I'm finding that LLMs are doing a better job for searching for new things. If I have a question, instead of going to google or bing I'll goto chatGPT and ask some of that nature with some sources for further reading.
Never would I think that I would need to use AI to answer simple search and yet here we are because the sole purpose of a search engine doesn't really exist anymore.
The problem is, you can't trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.
And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can't trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that's a coin flip.
Here's my theory... Google wants to artificially fuck up it's search functionality. It wants to offer good performance for a fee. And it's going to be doing that by giving it's own AI the correct filters while at the same time tripping every other AI capable of searching the net such that the other AI results become garbage and only the Google one works correctly. Anyway that's my conspiracy theory, fuck Google with a bunch of sharp forks.
And AI is just making it worse. Entire websites of SEO-optimized content can be generated in seconds now. No one will be able to keep up with all that!
I’m surprised in most posts I’ve read about this there wasn’t a mention of Yacy which is a P2P distributed indexer / search engine. It heavily focuses on privacy. I’ve used it in the past and it worked great for my use cases to bypass censorship. It’s still actively developed after all the years. Would definitely recommend it or try it out as an replacement. The installation and usage is fairy simply.
No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded.
After pouring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google's declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted.
Along with that, the researchers determined that all three search engines are prone to being gamed by large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns, and their efforts to subvert such manipulation through algorithm updates have, at best, "a temporary positive effect."
Google even claimed in 2022 that it was updating its algorithm to prioritize "people-first content," but as the researchers found, those efforts have been in vain as SEO experts and spam factories have simply figured out how to game the newest tweaks to the system.
Janek Bevendorff, research assistant at Leipzig University and an author on the paper, told The Register that it's hard to say whether there's an easy way out of the current online search predicament in which we find ourselves.
"Affiliate marketing itself is in part responsible for what online content looks like now," Bevendorff said, but noted that "banning it entirely is probably not a solution," as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream.
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I use DDG when coding and generally find it to be a bit nicer, but from the article it sounds like they're prone to the same issues. Anecdotally, I have noticed non-code queries do seem to be similarly crap
ETA: You can set it as default in Chrome too, under Settings -> Search Engine
I use DDG like others have mentioned, but I also like Perplexity, because it's not a chat like ChatGPT, it just answers queries without trying too hard to chat to you.
I use DuckDuckGo Lite in Librewolf with Ublock and NoScript (amongst other addons). That combination used with ddg's !bangs got me covered. No ads, not even image search (just go to ddg directly for that), just content.
I've used searx through a docker container, and it's a strong 2nd choice, but ddg lite is just easier to set up and gives better results imho.
All said, an LLM like a local Llama and ChatGPT, can fill the gaps for very specific searches. Sadly, the modern internet takes a lot of savvy to navigate quickly and effectively.
There's a very good reason so many are typing in "reddit" at the ends of their searches, and that's if their not using Chat GPT to just get them to the answer faster, and using much more computational resources to do so...it's a big cluster fuck.
FCC should impose regulations on search providers to make searching with Google's competition more cumbersome and less useful. You know, 'level the playing field'