cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47107360
Google is making its Search more centred around AI, turning it into a conversation.
Besides being a worse experience, the websites from which it sources its information are losing all traffic and recognition.
Recommend a list of alternatives:
- Kagi - Paid but better experience than Google
- Ecosia - Similar experience while supporting a good cause
- Qwant - Increasingly unique results and building a EU-first index
- DuckDuckGo - Privacy-focused search, but quality of results may vary
More options: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/search-engine/
Ecosia
Startpage
DDG
Qwant
Brave Search
Even Yandex actually doesnt suck, if you’re cool to use it.
Anyone still using Google needs to be in a home.
I am using Qwant and Ecosia
is that as profitable as search?
It’s a bubble, so yes, until it bursts, it’s more profitable.
Been a kagi subscriber for about a year now. Right when they wer implementing ai overview. It’s been a very refreshing way to internet
google being useful for search has been over for at least a decade
Genuine question: What are you using?
I’m using ddg, I used to have trouble finding stuff, and occasionally used Google in the beginning, but I’ve not had to Google something in over a year now
Yay, worse search
Just when you thought it couldn’t get even worse…. Google disappoints yet again. Maybe this will be the push people need to start using alts
Ecosia.org ⬆️
Cool concept; really, REALLY dumb name.
Eco-seer isn’t really that bad, and “misspelling” the company name is almost mandatory.
Is a deliberate misspelling of googol any better for a company name?
Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
When ads became more important than search results. The more searches you need to attempt, the more ads they get to auction off companies who are still dumb enough to think search ads work.
Yeah, it’s so tiring. Search for something, entire first page is useless aggregator sites, containing nothing about the actual topic other than keywords. Waste of time
Agreed, and for the moment the “AI experience” is better than what Google Search was a couple of years ago… but I have faith, they’ll sell this one out too, after all: users are the product.
That is the point. Search is free. You will be paying for ai soon. If you don’t then you’ll get the low-quality results. This is nothing more than greed. They were making lots of money with search, but like everything in the modern world, businesses only exist now to extinguish what was free or a good value and sell the same thing back at an extreme markup.
Furniture was made of wood. Now it’s mostly disposable composite junk. Wood, now commands a high premium.
Household goods like toasters, irons, lamps, sofas were all at one point made to be durable. Many people would buy these things and maybe replace them every 15-20 years. Now the same stuff lasts five if you’re lucky.
Google Search has long since diminished from it’s peak. 15 years ago we used to play a “game” by describing something as vaguely or strangely as possible and would be entertained to find it still on the first page of search results.
SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance, and LLMs are the kill shot.
Indexing and ranking were already a solved problem, and conventional algorithms accomplished it much better than LLMs do. Unfortunately, LLMs need to find uses to justify investment, so now they must be used for any task that they can be used for, even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
To be clear, Google’s declining performance was caused by Google’s endorsement of (bad) SEO, paid ranking, and building a monopoly. It intentionally destroyed itself.
SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance
Yeah, this much started eating into the users’ need for that one good answer.
Absolutely nailed it.
even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
Like Gemini replacing Assistant. Holy shit, what a dumpster fire.
The other factor is companies, interests, paying the Google and their ilk to not include things in search results. And only include what they choose as an alternative.
Then you might have different interests gaming the search results to bury something they don’t like.
This is only amplified by LLMs
At the moment, I do find that the LLMs bring me more of what I want to see than the basic search engine used to a few years back… 15-20 years ago the basic search engine seemed to be much better then slowly deteriorated from there.
I have confidence, they’ll sell this version to the highest bidder faster than they did the last one, then it will be just as bad as listening to radio advertisements as a way to find a good local restaurant to eat at…
I haven’t used Google search since 2008, when I starting using Linux and Duckduckgo was the default search engine for Firefox.
Oh, how Firefox changed…
Firefox always used Google as their default search engine, since Google pays a lot of money for that privilege.
Edit: some Linux distros used to change that default while they were shipping a non-branded fork of Firefox.
I wouldn’t know because I mainly use DuckDuckGo and haven’t had a reason to use Google in a long time.
DuckDuckGo is just Microslop Bing with a different front-end.
Isn’t every alternative search engine just bing or google in the background?
Not all, but mostly, yes: https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr/116609141864889111
Yeah, whatever bias and censorship Micro$lop’s search index has, except supposedly without the tracking. It’s a step up from Google and Bing, but not the perfect solution.
What do you recommend?
If you live in Europe, the French search engine Qwant is great.
yacy is an interesting alternative if you self host.
Kagi. It does work and they are making anti AI a priority.
"Kagi Assistant
Access multiple AI models without being tracked. Use the power of different LLMs, all grounded by Kagi search results, while keeping your prompts and data private."
I mean it’s pro-privacy, but that’s hardly anti-AI.
I recommend DDG as the first line, and kagi free tier if you can’t find it on DDG.
I, as of yet, haven’t really explored any alternatives, but I see a lot of others mentioned in the comments here.
Not using meta search engines and going directly to the sites with the info and searching them for instance.
Ah yes, good thing I kept a rolodex of websites for every useful website that I might need.
Can you search your rolodex for “caddy tls configuration” for me?
Thanks fri… wait, you’re not who I replied to. Do you have your own rolodex of websites?
Don’t be daft. You don’t need to know more than the dozen you already know. Wikimedia, stack overflow, Reddit and whatnot. For everything else you can still use a meta search engine.
So your suggesting to stop using meta search engines unless you need meta search engines?
Exactly. My recommendation is to rely less on metasearch engines.
SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.
are you aware of any instances that have lasted longer than a few months?
I have it set up on my own home server. Before that, I had it set up on individual PCs. It’s super easy. I guess you mean public instances. I’ve never used one because it is so easy to set up for yourself.
Is that such an issue? If so, I could set up an open instance.
Nah, it isn’t, there is a whole instances list and there are always the same instance, often some new ones pop up but that’s it, there are also some great instances not in the list
Yup, easy peasy. And if you really want AI deep research, how about plugging it into your own local LLM with Vane
Is searching with -AI not going to work?
They’re getting rid of search entirely and making everything AI summaries. It’s literally just AI responses and nothing else.
God I hope so. It’s great when the garbage takes itself out.
I’ve had times where it refuses to search with the -ai flag.
Ugh, damn post title. I went through the whole article looking for the alternatives before realizing the title of the article says nothing about alternatives.
Didnt bother with the article but
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Is an option
It’s gone to shit since Bing jacked up the price of API calls
Sorry, it was in the post body. Will update post to make this clearer.
I degoogled as a Covid project. Mostly it just made me feel a little bit better… and then GenAI hit. Hopefully I’ll go my whole life without ever having used Gemini. And hopefully, if they ingested any of my pre-pandemic emails, photos, docs, etc to train with, pulling it out of cold storage will at least have cost them extra time and money.
If I wanted a conversation I wouldn’t be using a search engine to get answers.
