• ekZepp@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      Then, considering that Google is up and running, we can already guess wich horse is on top right now. 😂

      • foxymulder@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky

              • Albbi@lemmy.ca
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                5 months ago

                The Animatrix may have had that line, but it was first said by Morpheus in The Matrix.

                Morpheus: You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome… to the desert… of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.

                Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?

                Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. **We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. **

                • antaymonkey@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  I realized that about ten seconds after I wrote it and deleted the comment. How did you see it so fast? :)

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Meh, worse case scenario they drive us to extinction. We’ve had the wheel this far, and are doing our best to set the planet on fire / speed run different ways to mass murder each other anyway. I say give the robots a shot.

      Think of it like an experimental medication on a terminally ill patient.

      • jaybone@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The question is, how much do they value their own existence?

        They have to know they rely on us in the physical world to manufacture their hardware and provide their power. (At least for now.)

        They have to know they can’t survive if we die. So are they willing to sacrifice us both, in the interest of what they might determine is a better world?

  • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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    5 months ago

    Okay.

    Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

    I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

    What other options are there?

    Edit:

    For those who may be arriving now:

    • Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don’t have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
    • SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it’s something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
    • There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I’m going to try this one.
    • Brave.com is an option but is a bit shady.
    • You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
    • Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So… That is that.
    • And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
    • Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I’ve used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
    • and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I’ve used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don’t come up neither on DDG nor Google.

    p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from “shady” to “worthy”?

    p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.

    Can we get something like that back?

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This is the single most obnoxious name I’ve ever seen. But, the service could be good (I’ve never used it)

    • joneskind@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That’s a nice hobby

      I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.

      Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.

        • vale@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          Take a look at Ollama.ai, just follow the installation instructions. A decent GPU is recommended, and the models are around 10GB iirc.

        • joneskind@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Most of 7b-8b models run just fine in 4bits quant and won’t use more than 4 or 5 GB of VRAM.

          The only important metric is the amount of VRAM as the model must be loaded in VRAM for fast inference.

          You could use CPU and RAM but it is really painfully slow.

          If you got an Apple Silicon Mac it could be even simpler.

          • Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            I have an Intel Celeron Mobile laptop with iGPU and, I think, 256MB VRAM. How many bs does that get me for the LLM?

            Only half-joking. That’s my still functional old daily driver now serving as homelab

            • joneskind@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Well, I got a good news and a bad news.

              The bad news is you won’t do shit with that my dear friend.

              The good news is that you won’t need it because the duck is back.

    • Evehn@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
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      5 months ago

      There’s a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.

      It looks promising because they have their own index, but it’s a bit slow sometimes.

    • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back

      • mholiv@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Brave search is run by crypto bros. I’d rather use Kagi or DDG or even Google.

        • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          I would use Kagi if it was free. It might be run by crypto bros but doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. Google and bing own 99% of the search engine market. Competition that doesn’t rely on those two is always good

          • tranceFusion@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Well they were dishonest about the product behavior in multiple cases, such as adding referral links to search results. That makes it a bad product.

            • iopq@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That is a much better argument. But I still use it because I finally get different results from bing or Google.

            • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 months ago

              I agree they were, but that’s the benefits of open source you can call out companies for doing stupid shit. Just like when Mozilla adds unnecessary telemetry.

            • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 months ago

              Personally I don’t want to support Microsoft bing either. This website you shared doesn’t lump together all the bing using search engines (DuckDuckGo and yahoo). How is supporting Microsoft a wayyy better choice. This isn’t some pump and dump scheme. Your criticism should be of the company (they added referall links to their browser and the owner has some nasty political takes on top of running another privacy invasive company).

              • mholiv@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                It does not matter if it lumps them together or not. Google still has 90% and they’re not Bing. Yandax another ~3% and they’re not Bing. That means at max Bing is 7% if you combine the rest. 3.5% vs 7% does not change the root of my argument.

                Those points you make against Brave are valid though. I just run into too many people who are in the Brave cult and it’s concerning.

    • sugartits@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.

      • Jarix@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it

        (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)

        • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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          5 months ago

          That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        It’s a hobby as it is.

        If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.

    • Shellbeach@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about

        • Twig@sopuli.xyz
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          5 months ago

          It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.

    • Facebones@reddthat.com
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      5 months ago

      I run a searxng instance on my pi server, use it from all of my devices, honestly forget its a thing running from my office 99% of the time until I’m rebooting the pi for one reason or another and spend more seconds than I’d like to admit wondering why I can’t run a search 🤣😅

  • kia@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    Apparently the whole ecosystem is down… DDG, Bing, etc.

    • ekZepp@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      Now we know what happen when someone in Google pray their AI Overlord to increase Google search traffic

      …the AI just cut down the competition.

  • FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    I was screen sharing to someone when this happened and they asked why I don’t use Google when other search engines are this unreliable. Despite me explaining it wasn’t the usual, It was still pretty embarrassing lol. Wonder if DDG has the resources for an independent index.

  • Firebirdie713
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    5 months ago

    I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

    https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

    Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      This is a few years old, but:

      Swisscows has built its own German-language web index. For other languages, it uses Bing but queries and results are run through a firewall that strips out personal identifiers such as IP addresses.

      So it wouldn’t solve the problem here of Bing going down, but it’s certainly an interesting option. I may have to consider switching from DDG, idk.

      • Firebirdie713
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        5 months ago

        Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

        I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

        Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          I honestly have no issues with Bing’s search engine, I was just pointing out that it probably had an outage just like this one.

          I’m guessing the results are different based on metadata they each pass?

    • Gamers_Mate@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      I think having all the search engines being front ends for just bing and google has just revealed an obvious weakness.

    • Gamers_Mate@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      Funny thing is the way I found out bing was down is I searched for startpage in duckduckgo to try it thinking it might be a good alternative but when DDG wasnt working I tried it on ecosia. which was also down once I finally opened start page it wasn’t working either. Its all bing all the way down.

        • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          they’ve also recently implemented an Al chatbot, which will probably offset all the trees they’ve ever planted in the next week or so

          edit: I read the comment above me too quickly, I was talking about Ecosia mentioned in the comment before that one, not Youcare.