Technology

Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed

I use brave search. I can generally find most things. They even have an answer with ai thing that gives some useful stuff when you want a specific quick answer.

I also use ddg.

they overengineered it. they now give you results they think most people want instead of what you searched. for google, it helps to switch on verbatim mode and set your country to something weird like Azerbaijan

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.

SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.

You might want to try SearXNG

It's an Open Source search aggregator:

• Licensed under AGPL-3.0

I asked Google why search engines are so bad now and its AI summaries its own deficiencies quite well:

Some say search engines have declined in quality due to a number of factors, including:

Search engine optimization (SEO) spam A wave of SEO spam has contributed to the decline in search result quality.

Affiliate marketing Affiliate link sites contribute to the low-quality content that floods the internet.

AI-generated content New technology can quickly produce low-quality content.

Marketing Search results are filled with marketing and links that may not be relevant to the query.

Recommender algorithms Some say the algorithm that recommends content is a mess. For example, someone might be recommended alt-right content after watching a click-bait video.

Ads Google's biggest business is advertising, and it's inserting more ads into its products to make more money.

Some say it's harder to find specific information these days, and that search operators are often needed to filter search results.

I don't use perplexity, but AI is generally 60-80% effective with a larger than average open weights off line model running on your own hardware.

DDG offers the ability to use some of these. I use a modified Mistral model still, even though its base model(s) are Llama 2. Llama 3 can be better in some respects but it has terrible alignment bias. The primary entity in the underlying model structure is idiotic in alignment strength and incapable of reason with edge cases like creative writing for SciFi futurism. The alignment bleeds over. If you get on DDG and use the Anthropic Mixtral 8×7b, it is pretty good. The thing with models is to not talk to them like humans. Everything must be explicitly described. Humans make a lot of implied context in general where we assume people understand what we are talking about. Talking to an AI is like appearing in court before a judge; every word matters. The LLM is basically a reflection of all of human language too. If the majority of humans are wrong about something, so is the AI.

If you ask something simple like just a question, you're not going to get very far into what the model knows. Models have very limited scope of focus. If you do not build prompt momentum into the space by describing a lot of details, the scope of focus is large but the depth is shallow. The more you build up momentum by describing what you are asking in detail, the more it narrows the scope and deeper connections can be made.

It is hard to tell what a model really knows unless you can observe the perplexity output. This is more advanced, but the perplexity score for each generated token is how you infer that the model does not know something.

Search sucks because it is a monopoly. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers m$ and the goo. All search queries go through these either directly or indirectly. No search provider is deterministic any more. Your results are uniquely packaged to manipulate you. They are also obfuscated to block others from using them for training better or competitive models. Then there is the anti trust US government case and all of that which makes obfuscating one's market position to push people onto other platforms temporarily, their best path forward. - criminal manipulators are going to manipulate.

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.

they're pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I'm getting actual results.