low quality" below the paid subscription button, I get
| the same error as before.
|
| Edit: the paid subscription payment flow says I'm
| actually buying "Televzr Premium Max Subscription for
|
| 1 Month_mp
|
| Televzr helps get wireless access to the media library on
| the computer from the mobile phone"
|
| So it purports to be something unrelated to downloading
| youtube videos. I didn't pay 1400 yen for it, so I won't
| get to find out if it helps me download youtube videos.
| BoostandEthanol wrote:
| There's something incredibly entertaining to me about even this
| well researched article struggling to find a reason for why wider
| tyres have more grip.
|
| As I understand it, this is because tyres are still somewhat of a
| mystery, and anyone outside of a laboratory really doesn't know
| shit. The best explanation I can think of is due to tyre load
| sensitivity. The friction coefficient of rubber decreases with
| normal force (E.g, a heavily loaded tyre has a lower friction
| coefficient), which is a pretty well accepted fact, this is one
| of the methods engineers will use to tune the handling of cars.
| This means a wider tyre has a lower force per unit area of the
| contact patch, which means it'll have a higher friction
| coefficient.
|
| Now that sounds plausible to me, but that's just my best guess
| explanation.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/
|
| gives good tyre advice (obviously not car tyres, but info is
| there)
| joshuaissac wrote:
| For the ad blocker results, the author judges the search engines
| by how they rank the best result (uBlock Origin), but I think
| that search results that point to Adblock Plus or AdBlock are
| good enough. Sure, they do not block all ads, and take money from
| advertisers to allow through certain types of ads, but they still
| block ads in general, and 'acceptable ads' can be disabled in the
| settings. So I would consider these 'good results', rather than
| 'bad results'/'very bad results' as the author does.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I don't understand the praise of Marginalia.
|
| When I search for "Steve Jobs" on Marginalia, I got blogs about
| his speech in 2011 and some mailing list from 2007.
|
| When I search for my own name I get nothing. In Google it's just
| me.
|
| It's cool that one person built all this of course but... that's
| not a good search result compared to Google?
|
| Maybe I miss something, maybe I use it wrong
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| What do you expect when you search for Steve Jobs? Also, which
| filter did you use?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I don't know I used any filters? I don't know what are
| filters sorry
|
| I expect wikipedia article on Jobs as a baseline.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Ah, I downrank Wikipedia pretty hard :P
| shp0ngle wrote:
| By the way please don't take it as if I am taking you down or
| something
|
| It's amazing what you did, it's just not a Google killer? or
| at least I don't see it
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's really not supposed to be either. Like it's designed
| to be the search engine you use when you can't find
| something elsewhere, so it's largely designed to show you
| different results than the ones you get on Google and Bing.
|
| In general a lot of the complaints seem to be "I'm not
| getting what I expect from Google". Well... yeah. That's
| the point. If someone wants the same results as Google,
| they should arguably use Google.
| haizhung wrote:
| What always confuses me about the ,,search has gotten so bad"
| mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at
| best, and anecdotal recollection at worst.
|
| Like, sure, I have the _impression_ that search got worse over
| the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell?
|
| And, honestly, this should be a verifiable claim; you can just
| try the top N search terms from Google trends or whatever and see
| how they perform. It should be easy to make a benchmark, and yet
| no one (who complains about this issue) ever bothers to make one.
|
| Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria by
| which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5
| examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any general
| claims.
|
| So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the
| sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying
| that claim.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Probably for the same reason that there are so many more posts
| about anything that make claims than that explore evidence
| systematically, especially when the people making the posts
| stand to gain nothing by spending their time that way.
|
| I encounter claims that "protobuf is faster than json" pretty
| regularly but it seems like nobody has actually benchmarked
| this. Typical protobuf decoder benchmarks say that protobuf
| decodes ~5x slower than json, and I don't think it's ~5x
| smaller for the same document, but I'm also not dedicating my
| weekend to convincing other people about this.
| ForkMeOnTinder wrote:
| The problem with benchmarking that claim is there's no one
| true "json decoder" that everyone uses. You choose one based
| on your language -- JSON.stringify if you're using JS,
| serde_json if you're using Rust, etc.
|
| So what people are actually saying is, a typical protobuf
| implementation decodes faster than a typical JSON
| implementation for a typical serialized object -- and that's
| true in my experience.
|
| Tying this back into the thread topic of search engine
| results, I googled "protobuf json benchmark" and the first
| result is this Golang benchmark which seems relevant.
| https://shijuvar.medium.com/benchmarking-protocol-buffers-
| js... Results for specific languages like "rust protobuf json
| benchmark" also look nice and relevant, but I'm not gonna
| click on all these links to verify.
|
| In my experience programming searches tend to get much better
| results than other types of searches, so I think the
| article's claim still holds.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I agree. You wouldn't use encoding/json or serde-json if
| you had to deserialize a lot of json and you cared about
| latency, throughput, or power costs. A typical protobuf
| decoder would be better.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think the point he's trying to make that the search results
| page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of
| scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating
| safely.
|
| If he was looking at relevance, yours would be a solid point,
| but since most of the emphasis is on harm, a smaller sample
| works. Like "we found used needles in 3 out of 5 playgrounds"
| doesn't typically garner requests for p-values and error bars.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think this is a good illustration of my frustration with
| this discussion: I don't think search has gotten bad, I think
| the web has gotten bad. It's weird to even conceptualize it
| as a big graph of useful hypertext documents. That's just
| wikipedia. The broader web is this much noisier and dubious
| thing now.
|
| That's bad for google though! Their model is very much
| predicated on the web having a lot of signal that they can
| find within the noise. But if it just ... doesn't actually
| have much signal, then what?
| whakim wrote:
| But there's still plenty of signal. It isn't as if there
| are no working YouTube downloaders, or factually correct
| explanations of how transistors work. It's just that search
| engines don't know how to (or don't care enough about)
| disambiguating these good results from the mountains of
| spam or malware.
| devinmcafee wrote:
| I think that both of you are correct. The internet has
| much more "noise" than in the past (partially due to
| websites gaming SEO to show up higher in Google's search
| results). As a result, Google's algorithm returns more
| "noise" per query now than it used to. It is a less
| effective filter through the noise.
|
| Imagine Google were like a water filter you install on
| your kitchen faucet to filter out unwanted chemicals from
| your drinking water. If as the years progress your
| municipal tap water starts to contain a higher baseline
| of unwanted chemicals, and as a result the filter begins
| to let through more chemicals than it did before, you'd
| consider your filter pretty cruddy for its use case. At
| the bare minimum you'd call it outdated. That is what is
| happening to Google search
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| On the one hand, I'm not sure the data corroborates that.
| If this is a web problem and not a search engine problem,
| then I'd expect every search engine to have the same
| pattern of scam results.
|
| I'd also argue that finding relevant results among a sea of
| irrelevant results is the primary function of a search
| engine. This was as true in 1998 as it is today. In fact,
| it was Google's "killer feature", unlike Altavista and the
| likes it showed you far more relevant results.
| gmd63 wrote:
| If the web is being polluted by a nefarious search engine
| provider that is excluding the polluted pages from their
| algorithm, you wouldn't see the same pattern across
| search engines
|
| Not saying or even suggesting that's happening, but the
| logic isn't airtight
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well, there's always the Munchaussen trilemma, by which
| no reasoning is airtight.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Relevant is a difficult concept to agree on. In 1998 it
| was more about X != Y, that is being shown legit pages
| that just were not the correct topic.
|
| These days the results are apt to be the correct topic,
| but instead optimized for some other metric than what the
| user wants. For example downloading malware or showing as
| many crypto ads as possible.
|
| I don't expect every search engine to have the same scam
| results. Scammers target individual search engines with
| particular methodologies. Google does a lot of work to
| prevent crap on their engines, the issue is the scammers
| in total do far more.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| The web has gotten bad because of what big search engines
| have encouraged. If they stopped incentivizing publishing
| complete garbage (by ruthlessly delisting low quality sites
| regardless of their ad quantity, etc) then maybe we'd see a
| resurgence of good content.
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| The web is bad because it is both popular and commercial.
| Every now and then I fantasize that just finding a
| sufficiently user-hostile corner would suffice to
| recreate the early internet experience of an online world
| nearly exclusively populated by anticommercial geeks.
| eep_social wrote:
| I understand this is the tactic the Gemeni folks are
| using.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I don't think so. I think it's the inevitable outcome of
| giving all of humanity the ability to broadcast without
| curation.
|
| Or maybe we're saying essentially the same thing, but you
| think search engines should be doing that curation. But
| that was never my conception of what search engines are
| for.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I think we are indeed saying the same thing. However, I
| would like search engines to do some curation --
| specifically, to remove results that deliver malware, are
| clones of other sites, and are just entirely content free
| (eg Microsoft's forums).
|
| I'll give Google credit: I haven't seen gitmemory or SO
| clones in a while. It took a few years but they seem to
| have dealt with them.
| hyperpape wrote:
| I agree we can say "this is a minefield of scams" without
| doing a comparison.
|
| There still is a question about when it got bad--I think Dan
| mentions 2016 as a point of comparison, and there were plenty
| of scams back then, so you might wonder whether the days when
| a query wouldn't return many scams.
|
| If you go back far enough, then there wasn't the same kind of
| SEO, and Internet scams were much smaller/less organized, but
| that's a long time ago.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think the automation tools for scams are what the major
| change is. In the distant past it was humans doing this,
| now I'm guessing there are a few larger businesses and
| likely nation states that have a point and click interface
| that removes 99% of the past work.
| avsteele wrote:
| I don't think this is a fair criticism.
|
| 1) The step where you evaluate "how they perform" is
| necessarily subjective.
|
| 2) you could design a study and recruit participants but that
| isn't something a blogger is going to do.
|
| 3) He does link to polls where people agree with the idea the
| result have gotten worse. Yeah, there are sampling problems
| with a poll, but its better than nothing.
|
| In this case especially, the writer is answering the question:
| "Whose results are best according to my tastes?"
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Internet Archive remembers.
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com/search/%2A
|
| Find a query of interest, see for yourself (and take a snapshot
| of the present state for posterity).
|
| The api enables more powerful queries,
| https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=google.co.jp*&pag...
|
| Also try other search engines and languages.
| jll29 wrote:
| > Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria
| by which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5
| examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any
| general claims.
|
| US NIST, in their annual TREC evaluation of search systems in
| the scientific/academic world, use sets of 25 or 50 queries
| (confusingly called "topics" in the jargon).
|
| For each, a mandated data collection is searched by retired
| intelligence analysts to find (almost) all relevant result,
| which are represented by document ID in general search and by a
| regular expression that matches the relevant answer for
| question answering (when that was evaluated, 1998-2006).
|
| Such an approach is expensive but has the advantage of being
| reusable.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Dan approached the problem from a qualitative perspective.
| Perhaps if more people took this approach over quantitative
| maximalism we would actually have products that don't drive us
| fucking insane.
|
| All that matters _is_ the overwhelming sentiment that search
| has gotten worse, not the same fucking spreadsheet that got us
| here in the first place!
| bee_rider wrote:
| > So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the
| sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying
| that claim.
|
| I suspect it has gotten worse, so posts complaining about it
| resonate. But, it is not really a huge problem, and anyway it
| isn't as if there's much I can do about it, so I'm not going to
| bother collecting statistically valid data.
|
| I think this is generally true about a lot of things. We should
| be OK with admitting that we aren't all that data-driven and
| lots of our beliefs are based on anecdotes bouncing around in
| conversations. Lots of things are not really very important.
| And IMO we should better signal that our preferences and
| opinions aren't facts; far too many people mix up the two from
| what I've seen.
| pixl97 wrote:
| When it comes to human psychology what we believe tends to be
| more important than what is when it comes to future
| predictions of our actions. If people think search sucks then
| it's likely they'll use less of it in the future and it opens
| up companies like Google for disruption.
| narag wrote:
| _What always confuses me about the ,,search has gotten so bad"
| mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at
| best, and anecdotal recollection at worst._
|
| I can't speak for anybody else, just trying to find stuff
| online, not writing a treatise about it or writing my own
| engine to outcompete Google. It's been asked _many_ times here
| over the years and the answer was always _explanations_ , never
| solutions.
|
| Shittification does not happen overnight, but along many years.
| It started with Google deciding that some search terms weren't
| so popular: "did you mean...?" (forcing a second click to do
| what you intended to do in the first place) and went downhill
| when qualifiers to override that crap got ignored.
|
| For me enough was enough when I realized that a simple query
| with three words, chosen carefully to point to the desired
| page, gave thousands of results, none of them relevant. YMMV.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| So you're confused why other people aren't doing research for
| you and when they do provide some evidence, you dismiss it
| because it's not a large-scale scientific inquiry into search
| quality? Get frickin a grip.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Even without looking at the subjective quality of search
| results, the sheer user hostility of the design of the Google
| search results page is an obvious, objective instance of how
| search has enshittified.
|
| That is, in the early days, Google used to highlight that
| "search position couldn't be gamed/bought" as one of their
| primary differentiators, ads were clearly displayed with a
| distinct yellow background, and there weren't that many ads.
| Nowadays, when I do any remotely commercial search the entire
| first page and a half at least on mobile is ads, and the only
| thing that differentiates ads from organic results is a tiny
| piece of "Sponsored" text.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Some things are easily quantifiable, but very few. Such as the
| number of ads per search. Back in the day google had at most 1
| and it was visibly distinct from the rest of the links.
|
| Otherwise, yeah, maybe search didn't degrade but the internet
| got more spammy. Or maybe users just got wiser and can see
| through the smoke screen better. Who knows...
|
| Doesn't change the fact that today one has to know how to
| filter through pages of generic results made by low effort
| content farms. Results that are of dubious validity, which at
| best simply waste your time. Or through clones of other
| websites (i.e. Stackoverflow clones).
|
| Search engines can choose to help with that (kagi certainly
| puts in the effort and I love it for that), or they can ignore
| the problem and milk you for ad clicks.
|
| Anecdotal evidence is good enough for me.
| ta988 wrote:
| Yes to get an accurate comparison we would need to have results
| from queries 10 years ago.
|
| I still remember myself having to really often go to page 3 and
| more of google searches to find things even really early on.
|
| I think it has never been good, got a bit better before SEO
| farms took all the gain out. That's my feeling with nothing to
| back it.
| arp242 wrote:
| To do this you would need to have a comprehensive definition of
| "quality", and that's anything but easy, and it will be at
| least partly subjective. It's also hard to include omissions in
| your definition of "quality" (and again, what should or should
| not be omitted is subjective as well).
|
| For example, let's say I search for "Gaza"; on one extreme end
| some engines might only focus on recent events, whereas others
| may ignore recent events and includes only general information.
| Is one higher "quality" than the other? Not really - it depends
| what you're looking for innit?
|
| All you can really do is make a subjective list of things you
| find important and rate things according to that, and this is
| basically just the same thing as an anecdotal account but with
| extra steps.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| _> has it really? How could you tell?_
|
| Yes it has and for a certain class of queries it's not even
| open for debate, because Google themselves have stated they
| deliberately made it worse. And they really did, it's very
| noticeable.
|
| This class of queries is for anything related to any
| perspective deemed "non authoritative". Try to find information
| that contradicts the US Government on medical questions, for
| example, and even when you know what page you're looking for
| you won't be able to find it except via the most specific
| forcing e.g. exact quoted substrings.
|
| Likewise, try finding stories that are mostly covered by
| Breitbart on Google and you won't be able to. They suppress
| conservative news sites to stop them ranking.
|
| 15 years ago Google wasn't doing that. It would usually return
| what you were looking for regardless of topic. There are now
| many topics - which specifically is a secret - on which the
| result quality is deliberately trashed because they'd prefer to
| show you the wrong results in an attempt to change your mind
| about something, than the results you actually asked for.
| torginus wrote:
| I wonder if this aggregate enshittification of computers (be it
| search, social media, video games) etc. is actually a good thing
| for humans in general.
|
| I feel like today's digital spaces don't have as strong a grip on
| the minds of people - I think folks started rediscovering the
| value of genunine human interaction and hobbies that do not
| involve a computer screen.
|
| For example, I haven't seen the equivalent of 2000s-2010s
| Facebook addicts or (WoW addicts in the gaming space) to such an
| extent, with parasocial media, such as TikTok or Youtube or
| Twitch, having replaced social media, and social video gaming
| such as MMOs having lost a lot of popularity.
| nunez wrote:
| > When I tried running the query from the paper, "cellular phone"
| (no quotes) and, the top result was a Google Store link to buy
| Google's own Pixel 7, with the rest of the top results being
| various Android phones sold on Amazon.
|
| Interestingly, if you add "before:2001-01-01" to the query, the
| paper that Brin and Page referenced shows up as the third result.
|
| That this query now ranks phones you can buy higher than
| information about phones makes sense, since the web is much
| bigger these days and cell phones are much more widely accessible
| than they were back then.
|
| > Although Google doesn't publicly provide the ability to see
| what was historically returned for queries, many people remember
| when straightforward queries generally returned good results.
|
| See above. Sort of.
|
| ---
|
| I wish Dan spent more time talking about Kagi. I, too, have found
| it terrible for searching for things to buy and some images but
| excellent otherwise.
| sundalia wrote:
| The intro query "youtube downloader" already showed me relevant
| results (some website where you paste an URL and bam download). I
| think there's a big tech bias in the whole post (how relevant is
| a mastodon poll, for real).
|
| Not saying the current landscape doesn't suck with ads everywhere
| and incentives to not give exactly relevant results at times, but
| I think google is pretty good still.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Which web site did you use to successfully download a youtube
| video, and which youtube video did you downloadl?
| swayvil wrote:
| Without labor to run their circus, 99% of business would
| disappear overnight.
|
| Without business, spam would disappear.
|
| So if you remove the labor you remove the spam.
|
| So the best spam filter is UBI.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I had to stop reading this because I found it too depressing and
| it triggered a lot of anger about how big tech combined with the
| incentives of capitalism is basically fucking up the world.
| btbuildem wrote:
| On a side note: would it kill the author of the site to use a
| stylesheet?
| hasmolo wrote:
| it's the same as my choice to only use lowercase letters, it is
| designed to make you upset that i am not following conventions.
| that's as far as i have been able to figure for hwy i started
| doing this, and by extension, why tech bois love to drop some
| vital freature to communication to signal being an 'insider'
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'd love to see this a little extended.
|
| Searx and Yandex.
|
| Specifically... if I need something even slightly "gray", Yandex
| is the only option anymore. Torrent search on google et al is
| just awful.
| airstrike wrote:
| > Continuing with the theme of running simple, naive, queries, we
| used the free version of ChatGPT for this post, which means the
| queries were run through ChatGPT 3.5.
|
| why
| jbmilgrom wrote:
| Was gpt4 used (with paying subscription)?
| IceMichael wrote:
| Okay, so all search engines suck. Yeah, that matches my
| experience
| justinl33 wrote:
| > _It 's common to criticize ChatGPT for its hallucinations and,
| while I don't think that's unfair, as we noted in this 2015, pre-
| LLM post on AI, I find this general class of criticism to be
| overrated in that humans and traditional computer systems make
| the exact same mistakes._
|
| Finally some one said it. We are unnecessarily harsh on
| hallucinations. LLM's don't intentionally 'lie'. To say this is a
| wrongful anthropomorphism.
| krapp wrote:
| It's also a wrongful anthropomorphism to claim that human
| beings "make the exact same mistakes" as LLMs, because they
| don't. Humans don't confabulate the way LLMs do unless they
| have a severe mental illness. A human doctor isn't as likely to
| simply make up diseases, or symptoms, or medications, whereas
| an LLM will do so routinely, because they don't understand
| anything like human anatomy, disease, chemistry or medicine,
| only the stochastic matching of text tokens.
|
| We're not unnecessarily harsh on hallucinations, it's
| absolutely necessary because of how effective LLMs are at
| convincing people that because they can generate language, they
| are capable of sentient thought, self-awareness and reason.
| Acting as if humans and LLMs are basically equally trustworthy,
| or worse, that LLMs are more trustworthy, is _dangerous._ If we
| accept this as axiomatic, shit will break and people will die.
| maronato wrote:
| To validate hallucinations is anthropomorphism. Tools shouldn't
| make stuff up.
|
| I don't second guess Pythons math results. If the result is
| wrong, that's my fault for coding it wrong, never Pythons for
| hallucinating
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| Ironically I had to use a search engine to discover what "Mwmbl"
| was. It's apparently a search engine. But, visiting the front
| page, I see something akin to a git commit log?! I'm not sure I'd
| have guessed that this was a SE if Brave Search did not tell me
| it was (even then I'm not convinced yet).
|
| https://mwmbl.org/
|
| Added: Interesting. Apparently it's allowed to edit the SERPS
| there. Which implies that I'm out, but (well, because) I've got a
| feeling which kind of Internet Entrepreneurs this factoid will
| appeal to
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