[HN Gopher] Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta
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Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta
Author : holysoles
Score : 193 points
Date : 2025-11-08 00:37 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mullvad.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (mullvad.net)
| holysoles wrote:
| For anyone looking at alternatives, I've been a user of searxng
| for awhile and have found it to be pretty solid.
| backscratches wrote:
| Submit a query to a random instance via
| https://searx.neocities.org (which is set as my homepage).
| BrenBarn wrote:
| This has the same problem that most public searxng instances
| seem to have nowadays, which is that they don't work. Either
| you just get an error about rate limiting or you get results
| totally unrelated to your search. I just tried a couple
| random searches about geographical locations (in English) and
| got back a bunch of results in Chinese.
| mac-attack wrote:
| Mullvad Leta was an engine of choice within SearXNG for my
| self-hosted instance. Disappointed to see it go.
| t0lo wrote:
| i love searx but i wish it could include yandex as well- then
| it would be perfect- dumb wars
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I had been using baresearch.org (a searxng instance) but it's
| recently become unusable, apparently due to the engines it
| aggregates cracking down on such things. I tried some other
| instances but they also don't work. It's a bummer because I
| thought searxng was pretty great for the last year or two.
| holysoles wrote:
| I've been selfhosting my own to avoid this issue. Once in
| awhile a search provider will be unavailable but its pretty
| consistent in pulling in the major ones.
|
| It doesnt require many resource and would be easy enough to
| run it on docker compose alongside a valkey/redis instance. I
| have mine on k8s but i dont think there is a helm chart
| easily found.
| stevage wrote:
| What exactly did it do? And why can't it do that anymore?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Most likely that people are switching to LLM based search
| products in droves and the real demand is there.
| therein wrote:
| Maybe you are but people are certainly not switching to LLM
| based search products in droves.
|
| It is the exact opposite for me. Everyone hates the LLM based
| search products in my circles. Just look at this shitshow.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/lAd3UHn
| jdiff wrote:
| Your circles might have a little more technical literacy
| than most. I'm working part time in retail at a hardware
| store currently and the amount of people who come in
| looking for parts specified exclusively by a single AI
| overview is mindboggling. People repairing car engines come
| in looking for bolts with specific lengths, materials, and
| thread pitches that AI told them they needed. I haven't had
| anyone come back and explicitly tell me that AI led them
| wrong, but I'm sure they've had to make multiple trips back
| out here.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Hardware repairs done by AI recommendations sounds really
| scary and dangerous.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| TBF: people overconfident in their DIY fixing skills are
| precisely the sort replacing searches with an LLM query.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| When I search switching to LLM based
| search products in droves.
|
| it says The shift towards LLM-based
| search products is significant as they offer more
| conversational and personalized responses compared to
| traditional search engines. This change is driven by users
| seeking quicker, more relevant answers and a better overall
| experience
|
| So it must be true, right? Coz that's the only thing I
| searched for. I got my answer. Why would I search for the
| opposite? My bias was confirmed. I'm happy and will repeat
| the results to all my friends, who will search for the same
| thing to confirm and get confirmation!
| edoceo wrote:
| This is sarcasm, correct? Cause really, you wanna find
| data that doesn't agree with you... if the objective is
| to be more smarter.
| chmod775 wrote:
| ChatGPT agreed it's not sarcasm.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| This hurts but it's so accurate lol
| tharkun__ wrote:
| No. And yes.
|
| Yes it's meant sarcastically. Personally I agree with you
| that you want to look at pros and cons, both sides.
|
| But there are many, oh very very many people out there
| who would literally do exactly what I wrote. They do it
| all the time. That's why we have these echo chambers
| everywhere. And AI as we can see here is not making it
| better.
|
| And it's not just the "general population". I see it on a
| technical level too at work. Developers just trusting the
| AI output. It sounded confident when it said it found the
| root cause, fixed the bug and added tests. So it's good
| to commit, right?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| What am I supposed to be outraged by here?
| nl wrote:
| > Just look at this shitshow.
|
| > https://imgur.com/a/lAd3UHn
|
| I don't follow NFL viewership numbers but searching and
| reading the results seems to indicate some support for that
| trend.
|
| What's wrong with it?
| chmod775 wrote:
| Scroll down. There's more.
|
| The LLM responded in the affirmative to all queries, even
| when they seem to contradict each other.
|
| > NFL viewership went down? Yes!
|
| > NFL viewership went up? Yes!
|
| > Home prices are going down? Yes!
|
| > Home prices are going up? Yes!
|
| Google is confirming people's biases on an industrial
| scale. Surely this is not going to do any damage...
| gruez wrote:
| Isn't traditional search going to have the same issue? If
| you search about how chocolate is good for you, you'll
| turn up plenty of sites willing to confirm your beliefs,
| AI summary or not.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Then where's the intelligence in it which a huge chunk of
| biomass wants to rely upon?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I have so many conflicting emotions/impulses.
|
| 1) don't believe everything you read on the internet
|
| 2) it looks like real search results
|
| 3) it's a bunch of crappy smartphone shots of screens
|
| 4) but why would someone work so hard to make these fake
| images
|
| 5) but AI image generation
|
| 6) but they don't look AI-generated
|
| 7) but maybe it's gotten better
|
| I can go on and on and on
|
| My ultimate feeling is "this looks legit." But man. The
| internet just isn't fun anymore. It's so much _work_.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| AI sycophancy[0] is a real problem, for multiple reasons,
| but your example is one that makes me disable AI on all
| search engines entirely.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/25/ai-sycophancy-isnt-
| just-a-...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| While I still often just search with Kagi, I have found it
| often easier to write a fullblown natural language question
| into Kagi Assistant, to query an LLM, which then replies
| and gives me the references, where it supposedly found that
| info. If the reply is weird, I can click through to the
| references and check that out.
| s_ting765 wrote:
| Or search companies are forcing LLM products on visitors and
| claim "see! everyone is using our AI search instead of the
| regular search".
| netfortius wrote:
| DeepSeek seems to go the way of trying to please everybody.
| They offer two alternatives. which you could use separately
| or both in the same time (named in an obvious way): DeepThink
| and ... well ... Search :)
| r721 wrote:
| Launch thread (5 months ago):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116503
| rollulus wrote:
| That was a "people who missed the launch discovered it
| later"-thread. The launch was 2.5 years ago.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397
| mac-attack wrote:
| IIRC, they initially only allowed VPN users to access the
| engine up until the 2nd announcement
| culi wrote:
| It's a privacy proxy for searching on Google, Brave, idk if
| they have others. It strips away any tracking info
|
| Searx is a similar idea. More powerful but definitely uglier
| Taek wrote:
| Sad to see it go, at the same time I never used it and it seems
| that the rationale is highly pragmatic, so you certainly won't
| find me protesting the decision.
|
| Privacy is an uphill battle, we should use our efforts where they
| make the most impact.
| mkatx wrote:
| Damn.. I just learned about this.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Similar privacy can be achieved through the combination of a VPN
| and a privacy-focused browser.
|
| Mullvad sell a VPN and privacy-focused browser so how are they
| unable to proxy the searches themselves? They already have the
| needed tools developed.
| jdiff wrote:
| A VPN and a privacy-focused browser have similar practical
| usefulness to a private search engine. They cannot be used to
| create a private search engine.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Yes, they can. You use the browser with the VPN to search
| sites like Bing and then scrape the search results.
| jdiff wrote:
| You don't need a whole browser for that, just a VPN. And
| that'd likely get their servers blocked for their users if
| Google's cracking down on them already.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >cracking down on them already.
|
| If they crack down on it then the suggestion to use a VPN
| and privacy browser won't work either.
| culi wrote:
| The browser is free btw and a great browser. Basically Tor
| without all the Tor protocol parts
| jsheard wrote:
| It always seemed like Leta was on thin ice since it queried
| Googles Search API and then cached the results for 30 days, which
| I believe is against Googles TOS. I wonder if they finally
| noticed and got mad.
|
| https://developers.google.com/terms
|
| > you will not [...] keep cached copies longer than permitted by
| the cache header
| benatkin wrote:
| They didn't get mad. Part of Google's playbook is openwashing,
| where they act open in order to get more people to lock into
| their tech.
| themafia wrote:
| > Part of Google's playbook is openwashing
|
| I think it's easier to just call it "lying." Nearly to the
| point of "breaking the law."
| t0lo wrote:
| fair enough- i used it a few times but brave was just more
| convenient- also for everyone here brave does its' own indexing
| and you can downrank and uprank sites and it will remember it
| without an accout
| mouse-5346 wrote:
| How has your experience with brave been privacy wise? Do they
| have an advertising network? Do they have sponsored search
| results or data harvesting?
| geokon wrote:
| a bit tangential but has anyone noticed a serious degredation in
| quality with duckduckgo? its become completely unusable and ive
| had to switch to Bing :(
|
| My guess is search's days are numbered and companies are
| "pivoting" away to other projects
|
| a shutdown is preferable to silent bitrot
| eviks wrote:
| But ddg is just Bing? How is it worse?
| geokon wrote:
| i dont know their internals but its very clearly not. You can
| try side by side. Extremely basic searches fail. It seems
| intermittent and inconsisent. Maybe their backend to Bing
| fails and the fallback is terrible. Just guessing
|
| Right this moment it seems to work. 2 Days ago Id search for
| something basic like "CSS colors" and not get back a single
| usable result
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Are you perhaps getting AI-generated trash that is just SEO
| optimized? I've noticed a TON more of these results in DDG
| and Google lately. You can now block those websites
| completely from DDG as of very recently (or at least I only
| noticed it very recently, and it's a true godsend to filter
| out all this AI-generated trash).
| geokon wrote:
| how do you block them?
|
| but yeah its a combination of SEO trash but it also
| seemingly not having stuff indexed
|
| I'd search "Ask Clojure" or "Clojure Agents" and nothing
| from Clojure.org would show up
|
| or like "MDN SVG circle" and the MDN would just not show
| up.
|
| of course today im trying it and its all working haha
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Weird, DDG supposedly uses Bing which should be indexing
| everything. Then again this is Microsoft, who can't even
| get local search working - Win11 lately can't even find
| Add/Remove Programs on my PC, I have to go through
| Settings and click 18 times before I find it.
|
| re blocking: after every search in the upper-right corner
| of each link I see 3 dots which opens a menu and offers
| "block this site from all results".
| AnonC wrote:
| DuckDuckGo has always been bad or just adequate for some
| specific purposes. Though it's been my default search engine
| for a long time, I do use the "!g" bang command on the search
| query to switch to Google when I find that DDG's results aren't
| relevant or adequate.
|
| In the last year or so, I look for the summaries from "Search
| Assist" and the dive into a chat with the (limited?) LLM models
| that it provides. It's my go to for LLM usage. It's rarely and
| for more complex needs that I go to ChatGPT.
| duttish wrote:
| Whenever ddg returns shit results for me and I try !g I still
| get shit results, but with more ads. I've stopped trying !g
| since a couple of years now.
|
| Wonder what's different, it seems people's experience differ
| quite a lot.
| culi wrote:
| Truth is no one has as much data as Google and no one can
| build as good of a search engine as they can. Google
| results "suck" on purpose. They want you to google
| something multiple times so they can serve you more ads.
| But they are totally capable of building a good search
| engine
|
| Kagi is proof of this. Kagi results are almost all the
| Google search API. It shows that Google is completely
| capable of building a better search engine if they wanted
| to
| Cerium wrote:
| I switched to Kagi a few years ago and have not looked back.
| The quality has been great and continues to perform well.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Is location aware search usable now? The answer when I was
| using it like a year ago was... no
| aryonoco wrote:
| In my experience, yes. I'm in Australia and when I want
| results from my state or even my neighbourhood, I only get
| the relevant results now.
|
| I think YMMV though and this is probably highly location
| dependant.
| rectang wrote:
| I recently bought a DDG subscription because of their duck.ai
| service.
|
| For $10/month it's great to have someone whose incentives are
| aligned with my own managing my relationships with AI companies
| I'd otherwise have to monitor constantly for privacy abuses.
|
| I haven't noticed a recent degradation in DDG's search results,
| but I'm also turning to duck.ai more frequently and on the
| whole my search/investigation experience is better.
|
| The one significant downside is that duck.ai limits the length
| of your chats, but considering the price that's not surprising.
|
| The direction I'd like to see the industry go is better
| integration of search results into AI chat, blurring the
| distinction between the two. That would make both products more
| compelling: search results are made more friendly with AI
| summaries, and original sources help to counter AI
| hallucinations and obsequious blather.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| AI is killing websites[0]. Why visit a website if the AI
| summary is good? But soon, if everyone is only using AI
| results, then there will be no reason to create new websites,
| unless you don't care about anyone visiting your site except
| for AI crawlers.
|
| [0]: I won't bother linking any articles since there are too
| many articles on the subject and whatever I link is probably
| not the site you want (or is maybe paywalled).
| rectang wrote:
| There are many serious ethical and practical problems posed
| by the rise of LLMs, and I agree that this is one.
|
| My hope is that AI helps to fine tune inquiries and helps
| users discover websites that would otherwise not have been
| uncovered by traditional index-based search.
|
| Unfortunately it's in the interests of search and AI
| companies to keep you inside their portals, so they may be
| less than willing to link to the outside even when it would
| improve the experience.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Hard agree. I was recently at a talk from Jaron
| Lanier[0], who proposed that AI should, after every
| query, present on the right-side of the page a list of
| all clickable sources where AI gathered it's data from,
| so that we could verify accuracy, as well as allowing us
| to continue giving traffic to websites.
|
| [0] https://www.jaronlanier.com
|
| edit: grammar
| mystraline wrote:
| When I do use LLMs, I explicitly ask for all claims with
| a footnote and the source used for citation.
|
| I almost always get the claim(1) and footnote with URL or
| book, or DOI.
| bloggie wrote:
| I haven't used LLMs much but Perplexity always give me
| tons of links, I really appreciate it vs. chatgpt.
| imiric wrote:
| > Unfortunately it's in the interests of search and AI
| companies to keep you inside their portals, so they may
| be less than willing to link to the outside even when it
| would improve the experience.
|
| This is true, but aren't "AI" summaries directly opposed
| to this interest? The user will usually get the answer
| they need much more quickly than if they had to scroll
| down the page, hunt for the right result, and get exposed
| to ads. So "AI" summaries are actually the _better_ user
| experience.
|
| In time I'm sure that we'll see ads embedded in these as
| well, but in the current stage of the "AI" hype cycle,
| users actually benefit from this feature.
| brookst wrote:
| Might as well hope that websites optimize for sending
| people to bookstores.
| imiric wrote:
| > AI is killing websites
|
| I think that's hyperbole.
|
| Yes, users can rely on "AI" summaries if they want a quick
| answer, but they've been able to do that for years via page
| snippets underneath each result, which usually highlight
| the relevant part of the page. The same argument was made
| when search engines began showing page snippets, yet we
| found a balance, and websites are still alive.
|
| On the contrary, there's an argument to be made that search
| engines providing answers is the better user experience. I
| don't want to be forced to visit a website, which will
| likely have filler, popups, and be SEO'd to hell, when I
| can get the information I want in a fraction of the time
| and effort, within a consistent interface. If I do need
| additional information, then I can go to the source.
|
| I do agree with the idea you mention below of search
| engines providing source links, but even without it, "AI"
| summaries can hardly be blamed for hurting website traffic.
| Websites are doing that on their own with user hostile
| design, SEO spam, scams, etc.
|
| There is a long list of issues we can criticize search
| engines for, and the use of "AI" even more so, but machine-
| generated summaries on SERPs is not one of them IMO.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| I guess you didn't take up my offer to search for how AI
| is killing traffic. There are numerous studies that
| repeatedly prove this to be true, this relatively recent
| article links to a big pile of them[0]. Why would anyone
| visit a website, if the AI summary is seemingly good
| enough?
|
| My issue with AI summaries is that they are not even
| remotely accurate, trustworthy or deterministic. Someone
| else posted this wonderful evidence[1] in the comments.
| LLMs are sycophantic and agree with you all the time,
| even if it means making shit up. Maybe things will
| improve, but for the last 2 years, I have not seen much
| progress regarding hallucinations or deterministic i.e.
| reliable/trustworthy responses. They are still stochastic
| token guessers with some magic tricks sprinkled on top to
| make results slightly better than last month's LLMs.
|
| And what happens when people stop creating new websites
| because they aren't getting any visitors (and by
| extension ad-revenue)? New info will stop being
| disseminated. Where will AI summarize data, if there is
| no new data to summarize? I guess they can just keep
| rehashing the new AI-generated websites, and it will be
| one big pile of endlessly recycled AI shit :)
|
| p.s. I don't disagree with you regarding SEO spam,
| hostile design, cookie popups, etc. There is even a
| hilariously sad website[2] which points out how annoying
| websites have become. But using non-deterministic
| sycophantic AI to "summarize" websites is not the answer,
| at least not in the current form.
|
| [0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/google_ai_over
| views_s...
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/a/why-llm-based-search-is-scam-
| lAd3UHn
|
| [2] https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
|
| edit: grammar
| imiric wrote:
| I'm well aware of the studies that "prove" that "AI"
| summaries are "killing" traffic to websites. I suppose
| you didn't consider my point that the same was said about
| snippets on SERPs before "AI"[1].
|
| > My issue with AI summaries is that they are not even
| remotely accurate, trustworthy or deterministic.
|
| I am firmly on the "AI" skeptic side of this discussion.
| And yet if there's anything this technology is actually
| useful for is for summarizing content and extracting key
| points from it. Search engines contain massive amounts of
| data. Training a statistical model on it that can provide
| instant results to arbitrary queries is a far more
| efficient method of making the data useful for users than
| showing them a sorted list of results which may or may
| not be useful.
|
| Yes, it might not be 100% accurate, but based on my own
| experience, it is reliable for the vast majority of use
| cases. Certainly beats hunting for what I need in an
| arbitrarily ordered list and visiting hostile web sites.
|
| > LLMs are sycophantic and agree with you all the time,
| even if it means making shit up.
|
| Those are issues that plague conversational UIs, and long
| context windows. "AI" summaries answer a single query and
| the context is volatile.
|
| > And what happens when people stop creating new websites
| because they aren't getting any visitors (and by
| extension ad-revenue)? New info will stop being
| disseminated.
|
| That's baseless fearmongering and speculation. Websites
| might be impacted by this feature, but they will cope,
| and we'll find ways to avoid the doomsday scenario you're
| envisioning.
|
| Some search engines like Kagi already provide references
| under their "AI" summaries. If Google is pressured to do
| so, they will likely do the same as well.
|
| So the web will survive this specific feature. Website
| authors should be more preoccupied with providing better
| content than with search engines stealing their traffic.
| I do think that "AI" is a net negative for the world in
| general, but that's a separate discussion.
|
| [1]: https://ahrefs.com/blog/featured-snippets-study/
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Sorry I didn't meant to discount your argument. I don't
| think SERPs are a valid comparison, AI is for me an
| apples vs. oranges comparison, or rather rocks vs.
| turtles :)
|
| btw your linked article/study doesn't support your
| argument - SERPs are definitely stealing clicks (just not
| nearly as many as AI):
|
| > In other words, it looks like the featured snippet is
| stealing clicks from the #1 ranking result.
|
| I should maybe clarify: I have been using LLMs since the
| day they arrived on the scene and I have a love/hate
| relationship with them. I do use summaries sometimes, but
| I generally still prefer to just at least skim TFA unless
| it's something where I don't care about perfect accuracy.
| BTW did you click on that imgur link? It's pretty damning
| - the AI summary you get depends entirely on how you
| phrase your query!
|
| > Yes, it might not be 100% accurate, but based on my own
| experience, it is reliable for the vast majority of use
| cases. Certainly beats hunting for what I need in an
| arbitrarily ordered list and visiting hostile web sites.
|
| What does "vast majority" mean? 9 out of 10? Did/do you
| double-check the accuracy regularly? Or did you stop
| verifying after reaching the consensus that X/Y were
| accurate enough? I can imagine as a tech-savvy
| individual, that you still verify from time to time and
| remain skeptical but think of 99% of the users who don't
| care/won't bother - who just assume AI summaries are
| fact. That's where the crux of my issue lies: they are
| selling AI output as fact, when in fact, it's query-
| dependent, which is just insane. This will (or surely
| has) cost plenty of people dearly. Sure, reading a
| summary of the daily news is probably not gonna hurt
| anyone, but I can imagine people have/will get into
| trouble believing a summary for some queries e.g. renter
| rights - which I did recently (combination summaries +
| paid LLMs), and almost believed it until I double-checked
| with a friend who works in this area who then pointed out
| a few minor but critical mistakes, which then saved my
| ass from signing some bad paperwork. I'm pretty sure AI
| summaries are still just inaccurate, non-deterministic
| LLMs with some special sauce to make them slightly less
| sketchy.
|
| > Those are issues that plague conversational UIs, and
| long context windows. "AI" summaries answer a single
| query and the context is volatile.
|
| Just open that imgur link. Or try it for yourself. Or
| maybe you are just good at prompting/querying and get
| better results.
|
| > So the web will survive this specific feature. Website
| authors should be more preoccupied with providing better
| content than with search engines stealing their traffic.
|
| I agree the web will survive in some form or other, but
| as my Register link shows (with MANY linked studies), it
| already IS killing web traffic to a great degree because
| 99% of users believe the summaries. I really hope you are
| right, and the web is able to weather this onslaught.
| imiric wrote:
| > What does "vast majority" mean? 9 out of 10? Did/do you
| double-check the accuracy regularly? Or did you stop
| verifying after reaching the consensus that X/Y were
| accurate enough?
|
| I don't verify the accuracy regularly, no. And I do
| concede that I may be misled by the results.
|
| But then again, this was also possible before "AI". You
| can find arguments on the web supporting literally any
| viewpoint you can imagine. The responsiblity of
| discerning fact from fiction remains with the user, as it
| always has.
|
| > Just open that imgur link. Or try it for yourself. Or
| maybe you are just good at prompting/querying and get
| better results.
|
| I'm not any better at it than any proficient search
| engine user.
|
| The issue I see with that Imgur link is that those are
| not search queries. They are presented as claims, and the
| "AI" will pull from sources that back up those claims.
| You would see the same claims made by web sites listed in
| the results. In fact, I see that there's a link next to
| each paragraph which will likely lead you to the source
| website. (The source website might also be "AI" slop, but
| that's a separate matter...) So Google is already doing
| what you mentioned as a good idea above.
|
| All the "AI" is doing there is summarizing content you
| would find without it as well. That's not proof of
| hallucinations, sycophancy, or anything else you
| mentioned. What it does is simplify the user experience,
| like I said. These tools still suffer from these and
| other issues, but this particular use case is not proof
| of it.
|
| So instead of phrasing a query as a claim ("NFL
| viewership is up"), I would phrase it using keywords
| ("NFL viewership statistics 2025"). Then I would see the
| summarized statistics presented by "AI", drill down and
| go to the source, and make up my mind on which source to
| trust. What I wouldn't do is blindly trust results from
| my biased claim, whether they're presented by "AI" or any
| website.
|
| > it already IS killing web traffic to a great degree
| because 99% of users believe the summaries. I really hope
| you are right, and the web is able to weather this
| onslaught.
|
| I don't disagree that this feature can impact website
| traffic. But I'm saying that "killing" is hyperbole. The
| web is already a cesspool of disinformation, spam, and
| scams. "AI" will make this even worse by enabling website
| authors to generate even more of it. But I'm not
| concerned at all about a feature that _right now_ makes
| extracting data from the web a little bit more usable and
| safer. I 'm sure that this feature will eventually also
| be enshittified by ads, but right now, I'd say users gain
| more from it than what they lose.
|
| E.g. if my grandma can get the information she needs from
| Google instead of visiting a site that will infect her
| computer with spyware and expose her to scams, then
| that's a good thing, even if that information is
| generated by a tool that can be wrong. I can explain this
| to her, but can't easily protect her from disinformation,
| nor from any other active threat on the modern web.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Just to add fuel to the fire...AI output is non
| deterministic even with the same prompt. So users
| searching the same thing may get different results. The
| output is not just query dependent
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > My issue with AI summaries is that they are not even
| remotely accurate, trustworthy or deterministic.
|
| Who cares if it's deterministic? Google changes their
| algorithms all the time, you don't know what its devs
| will come up with next, when they release it, when they
| deploy it, when the previous cache gets cleared. It
| doesn't matter.
| rectang wrote:
| Haha, I suppose the problem is that LLM outputs are
| unreliable yet presented as authoritative (disclaimers do
| little to counteract the boffo confidence with which LLMs
| bullshit) -- not that they are unreliable in
| unpredictable ways.
| rr808 wrote:
| agreed, the other half is that most websites now are just
| AI generated slop that makes you wonder why you even
| bothered to look at the actual website instead of the llm.
| graemep wrote:
| > Why visit a website if the AI summary is good?
|
| That is a big if.
|
| A summary cannot be better than what is summarizes in any
| was but brevity. It can be much worse.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Let me remind you of recipe websites as an example of how
| summaries can be better by ignoring all of the useless
| crap that has nothing to do with making the dish
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Agreed, but only assuming the summary is accurate and not
| hallucinating, which the current state of LLMs sadly can
| not guarantee. Maybe next year?
| brookst wrote:
| Noise reduction has tons of value in many fields.
| rectang wrote:
| I find that if I describe an esoteric bug to a high
| powered LLM, I often get to my answer more quickly than
| if I trawl through endless search results. The synthesis
| itself is a valuable addition.
|
| Frequently I cannot even find source documents which
| match my exact circumstances; I'm uncertain whether they
| actually exist.
| brookst wrote:
| I hope it was intentional humor that you summarized a view
| and did not link. Your own small contribution to killing
| websites?
| potro wrote:
| Summary is supposed to give you a taste of what the link
| destination talks about. If most of the page information
| can be fitted in one paragraph of summarization, the
| problem is with webpage, and visiting that webpage would
| have been a waste of the user time.
| subarctic wrote:
| I switched to brave search a year or two ago and found it to be
| an improvement
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have DDG set as the primary in some places and Google as the
| primary on other devices, so I've used both in parallel for
| years.
|
| To be honest, DDG has always been far behind Google. It's fine
| when I know my search result is going to be in the top 10 of
| any engine I use, but the moment I need to search for anything
| non obvious I don't even bother with DDG any more.
|
| DDG does seem marginally worse today than it was maybe 5 years
| ago. It falls off rapidly past the first few results. Now it
| even seems like it just starts mixing generic results from some
| popular adjacent keyword into the results and hopes we don't
| notice as users that it stopped trying to search by page 2.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I've started to wonder/worry that maybe it's not the search
| engines (excluding Google, I won't apologize for them). What
| if there's _just nothing to search for_? If there is little
| on the internet besides trash and a few big portals? Much of
| what you might be searching for whether you know it or not
| will be a reddit post, or Facebook, or Stackoverflow. And
| some of those places don 't even allow for proper indexing by
| crawlers. Worse than that nightmare fuel is the idea that
| 2025 just isn't the same internet as we grew up with, where
| everyone was racing to shovel as much real content onto it as
| they could... today it's a bunch of grifters hoping to be
| influencers or Youtube personalities or skeevy scammers AI-
| generating slop but not much else.
|
| And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in
| 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I
| hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a
| retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I
| am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.
| ijk wrote:
| Unfortunately, I am also worried that is the case.
|
| There was an era where there were a lot of completely free
| sites, because they were mostly academic or passion
| projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
|
| Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive
| text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely
| supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
|
| And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche
| communities by offering them a much easier way to create a
| community and then killing it off.
|
| Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep
| project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has
| consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages.
| There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
|
| And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI
| into the mix.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Maybe the issue is not DDG itself directly, but that the web
| has become more shit and more inaccessible SPA nonsense.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| That's weird to hear. I've been using DDG daily since years and
| it's gotten progressively better, though lately every search
| engine's top results are often AI generated trash. To combat
| this it seems that DDG recently added a feature to every link
| in the upper-right corner to "block this site from all results"
| which is something I've been waiting for since SEO optimizing
| trash became a thing.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| What I have noticed is how slow it is to load versus other
| search engines. It's not much in the scheme of things but it's
| noticeable.
| dackdel wrote:
| i use kagi and duckduckgo. between the two i get my work done
| csomar wrote:
| > My guess is search's days are numbered and companies are
| "pivoting" away to other projects
|
| Pretty much. Most (all?) search engines have basically stopped
| indexing the web. If you create content that doesn't make it
| through social media and has significant links, Google won't
| just index your website.
|
| No, it's not under-ranking your site. It's plainly not indexing
| it. So if you have weird, specific content out there; it simply
| won't show up for a particular search.
|
| Search is pretty much over and no one is interested in getting
| that fixed.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Kagi. Seriously.
| ajdude wrote:
| I stopped using duckduckgo and switched to kagi shortly after
| the tankman fiasco[1]. Never been happier- if you want to
| support the continued existence of search, then pay for it.
|
| [1] Ask HN: "Tank man" image search blocked on Bing and
| DuckDuckGo 560 points by MaxHoppersGhost on June 4, 2021 | 126
| comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
| yegg wrote:
| We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to
| either since we've been banned in China since 2014. Here's my
| statement from back then:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
| dvntsemicolon wrote:
| I just switched to Kagi. It's great
| RamRodification wrote:
| Kagi uses Russian search engine Yandex (EDIT: among several
| other sources) to produce search results, which means they
| pay them, which means indirectly sponsoring Russia's invasion
| of Ukraine.
|
| There are more or less valid arguments for not excluding
| Yandex[1], but as a European, I want to avoid any of my money
| going to Russia if possible. And there is no setting to
| exclude Yandex from your Kagi search results.
|
| If you stopped using duckduckgo because of the tankman
| fiasco, maybe you should reconsider if Kagi is right for you.
|
| [1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-
| integratio...
| rvnx wrote:
| By definition it also means your search queries are sent to
| Yandex, which may be a problem if you are pasting sensitive
| data there and belong to a risk group
| albumen wrote:
| Not by definition; from the Vlad response linked above:
| "we do not call all sources for all queries, as we
| balance cost efficiency with result quality - a delicate
| optimization". But I could understand how one may want to
| eliminate any possibility!
| verdverm wrote:
| Add Perplexity to the list, they are working with Trump &
| Truth Social
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Second this. I finally gave up and subscribed to Kagi half a
| year ago, and man, I should have done it much sooner. The
| search results are just genuinely good.
|
| This is not like trying to use Bing, and then half the time
| you have to do the same search on Google because of how poor
| Bing's results are. It feels like Google felt fifteen years
| ago: useful results without all the "sponsored links" garbage
| around it.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I would recommend trying Ecosia, their search have become
| really good. Better than DuckDuckGo, Bing and Google to be
| honest. They use a mix of Bing, Google and a few other things,
| most recently their own index which they collaborate on with
| Qwants (only for German and French at this point).
|
| Originally I switched due to their environmental focus and the
| way they run the company, but the quality of the results keeps
| me there. They have their own ! query, like DuckDuckGo. So
| !maps for Google Maps and !w for Wikipedia.
| fwn wrote:
| While I like the general idea of Ecosia (in that it's a less
| harmful ad-funded service) they do share user IP addresses
| with their search partners (Google and Microsoft).
|
| > We, and our search partners, collect your IP address in
| order to protect our service against spammers trying to
| conduct fraud or to up-rank specific search results.
|
| Src.: https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
|
| This shouldn't necessarily stop anyone; I think it should
| just be mentioned when it is suggested as an alternative to
| DuckDuckGo. You probably wouldn't switch from a search engine
| that proxies all favicons to avoid tracking to one that sells
| your identity to Google and Microsoft for tree-money.
| pogue wrote:
| I've found Brave Search to be quite good. You can disable the
| AI summaries if you prefer. However, I generally find them very
| helpful. It's, of course, private similar to DDG. They use
| their own crawler as well as getting results from Google and
| other sources.
|
| https://brave.com/search/
| pythux wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to clarify that
| Brave Search is 100% independent and doesn't source results
| from any third -party (see here for more details:
| https://brave.com/blog/search-independence/)
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Brave
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| All of the brainpower is going into AI.
|
| Im expecting a future where we dont have "pages" on the
| internet anymore, but its just the backbone for generative AI
| content and if you want to promote your brand you need to pay
| the AI providers to put your content in responses.
|
| Eventually, the entire notion of "searching the web" will be
| seem as archaic as the rotary phone.
| yegg wrote:
| All our different search metrics have been up over time, so
| would love to know more about specifics if you'd care to reach
| out to me (email in profile) and we can look into it more
| deeply.
| chongli wrote:
| How do metrics tell you that a search query produces the
| result the user really wanted rather than fooling the user or
| forcing them to settle or even give up? A lot of my queries
| involve clicking a link and then realizing the site is
| garbage and just closing the tab.
| yegg wrote:
| Aggregate anonymous statistics, for example, requery
| rates/times, bounce back rates/times, etc.
| chongli wrote:
| So I submit a query, click a link, then I give up and
| close the tab. How do you tell that apart from me finding
| exactly what I wanted and staying there? Whether it's my
| first query or the 10th (and final) query in a chain of
| re-queries, you still have no way of knowing when I've
| found what I wanted or when I've given up.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Many times it has given me a list of all mainstream news
| networks rather than what I searched for.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The degradation is on _all_ search engines. Nothing is as good
| as it once was. Even the pay-for-it search engines are catching
| junk and floating it to the first page.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| If you want good search results, open up a tor browser and use
| yandex.ru. The difference in search result quality is eye-
| opening.
|
| Still hope Russia looks like Berlin in '45 soon but until then,
| you can't deny they got the better search engine.
| donohoe wrote:
| I use Mullvad for VPN and how no idea they had this! Are there
| other services should I be aware of?
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Mullvad browser.
| wafriedemann wrote:
| more important than a proxy is having an alternative to google
| because it is crazy how much they censor search results. just add
| brave search as a secondary.
| dvntsemicolon wrote:
| Yeah I expected that to happen eventually. It's a shame.
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