this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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10 bucks is too much though for a search engine, at least for me. Especially now that I use LLMs to replace most of the usecases of web searches.
I never used Google much anyway the last few years, I use duckduckgo which isn't quite as bad as google is now. Yeah I know it's just microsoft bling with a lick of paint but they didn't enshittify as much as google. But $10 + VAT is just a lot of money in Spain.
Maybe I'll try the $5 plan though, I never come even close to 300 searches a month anyway.
Edit: SearXNG sounds much better actually, thanks!! <3
Edit2: I installed SearXNG and love it <3 Really thanks for the tips here.
This is a useful take: I too will use LLMs for search-- but not for search for journal articles with data and evidence. LLMs too easily confabulate these.
LLM-as-search is fantastic when you want a no-bullshit statistical result for what you're looking for when you're wanting an overview or interactive tutorial.
As long as it has footnoting so I can see where each piece of information was sourced from, AI chat has its use cases. Without that I genuinely do not see the point at all. It's like when people "ask Google" something and just blindly trust the highlighted "answer" as infallible truth. It's just a really, really bad habit to develop and I wish more people understood this.
Not infallible truth. But very often it's something that is just for personal use.
Some things I've asked it recently were like "Which torch is smaller out of these 5 models?". Once I find which one I want it's easy to verify. Or "what does this Spanish expression mean?" or "how do I do ...".
Not everyone uses it to try and write authoritative stuff. And Google is full of clickbaity "comparison sites" that are nothing but fake advertising.
All of those questions you asked it return authoritative answers which you take on face value, unless you spend extra time fact checking them yourself.
Yeah but accuracy isn't a given with the other methods either. If I ask some randos on reddit I won't get a perfect answer either. If I google specs or reviews online they are often biased, wrong (think the magical Chinese lumens of torches) or even literally fraudulent paid reviews too.
So yeah for me the LLM output is more than good enough with a bit of verification if necessary.
I don't really understand why people are suddenly hung up about holding LLMs up to this lofty ideal of an unbiased super-truth. Where did that requirement come from all of a sudden? It's not really realistic and not something we've ever had in the past.
I feel the same about self-driving systems. People get all hung up if they crash once in a while, expecting them to be 100% perfect in all situations. But ignoring the concept that they already might be a hell of a lot safer than human drivers. They fail in different situations generally but why do we suddenly demand perfection?
I'm sorry, but citing other examples of bad research practices does not magically make AI reliable. That is a whataboutism.
Self hosted searxng is where it's at. Seriously love it and have replaced my search engines on all my computers and phone.
I use this along with Vivaldi browser that will let me switch engines quickly with "search shortcuts" for those few times I need local Google results.
Yep I hosted it on my VPN server so I can reach it from all my devices. Love it. Learned about it here and I'm really happy I did.
I'd love to do that, too. But I'm a bit overwhelmed with setting it up :/
Plenty of public instances which are probably 100% privacy preserving in practice.
Stract.com also looks promising.
Promising, but not ready for primetime. I spent the last two days using it as my phone's default search after you mentioned it, and... well, I went back to Google, at least for now.
I put in the name of my home town and the first 2 links were escort sites offering ladies in that town... Seriously.
Not really impressed so far.
stract has same issue mentioned above where search engines are actually the only time i want data on me to be easily accessible. not being able to search "food near me" is frustrating, and no privacy-centered google alternative i've been happy with has had that feature. im fine with my location and other relevant metadata on me getting used in a search, as long as that metadata is in a black box restricted to me that doesn't create a profile for advertising companies
Yeah that makes sense. My comment had more to do with the potential of a open source search engine/crawler than anything it currently does. Though I feel the optics feature might be able to account for that eventually.