I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.
I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.
Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.
they’re pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I’m getting actual results.
I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
Searching for R34 is on you. Naming something R34 is on Nissan. The popularity of R34 is on all of us.
R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”
So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.
News orgs clinging to tradition.
i use archive.is for anything I really want to read.
most news is fluffy bullshit anyway.
Agree. It’s an important part of media literacy these days.
For political news, I’m only interested in what was actually said, not what is reported to be said .
It’s just that Bing/DDG seem to promote news from these sites as if they’re sponsored links… but without the disclosure.
bummer.
I see all the labeled sponsored links on Bing, but I generally get high quality results outside of those.
I’m pretty sure here in the states, a site is obligated to identify ad content and sponsored content, so when a big company like Microsoft or Alphabet is doing it (Bing and Google) it makes me wonder if there’s been a recent carve-out or relaxation of the reg.
That makes the return adversarial to the end-user, hence the point of the regulations.
Every search engine I’ve encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you’re looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you’re not looking for porn.
Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there’s both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.
I’d really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.
You know that’s just Bing, right?
is it? that kind of makes sense, because I still use Bing occasionally while Google is completely out of rotation, although I don’t find Bing as good as duckduckgo.
edit: it is not! looks like the DuckDuckGo search engine is an aggregate of hundreds of search engines, including their own duck duck bot, excluding Google but including some Bing results.
Their FAQ hems and haws about that, but (in the past) I’ve done side-by-side tests and found identical results. Maybe something’s changed, maybe it hasn’t.
it must have done by now, then, I get different results from identical prompts in DuckDuckGo and Bing although both are usually relevant.
“DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.”
are you having trouble finding something specifically or you just don’t like the quality of the search results you’re finding in general?
definitely if you’re still on Google, stop using it.
It’s completely useless at this point.
DDG often gives me results for individual words of the search but not results for all of the words in that order for which to have contextually relevant results.
I often find myself forced to brave the shitshow that is google search.
that’s weird. the search results should still prioritize your search as is over variations, but not limit it. do you try searching in quotations to force the specific search exactly?
have you tried the duck assist thing yet?
If you’re trying to talk to the search engine more like a chat assistant, that sort of response might be what you’re looking for.
Fuck Duck Assist all my homies hate Duck Assist and I keep having to turn it back off again.
Whoever made it should get cancer and not have their children show up or call them back.
haha, whaaat why?
I just saw it for the first time today, it seems to mostly quote incredible sources rather than amalgamating responses.
you got some issues huh, poor fella?
I’m sorry I hurt your feelings and made you want to defend an LLM that approves copy pasted wikipedia snippets, but maybe you should go eat some ass?
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings”
I feel only pity for you.
reading your comments is like watching a diseased guinea pig nibble on its own scabs.
“an LLM that approves copy pasted wikipedia snippets”
duckduckgo’s llm tool offers relevant information from credible sources.
that is good.
Good luck unbunching those panties.
Lmfao
It’s not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.
Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every “product” they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It’s not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.
I’m very happy with kagi at the moment. Just crossed one year using it as my main search engine last week and don’t see why I would go back.
Same. Using Kagi feels like surfing the old web. The first thing I did was block all Pinterest results. That alone made every search golden. 😂
I hate Pinterest lol, best thing about Kagi is being able to block whole sites and it remembers your preferences. I may come back to Kagi but I didn’t feel like funding their AI features development. Now Im using Searx and 4get cause they’re free.
You’re not the only one. They have a leaderboard and the top 7 results are various Pinterest domains.
Leaderboard here for anyone curious
Yep everyone blocking Pinterest.
Also the most prioritized website is Wikipedia. Guess everyone wants facts in the the age of hallucinatory AI
I never got Pinterest results on Kagi to begin with
Having to signup and login to a search engines sounds like an annoying hassle
It’s a very minor annoyance and well worth it in my opinion.
I was searching for a book quote for over a year. I tried every search engine, tried changing the terms, checking back several times every few weeks or so, but couldn’t find anything even close. I tried kagi and it was literally the very first result on my very first search.
I haven’t looked back and have never had an issue finding what I’m searching for since.
You pay instead of seeing ads, so they need the account. Remembers you, though, so you just login once. Plus they have a solution for incognito/private windows too.
I really like it, has some cool features.
You can create a search-link that includes your token so you can also use it in incognito or if you are logged out for some reason.
You do it once.
It is. And it’s also terrible for privacy, but people do it with google as well.
Same. Even the ai stuff is helpful instead of annyoing.
Same.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now and it’s been working well for me
I don’t remember any specifics, but I think I heard there were some privacy concerns?
Then again, there seem to be privacy concerns about pretty much anything so might not be that bad…
The concerns are about the credit card you use to pay.
The argument is that they can associate the card with your searches.
As far as I know they don’t keep search data. I’m personally happy with them
I think this might be it. There were also some statements by the CEO I think which didn’t exactly inspire confidencenin their company - but again, I don’t remember the details unfortunately
That’s what’s kept me from using it, although I very much like the idea of paying for a good service. I would love to see them figure out a way to avoid accounts.
Yeah, lots of opinions, a few facts: one of the discussions.
It was not even the emails. I tried to duckgo it and only found this controversy (which was new to me). What I saw was a specific qute, possibly on topic of privacy or something adjecent which just made me go “nope!”
Never heard any issues with Privacy, but I’ve heard issues about them using Brave search Results as part of their results.
If i remember right, it wasn’t just using brave, but including a referral id in brave searches. It wasn’t intended, and they fixed it, so all good with me.
My blocks
Edit: hm. I seem to have replied to the wrong comment.
Is it really $108/year good though for a single person (based on the tier that makes sense for me)? Just curious what other search engines you’ve used or tried and what features set it apart to make it worth spending the money on.
It’s the first one I’ve paid for. And it is that much better than the free ones I used before imho.
That really depends on your use case and how valuable web search is for your daily life.
I’ve personally tried Google, Bing, DDG, Brave search, and ChatGPT. Kagi is consistently able to find what I’m searching for more quickly and accurately than anything else, which has been very valuable for me in my personal and professional life.
It’s easily worth the cost in result quality and time saving for me personally, but that doesn’t mean the same will apply to you or anyone else.
As far as stand out features, there aren’t really any that I can think of. It just gives me the results I’m looking for without any bullshit to wade through.
Unfortunately they started to play with AI too :-(
It was disabled by default on my account I think
You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that’s just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
It is, and it’s not just the search engines to blame.
The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn’t pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.
Spam sites laden with key words and massive SEO to farm advertising dollars from clicks long predated AI
It doesnt help that big search engines like google have realized people will go as far as page 2 or 3 to find the results, so intentionally worsen their search results to increase ads being served.
SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.
Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate that part about AI accelerating SEO spam?
I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).
For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.
With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.
Not just you.
DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.
Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor
I switched to DDG right after Google added the ai answers to search and in baffled by how fast DDG seemed to go down hill. Just a few months ago it was still giving me on point results on the first try, now it almost feels like I’m using one of those malware search bars from back in the day.
yes - it’s a recent thing, no more that a few months I think
DDG still mostly fine for me, but anytime I use Google I’m reminded why I left. I wonder how much Googles beancounter enshittification has to do with that…
DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I’m assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it’s not much better.
I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.
I feel like it’s especially bad if you are searching for anything related to a marketable product. I tried searching ddg for information about using a surge protector with halogen bulbs and all I got was pages and pages of listicles on “best halogen lights 2024” full of affiliate links.
The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there’s not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
The Internet is dead ™
My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
Right on
I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.
What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.
Roccat Kone Aimo micro switch gives me “500 best mouse 2024” and such BS and that’s it.
It’s not just you. At some point, search’s primary purpose went from “finding the information you’re looking for” to “getting paid to put links in front of you”. Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.
Thanks! I love it, really works well from my limited testing!
I used priv.au
no worries!🤗
I tried that for a couple of weeks recently and while not dealing with all the bullshit google ads was refreshing, the actual results were often pretty bad.
My bad, I should’ve replied to your comment first!
Have you tried customizing your search settings in SearXNG? I’ve found that tweaking the instance’s default search settings improves the search experience quite a bit
I might look into that later. Thanks.
we have gone full circle back to metacrawler.
Kagi is good. I’m very happy with it.
Yes, it is a premium service, but it really works well.
Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.
And the AI is trained on the shitty search results. It just parses them many times faster than a human reader can, which does at least make it better at getting to the fucking point. Once paid advertising is fully integrated with LLM, it will be as shitty and useless as traditional search. And then the entire world will collectively hop to the next trend so it can get hyper-monetized/enshittified, too.
Exactly. LLM makes you do the same stupid shit, but faster and with more intensity.
It’s both.
Well, it’s boths fault. LLMs are an annoyingly effective tool for SEOs. Without it SEO would likely be easier to spot and block.
Kagi is pretty awesome
