[HN Gopher] Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and C... ___________________________________________________________________ Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT Author : 882542F3884314B Score : 788 points Date : 2023-12-31 02:32 UTC (20 hours ago) (HTM) web link (danluu.com) (TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com) | cratermoon wrote: | "Going back to the debate between folks like Xe, who believe that | straightforward search queries are inundated with crap, and our | thought leader, who believes that "the rending of garments about | how even google search is terrible now is pretty overblown", it | appears that Xe is correct." | | Also, the article tested Mwmbl as well, not mentioned in the | title here. | coldcode wrote: | Search was the biggest feature of the web in the early '00s. Now | it's such a mess. I can't imagine Search will ever be amazing | again, given all the complexity of providing quality while still | avoiding all the crap. | packetlost wrote: | Search probably hasn't changed much, but the internet is very | different. | jader201 wrote: | Yeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality | content, that search doesn't (or can't) do a good job of | surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal | left, but it's such a small fraction that it's much more | difficult to filter it out. | | Having said that, I'm usually still able to find what I'm | looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the | keywords to use to find it. But it's much harder nowadays for | sure. | amlib wrote: | I wonder how much influence google had in lowering the | content quality over the years? After all, most SEO spam | was a direct response to all the ludicrous requirements | they've forced the whole web into, which eventually only | SEO spam were willing to commit to. | | I also wonder if google just stopped existing, would the | web heal over time? | genewitch wrote: | i have a radio that can "hear" down to -130dBm, i've proven | this empirically. Cellular signals work at -12dB or more | below the noise floor, wspr works even lower than that. | Lightning is broadband noise, and yet i can still use | digital stuff when there's lightning storms. | | I don't buy the signal to noise argument. For example, | whenever i get on youtube and get fed some content, i can | immediately tell if it's had AI involved anywhere, and | thumbs it down. I won't recommend it, i've called people | out for linking such tripe to me (or others). | | Hear me out - google got bad about 11 years ago when the | dorking stopped being effective, right around the time of | the spotlight search results and the sponsored junk taking | the top results. Around this time, various agencies (news, | etc) started gaming the SEO to respond to any remotely | related search with whatever the news was currently. Google | chose not to "fix" this, because we're not the customer. | DDG was better for a few years for real results, too, but | that has gone downhill as well. | | The current zeitgeist uses stuff like tiktok and facebook | for "web searches" - "food trucks near Austin, TX" or so. | No one really uses web search like people on this site do, | and google couldn't care less if we don't like the search | results. | Libcat99 wrote: | Is it actually more complex to provide good results, or is it | just more profitable not to? | | I have a hard time believing an organization like Google | doesn't have the resources to provide a search engine that's | just as usable as what they had 6 years ago (around the time I | feel like the decay really set in). Seems a lot more likely | that it's just more profitable to serve up garbage sponsored | content. | jmye wrote: | Definitely more profitable not to. Especially as Google is an | ad company, not a search company. | | I'd rather see a world with numerous paid/subscription search | engines, that are motivated to do nothing but return search | results well. I expect you would see some of the SEO crap | getting solved. | w-ll wrote: | i cant remember where i read this, but something about how | google ranks site that have google ads higher than sites | that dont. makese sense, its evil, but makes sense, thats | why we get all this scrapped spam. is there any more info | on this? | mixdup wrote: | this is like focusing on one single problem as being the | cause of the decline of the United States. It's actually | a lot of things combining and there's not going to be one | fix | w-ll wrote: | wtf decline of the United States are you talking aboout | Nextgrid wrote: | Intentionally ranking sites with Google ads higher would | be a huge antitrust liability, so no way they're doing | that. | | On the other hand, they can achieve virtually the same | outcome while keeping plausible deniability by just not | doing anything that would downrank sites with ads (of | which a significant chunk is likely to be Google's). | | Spam sites often include ads. | w-ll wrote: | i dont think they public disclose that fact | Nextgrid wrote: | It doesn't need to be public to become an antitrust | liability. Internal written material can still come up | during discovery, potentially even in unrelated cases. | | Therefore the safest option is to never openly discuss it | or intentionally do it and instead use other means to | achieve the objective (don't intentionally rank spam | higher, just defund/cancel any projects that would make | it rank lower). | zihotki wrote: | Google, or Alphabet, is not a search emgine company. It's an | ads company and that's what they are optimizing for. | Night_Thastus wrote: | The problem is that even if providers of the service are 100% | trying to provide a great service, everyone on the web will | always be min-maxing to appear on top. | | So it's inevitably going to become crap. | jmclnx wrote: | To me it is only due to the ads, google and bing return nothing | but ads on the first page. Plus for me to have the joy of | seeing these ads, I need to got through a CAPTHA that I need to | try multiple times. | | But all in all, a very good article | 1970-01-01 wrote: | The golden era of search results is very much over. Welcome to | the pot-metal era. | endisneigh wrote: | I reckon these days search is pretty difficult and everyone knows | how to game it. I recommend using a search engine that lets you | effectively change which sites are shown. You can do this with | Kagi, or with Google's Programmable Search Engines - I'm sure | there are more too. | | In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't sometimes | correct, but because I don't want videos polluting the regular | results - it just takes too long to get info from videos. | | An ability to upvote results for a given query seems tantalizing | but I bet it would be gamed too. The DIY approach seems to be the | only tractable one. | | In my case I only only results from domains I believe are | correct. The whitelist approach does have downsides. Usually I'll | vet new potential domains through social means like Reddit and | this site, rather than identifying them through the search | results. I believe there's an inherent tradeoff between | discoverability and the gameability of the results. | | Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008 Google | Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude less | content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable your | place is on your business and thus no SEO. | | I also personally disagree that yt-dlp is the "correct" result | for the average user when they search Youtube Download. I highly | doubt the average user would know or care to use the command | line. A website front end would be more actionable for them. | kristopolous wrote: | I'm a big fan of the non commercial site search engines because | of the gaming aspect. If you're not generating revenue from the | clicks the game mostly goes away. | | I'm not saying people aren't entitled to make some money, but | it clearly incentivizes user hostile behavior. | | Maybe make it an option because legitimate sites like | journalism also use this model. | Renaud wrote: | Subscription model like Kagi seems to work pretty well | against gaming the results. | | Their only remaining incentive is to be good enough that | people keep paying for the service. | Nextgrid wrote: | It works not because they're somehow smarter or have more | resources than Google at detecting spam/SEO, it's because | unlike Google (and other ad-supported search engines), they | make money from result quality and have an interest in | blocking spam. | | Google on the other hand makes money off ads (whether on | the search results page itself or on the spam sites), so | spam sites are at best considered neutral and at worst | considered beneficial (since they can embed Google | ads/analytics, and make the ads on the search results page | look relatively good compared to the spam). | | Black-hat SEO has been around since the early days of | search engines and they managed to keep it at bay just | fine. What changed isn't that there was some sudden | breakthrough in malicious SEO, it's that it was more | profitable to keep the spammers around than to fight them, | and with the entire tech industry settling on | advertising/"engagement" as its business model, the risk of | competition was nil because competitors with the same | business model would end up making the same decision. | | The same reason is behind the neutering of advanced search | features. These have nothing to do with the supposed war on | spam/SEO, so why were they removed? Oh yeah because you'd | spend less time on the search results page and are less | likely to click on an ad/sponsored result, so it's against | Google's interests and was removed too. | ec109685 wrote: | Kagi works because there is no incentive for SEO | manipulators to target it since their market share is so | small. | | Super tinfoil hat to believe Google wants to send users | to blog spam websites (e.g. beneficial to Google). | | Anytime there is money to be made, there is an | effectively infinite amount of people trying to game the | system. | lanstin wrote: | Google is a complex system so "want" can just include we | are making money from the blog spam and while we don't | like it other things take priority over fighting it as | effectively as we could. | ZeePelli wrote: | It's never tinfoil-hat to assume that a corporation is, | at very least, making sure not to fight too hard against | any activity that brings it more revenue. | whakim wrote: | But the author tried Kagi and the results don't appear to | be noticeably different, filled with scammy adspam just | like Google and Bing. Kagi's results seem to mostly | aggregate existing search engines [1], so this isn't much | of a surprise. Perhaps a subscription-based service that | operates an index at Google's scale might help, but no such | thing exists to my knowledge. | | [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search- | sources.htm... | greggh wrote: | Right, but Kagi has built in tools to make it easy to fix | that. Blocking those spammy sites from ever showing up | again. Moving certain sites up the ranking, and so on. | These features mean that over time my Kagi results have | become nearly perfect for myself. | whakim wrote: | This is addressed in the article. As Hacker News readers | and expert computer users, we have a bag of tricks that | we can reach into in order to make our searches perform | better. With a similar level of effort and an expert | user's intuition you can get good results out of any | search engine. Not so for the average user. In fact, | again paraphrasing the article, Google's original claim | to fame was that you _didn 't_ have to spend a lot of | time doing exact keyword matching and fancy tricks in | order to get good results. | ysavir wrote: | > In particular I block Youtube, not because they aren't | sometimes correct, but because I don't want videos polluting | the regular results - it just takes too long to get info from | videos. | | Funnily enough, lately I've been prioritizing YT videos more | when searching. So many sites now are just regurgitated SEO | farms with minimal quality, and easy to see why: it's minimal | effort to produce and cheap to host. But making a video takes | time and effort, so has a much higher barrier to use as a click | farm. | | More than once when traditional search failed me, I went to YT | and found some video from 2009 clearly and eloquently | explaining what I'm looking for in detail, and without any | distractions because the person authoring the video clearly | didn't specialize in the media format or show interest in | experimenting. | | I've found it to also be a better source when looking a product | to buy. Want to know which fan to get? Turns out there's a | channel from a dedicated guy who keeps finding ways to test | different fans and their utility and with multiple videos | demonstrating his approach and findings. The mainstream | channels aren't all that useful, but there's a ton of "old web" | style videos (some even recent) passionately providing details | for almost anything you'd think to search. And they're a gold | mine. | robrenaud wrote: | Would a browser feature that skipped to the relevant parts of | the video based on closed captioning and understanding search | intent be useful? It seems like this would be a good way for | Google to fight to stay relevant in UX vs having the chat | bots just quickly spitting out a readable answer. Hunting | through ad laden webpages is annoying. Seeking to the | relevant section of the video is a solvable problem, | especially for videos above some viewership threshold. | nulld3v wrote: | I've definitely seen Google do this already: | https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-suggested-clip- | sea... | tentacleuno wrote: | Google seems to be taking much more advantage of | YouTube's transcription feature lately. The first | addition was the (ok, gimmicky) animation on the | Subscribe button when someone says the dreaded like. | Hopefully a sign of things to come. | | Overall AI summaries are very welcome for a certain | subset of YouTube which is sadly dominated by sponsored, | clickbait, and ad-driven content. | dcow wrote: | Didn't Google try this already? It seems useful to me, at | least. IMO the next frontier of search is not better | hypertext, it's podcasts, audio, and video. | tentacleuno wrote: | > Seeking to the relevant section of the video is a | solvable problem | | ...and it has already _been_ solved, though partially: | SponsorBlock allows people to add a "Highlight" section to | a video, which denotes the part of the video which the user | most likely wanted to see (sans the "what's up guys", "like | and subscribe", etc.) | | Of course, it's not perfect: it relies upon humans doing | the work, though some may see that as a positive over | something more computerized. | plagiarist wrote: | Do you have some tips for finding concise videos that answer | the question you are asking? I am finding more and more | obvious LLM bullshit in results, so I am willing to try some | other tactics. But I am not ready to spend the minutes | watching videos to see if it is actually relevant or a waste | of time, always artificially long to increase ad revenue. | crznp wrote: | For me, it really depends on the type of video. For fixing | cars, I'm usually looking for something specific enough | that there isn't a lot of chaff. It was probably recorded | and edited on a phone just to splice the clips together. | Probably the default thumbnail that youtube extracted from | the video. | | For product videos, if Project Farm did it, look there | first. Otherwise, I look for someone has a lot of videos | for competing products with basically the same format, not | over 10 minutes. | | Tech videos are the hardest, I often still prefer text. | Maybe look for links to the docs in the description? I | still get duds though. | williamcotton wrote: | I don't know much about fixing cars, but yeah, YouTube is | a treasure trove for tacit knowledge. | ysavir wrote: | Wish I did, but here you're at the algorithm's mercy, | unfortunately. One possibility is subbing/accruing watch | time on channels that you find provide you the right value, | so that the algorithm might recommend similar channels on | other subject matters. | imiric wrote: | > But making a video takes time and effort, so has a much | higher barrier to use as a click farm. | | > The mainstream channels aren't all that useful, but there's | a ton of "old web" style videos (some even recent) | passionately providing details for almost anything you'd | think to search. And they're a gold mine. | | This won't be the case for long. YT is already starting to be | polluted with spam and AI generated content, which will get | more and more common. The same thing that happened to the web | in text form, will happen to videos. | | I think the only solutions are using allowlists for specific | domains, and ironically enough more AI to filter specific | results. Or just straight up LLMs instead of web search, | assuming they're not trained on spam data themselves. | danieldk wrote: | Yeah. I was recently looking for videos comparing two | smartphones and among top ranked videos there were videos | that just show the phones side by side and the video | consists of showing specs side by side and videos that just | have LLM-generated text, added to the video with TTS. | ysavir wrote: | One critical difference is the date attached to youtube | videos. It's easy to verify that a video was made before | this tech was available, but you can't do that with | websites, or search engine result pages. | | It does limit utility for more modern needs, unfortunately. | lrem wrote: | Note that the problem of filtering bad data out of learning | material isn't inherently easier than filtering same out of | search results. | necovek wrote: | That's curious, I generally hate video due to inability to | glance over content, and the few attempts I made to actually | find useful information I searched for resulted in... spammy | extra low effort video content that did not answer my | questions. | williamcotton wrote: | Depends on what you're looking for. A blog post about how | to play Search and Destroy by The Stooges is not as useful | as a video of James Williamson himself showing you the | riffs! | teeray wrote: | > it just takes too long to get info from videos. | | I can't wait until video transcripts get fed into LLMs just to | eliminate the whole "This video is sponsored by something- | completely-unrelated, more about them later. What's up Youtube, | remember to like, share, subscribe... _5 entire minutes pass on | similar drivel_ ... _the actual thing you want, but stretched | out to an agonizing length_ " | execat wrote: | You need SponsorBlock. | | Usually people leave a "highlight" marker which tells you | where you're supposed to jump to. Along with the regular | "This video was brought to you by <insert>VPN". | lamontcg wrote: | > Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008 | Google Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude | less content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable | your place is on your business and thus no SEO. | | That was a decade after Google was created and people certainly | understood SEO and Google was constantly updating its algorithm | to punish people who were trying to game the algorithm. | | The wikipedia page on "link farming" for example references it | happening as early as 1999 and targeting SEO on inktomi: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm | | I remember some internal presentations at Amazon around ~2004 | about how boosting Google SEO on Amazon web pages increased | traffic and revenue (and Amazon was honestly a bit behind-the- | curve due to a kind of NIH syndrome). | bee_rider wrote: | At the time it seemed like Google was winning, though. SEO | seems to have gotten really good, or maybe Google just gave | up. | stevage wrote: | I have a hard time believing it's so difficult for a search | engine to distinguish between a credible, respected website | that has been around a while with some generated garbage that | exists to be a search result. We humans can tell them apart, so | in principle, computers can too. | Nextgrid wrote: | Yes, this should be table stakes for a classifier - a company | with the resource of Google can definitely solve that problem | if they weren't themselves in the business of spam | (advertising) and benefited from spam sites (as they often | include Google ads/analytics). | navigate8310 wrote: | Google is quite quick in plugging holes in AdSense but | AdWords. | pixl97 wrote: | I guess this brings up the question of how good are humans at | doing this across a wide number of domains on average? | | The other question I have is how long do these garbage | results stay up for a particular query on average? | dandrew5 wrote: | Google's PSE is neat but there isn't a good way to manage | switching between them. They could easily add a little dropdown | to let you select which one to use as part of the public link | UI they provide for each one individually. Giggle[1] gives me | this ability and I run it locally (alongside Kagi) for more | specific things to target domain lists I've been building over | the years. | | 1. https://github.com/dan-lovelace/giggle | readthenotes1 wrote: | I got different results for Google on "ad block". | | And changing the query to "ad blocker" like Google suggested | raised ublock origin way up in the results | jeffreyw128 wrote: | The issue with traditional search engines is that keyword-first | algorithms are extremely gameable. | | Try https://search.metaphor.systems - it's fully neural | embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what | the actual content of a webpage is. | | So in the mentioned example of searching for Youtube downloaders, | with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders | (https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20b...) | | Full disclosure - I work there :p | charcircuit wrote: | >it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only | an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is. | | What prevents websites from gaming their embedding? Switching | to a similarity search doesn't prevent the results from being | gamed. | marcinzm wrote: | How is that different from keywords? Embeddings aren't magic, | they're just page content. Content is trivial to game since | it's controlled by the website owner. | | edit: The results are also from my quick QA not that great. | Searching for "what is the best mouse to buy" leads to links to | buy random mice versus review summaries or online discussions | on mice. One of the recommended queries of "Here is a great fun | concert in San Francisco" leads to some really bizarre results | in non-English languages that have nothing to do with either SF | or concerts. | | edit2: Also, Google has been using LLMs part of their search | since at least 2018 so definitely not just keyword matching | there. | jeffreyw128 wrote: | Yup, definitely still gameable but if the model learns what | high quality content is like and what high quality webpages | there are (which it does), then the only way to game would be | to be great :) | | For your search - I would recommend turning autoprompt off | and searching something like "Here is a great summary of the | best computer mice to use:". | | Our embeddings model is trained on how links are talked about | on the Internet, if that helps with querying. So you have to | query like how someone would refer to a link before sharing | it | marcinzm wrote: | > Our embeddings model is trained on how links are talked | about on the Internet, if that helps with querying. So you | have to query like how someone would refer to a link before | sharing it | | So it's not high quality web pages but web pages that | people talk about a lot which is expected since no one has | an oracle that says what high quality is. The embeddings | are merely a proxy and generalization for "how links are | talked about on the Internet." That can be gamed at scale | just like every other signal any popular search engine has | been based off of. | jeffreyw128 wrote: | That's true. Although should be much harder | optshun wrote: | This is excellent! | | Definitely excited to see how it holds up to daily use. | | So far it gave me exactly what I wanted at the top for all of | my test queries that were well formed. | | As for asking "ignorant" questions both your service and the | goog failed where phind gave me an actionable starting point | (after a prodding follow up question: | https://www.phind.com/search?cache=hmul4znpn7y4ei6qa64fosmc ) | | "max-height like css property for top and left" | | Unsure if this sort of thing is even a goal of your project, | but you won over a new user. | | Wish you and your team all the best. | croes wrote: | Just wait until the content farms adapt | standardUser wrote: | How do you deal with dynamically/contextually generated | content? And how about paywalls and login-required content? | jeffreyw128 wrote: | Do our best at getting the right content. | | For paywalls/login - we play pretty straight, always obey | robots.txt, etc. | ShadowBanThis01 wrote: | So far so good. I'll try using this first from now on, and see | how it does. Good luck! | ec109685 wrote: | https://getthatvideo.com/ Is the first result for downloading | YouTube videos. Seems super sus (especially since the site | doesn't load). | | Auto-prompted to: "Here's a helpful website for downloading | YouTube videos:" | | Also, this result is horrible: | | "What does it mean if someone is not covered in nfl football?" | anonymoushn wrote: | The first result vtubego.com is a 144MB downloader app. The | page contains "Pricing Plans Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, | placerat verterem luptatum phaedrum vis, impetus mandamus id | vix fabulas vim." above its 3 paid plans (there is no free | plan). | | I haven't installed the downloader app, so I'm not sure if it | lets me download youtube videos for free. | | The second result "ytder.com" is a redirect to | "https://poperblocker.com/edge/" which seems to be a browser | extension for Microsoft Edge that protects the user from the | Holy See. I'm not using Edge and I'm trying to download a | Youtube video. | | The third result download-video.net says that it can download | videos from a list of sites. Youtube is not in the list, but | let's try anyway. If you put | "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box | and click "download" you get "500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token | '<', "" | | At this point I gave up, but please let me know if any of the | results work. | marginalia_nu wrote: | While I've made huge improvements to the algo recently, I do | think Marginalia Search got a bit lucky with the sample queries, | as it is still IMO far more hit and miss than many alternatives, | but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search quality is. | | Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that | it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding. | bombcar wrote: | I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single | developer can do so well ;) | | I do think that search has gotten much worse but my ability to | know the magic words like "ublock origin" instead of "Adblock" | and "yt-dlp" instead of "download YouTube" and phrase my search | has gotten better. | | We've all been doing prompt engineering against the Internet- | wide LLM that is the spam houses. | marginalia_nu wrote: | > I notice you completely avoid the question on how a single | developer can do so well ;) | | As much as I enjoy the notion of somehow being a 10,000X | developer, it's probably mostly that modern search is a | filtering problem, and MS does filtering fairly well. | tentacleuno wrote: | > [...] but that also speaks for how hard evaluating search | quality is. | | Would you be able to share some of your personal highlights | regarding this? | | I've partially kept up-to-date with the DIY, non-corporate | search space (YaCY and friends). I'd love to understand a bit | more behind the engineering decisions made when creating a | search engine; it seems like a very hard problem to solve. | | P.S. Marginalia is a very impressive piece of work, overall -- | I've heard nothing but positive remarks from users on here. | I've been meaning to try it for a while, but time constraints | have... well, constrained, thus far. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Honestly I understand it well enough that I see it is | surprisingly hard, but not enough to have good solutions... | golol wrote: | I just tested Mariginalia and it was completely unable to | lead me to a Wikipedia or imdb page when searching for | "driver ryan gosling" and variations. It just listed lots of | random articles. | wisemang wrote: | That.. is kind of the point of this particular search | engine. | | > This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on | non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you | perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you | probably already knew existed. | golol wrote: | Well that makes sense, but I wanted to push against the | result that the OP seems to take away from their test, | which was that Marginalia seems to work well for the | common user. | marginalia_nu wrote: | There's also a known bug with Wikipedia in particular, I | do index it but the results are never ranked particularly | high. I haven't fixed it because I don't want Wikipedia | to be the #1 result for every search. Feels like most | people are aware of Wikipedia and don't need help finding | it. | lbalazscs wrote: | I often do a Google search, and then go directly to the | Wikipedia result. My reasoning is that during the initial | search, I don't know if there's a Wikipedia page about | that topic, and I might need a fallback option. | treetalker wrote: | Thanks for your work! | | I have a suggestion for the "About" section at the top of | Marginalia's landing page. I think it would read better | like this: | | > This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses | on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites | you perhaps weren't aware of [instead] of the sort of | sites you probably already knew existed. | | Showing one thing "in favor of" another seems | contradictory in this case. | ta988 wrote: | Just my feedback after trying to finally get to what it is | exactly. | | I tried to find marginalia on DDG, not on the first page. | Google has it after some garbage. If I go to marginalia.nu I | get a SSL error. search.marginalia.nu works | | If i search on marginalia for duckduckgo there first link is | somewhat relevant but is about the app, all the other links are | related to DDG but of curious relevance. | | If I search for ublacklist mentioned above, I do not see | anything directly relevant. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Hmm, what's your browser? I renewed the cert today... Only | thing I can think of is that it might not like a wildcard | cert for the bare marginalia.nu domain. | ta988 wrote: | Firefox android | marginalia_nu wrote: | Hmm, can't reproduce it myself, but firefox has a nasty | habit of quietly "repairing" these types of | misconfigurations by redirecting from one subdomain to | another. I've added marginalia.nu as a SAN, should | hopefully work now. | jldugger wrote: | Safari doesn't like https://marginalia.nu. Probably because | *.marginalia.nu is not valid for the base domain. Add it as | a Subject Alt Name | marginalia_nu wrote: | Try now? | jldugger wrote: | Looks like you've fixed your bug. | happytiger wrote: | I feel like you could reboot yahoo directory and have more | utility that most searches. | kristofferR wrote: | The !bang directory for Kagi is honestly pretty good, found | some cool sites there: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs | louthy wrote: | Did you mean to say Kagi or Bing? | | Anyway, here's Kagi's bangs: | | https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html | kristofferR wrote: | > Note that Kagi supports all DuckDuckGo-style bangs. | | You can also make your own bangs. | | That said, my point was that the bang directory has a bunch | of the most useful sites in each category. | flenserboy wrote: | The return of something like Yahoo Directory would be most | welcome. There is great utility in having more than one | approach into a data space. That we have been stuck with | essentially one way in for over a decade means that there is a | great deal out there which would be great to access but which | has been rendered invisible. | marginalia_nu wrote: | https://ooh.directory/ | flenserboy wrote: | Nice. Thanks! | FergusArgyll wrote: | this is awesome! thanks | infamia wrote: | Categorization sounds like a good job for AI. Yahoo execs, are | you paying attention? :) | arthurcolle wrote: | I use serpapi for my hot RAG and the results are fine. | | Brave search API is obscenely overpriced. I hope someone is | working on Search because Google has become a singularly garbage | company. Propping up DEI is sinful enough but just failing to | compete is lame. /shrug | toomim wrote: | Do search engines censor political topics these days? If you | search "truthsocial" on ddg, the truthsocial.com website is the | first hit. But if you search "trump truthsocial", it doesn't give | you trump's truthsocial page, and doesn't even give you | truthsocial.com within the first few pages of search results. | | Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at | bing? It looks like google results are similar. | dpkirchner wrote: | I doubt you're seeing censorship. If you search for | "truthsocial trump" on ddg, you'll see his profile, for better | or worse. | toomim wrote: | Oh, interesting. So it depends on the order of the terms: | | - "truthsocial trump" works | | - "trump truthsocial" doesn't work | Springtime wrote: | DuckDuckGo (and by extension perhaps Bing, assuming identical | upstream results) has some terrible results when trying to | filter by all kinds of domains. | | There's a power tools review/news site that returns zero hits | for the actual domain when searching its name (which is the | same as its .com address). While for some domains even | searching using the `site:` parameter will give far fewer | results when paired with a query than just searching the domain | name + query sans the TLD (the router firmware site openwrt.org | is among such). | | It's a mess and reporting it hasn't any difference ime in the | past 3 years. So I'd be reluctant to say irrelevant results are | due to censorship unless there was more evidence. | senderista wrote: | I have concluded that Google definitely censors search results | relating to the Ukraine war, after vainly searching for | articles about documented Ukrainian war crimes (reported in | mainstream Western media like NYT/WaPo). | ARandomerDude wrote: | I'm not seeing this. I Googled "war crimes by ukrainian | soldiers" and the top link was an Amnesty International | Article, "Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger | civilians". | | https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine- | ukrai... | | I use Google as little as possible because I don't like | surveillance advertising but fair is fair. | senderista wrote: | You're right: I just checked and there are several hits for | events that happened over a year ago that I couldn't find | at all with Google back then. Shame on me for not checking | before I posted. I have no idea what happened but | apparently it's now fixed. | johnfn wrote: | I noticed that the author uses ChatGPT3.5 rather than 4, which is | a rather large difference. I don't have the knowledge to rerank | all questions the author asked, but I will say that a test of | ChatGPT 4 leads me directly to youtube-dl, which is better than | every other search engine listed. | taberiand wrote: | That was the first thing I checked reading the article. | Although the argument would be 3.5 is free - any comparison of | systems against ChatGPT that isn't using ChatGPT 4 can be | dismissed almost out of hand; there is not much point talking | about ChatGPT if it's not using ChatGPT 4 and making proper use | of its capabilities. | | That is not to say that there aren't valid criticisms of and | shortcomings in ChatGPT 4 - just that it's not useful to say | ChatGPT when it's referring to 3.5 | bombcar wrote: | He gives the full queries - do you have chat 4.0 that you ran | run it against? | Dah00n wrote: | >any comparison of systems against ChatGPT that isn't using | ChatGPT 4 can be dismissed almost out of hand | | Does everyone or even most use ChatGPT 4? The most used | version is -of course- by far the most relevant. | vitaflo wrote: | This is silly, most people aren't going to pay for ChatGPT, | just like they won't pay for Google or DDG. So using 3.5 in | this case is perfectly acceptable when we're talking about | free software. | taberiand wrote: | Kagi isn't free, that's on the list | huytersd wrote: | I've come to recognize that any article that uses 3.5 has an | agenda. | airstrike wrote: | I also suspect as much, but obviously can't know for sure. | IMHO it's intellectually lazy if not dishonest to benchmark | against 3.5 and not make that fact clearly known upfront | | A better benchmark would have had two entries for ChatGPT, | showing both 3.5 and 4 results | xigoi wrote: | The agenda of not wanting to pay for something just to test | it out when there is a free version? | latexr wrote: | > I will say that a test of ChatGPT 4 leads me directly to | youtube-dl | | And yet to other people it starts rambling about how that's | wrong and you shouldn't do it and doesn't give a usable answer. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38822040 | | I boggles the mind the extent to which people salivate over a | system that cannot decide between a correct straight answer, | something wrong but plausible, something wrong and impossible, | or outright refusing to answer. | johnfn wrote: | That's GPT 3.5. It sounds like you have a bit of an axe to | grind with ChatGPT, but if you're going to do so, do try to | grind it on the correct version. | latexr wrote: | The comment says it's v4. Since there's no information on | the page either way (funny, considering the original | complaint), I took them at their word. If you don't believe | them, that's up to you. | | For what it's worth, I do have access to v4 and it did give | me an answer right now. But since I also know even v4 can | give you wildly different answers to the same question even | if you ask them one right after another, that doesn't prove | it either way. | Osiris wrote: | I have recently started using kagi after seeing a recommendation | here. | | From what I understand, it aggregates results from multiple | sources rather than having their own indexer. | | The results aren't really any better, but the lack of ads and | videos in the results makes for a cleaner experience. | | I also haven't yet taken advantage of the extra features to block | certain websites from results. | | Personally, I pay the $5 mostly in an attempt to support another | competitor in the space. | kristofferR wrote: | Kagi is awesome, so much better experience than Google! | | Start using bangs, lenses and customized results ASAP, that | makes a big difference. | Zambyte wrote: | I actually find myself using bangs way more since I switched | to Kagi from DDG. I think it's the AI bangs like !chat and | !expert that got me in the habit of using bangs besides !g | (which I never actually use anymore). | Nextgrid wrote: | Pretty sure the reason Kagi is better isn't because they use | multiple sources, it's just because they can use the presence | of ads as a negative ranking signal, something that none of the | major public search engines will ever do as it goes against | their own business model. | elcook4000 wrote: | I have found appending site:edu remarkably improves google | results. | | For both the tire question and with respect to a youtube | dowloader, the first results were on the nose with the addition | of site:edu on Google. | | Why this is needed and whether a noncommercial, information rich | web portal should exist are questions for another thread. | fantasybroker wrote: | I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In _my_ | handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia. | | #1 "Gordon ramsey" (misspelled "Gordon Ramsay"). Marginalia shows | "The Life I Imagine: are my cheeks red?". Kagi corrects to Gordon | Ramsay and shows relevant results. | | #2 "Ukraine war". Marginalia shows an article about the Russian | Orthodox church and a Substack post about the war. Kagi shows | Wikipedia, Al Jazeera, etc up-to-date summaries about the war. | | #3 "Dildo". Top post on Marginalia is "Students for Concealed | Carry Embraces UT Dildos | Students for Concealed Carry". Top | posts on Kagi are Wikipedia (read) and Amazon (buy). | | > How is Marginalia, a search engine built by a single person, so | good? | | Because it's not good? | BytesAndGears wrote: | I had a similar experience when testing Kagi after reading | this. The top result for the "wider car tires" query on Kagi | was a link to Physics StackExchange with some marginally | informative answers [0], which would be easy to expand on in | future searches. The second result was Reddit. Then a couple of | incorrect/irrelevant pages but they don't look like scams | | [0]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29903/why-do- | peo... | | Edit: I did just realize that I have StackExchange customized | to be up-ranked. So that probably helps. But yeah, I guess this | is why I usually get good results, which is something that | generally still fails with Google for me. | hattmall wrote: | I don't disagree with your assessment in full, but I don't | exactly consider wikipedia and Amazon good results. Like they | are big enough that if that's the result I want I can go to | them directly. So like they aren't bad or wrong, but I can see | the case for excluding them. Should something like Webster's | dictionary be a top result? | fantasybroker wrote: | I think for single word queries like that Wikipedia covers | more ground than a dictionary. Personal preference, perhaps. | If I need a definition I search for "define dildo" (Kagi | shows Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc dictionary entries). | marginalia_nu wrote: | Marginalia supports the old Google syntax, e.g. | "define:dildo" | fantasybroker wrote: | Thanks! If you are that "single person" who built | Marginalia... hope you are not taking my criticism | personally. I am more annoyed by this blog post that uses | a few handpicked queries to present generalized long | winded conclusions that are completely disproven when | using a different set of queries. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Yeah, its me, and to be fair I made a comment to a | similar effect myself. Assessing search result quality is | very hard, and this is definitely a pretty flattering | selection of queries. | fantasybroker wrote: | On the plus side - in addition to Marginalia's own | success, you can take partial credit for how good Kagi | search results are (IIRC Marginalia's index is one of the | sources for Kagi search results). So... thank you for | that! | marginalia_nu wrote: | Marginalia Search isn't trying to be a universal knowledge | engine, it's just a website finder. | | That's bad if you're looking for a simple answer or basic | fact, and good if you're looking for a few hours of reading. | Brian_K_White wrote: | It seems to me that the name "marginalia" is not just a random | set of syllables. It sounds like it's doing what it says on the | tin, which is gooder than not doing what it says on the tin. | (distinct from whether what it says on the tin is something you | want) | aworks wrote: | The appendix describing the individual search results is both | entertaining and scary e.g. | | "Two of the top three hits are how to install the extension and | the rest of the top hits are how to remove this badware. Many of | the removal links are themselves scams that install other | badware." | fgblanch wrote: | I would love to see Perplexity.ai in the benchmark. It has | completely replaced Google/DDG for information questions for me. | I still use DDG when I want to do a navigational query (e.g. find | the URL for a blog i partially recall the name). | rr808 wrote: | Me too. I only heard about it this morning and it looks kinda | perfect so far. | larve wrote: | While kagi was the product that most brought me joy in 2022, | perplexity.ai has been the one for 2023, even though i only | recently started using it. It's just been a joy to be able to | iteratively discuss most of my searches. | | EDIT: here's a search for tire (I don't know anything about | tire, so maybe there's much better links out there, but this is | pretty much what I was expecting. Not an ad or SEO in sight.) | https://www.perplexity.ai/search/tire-3iuI9T6BQUSvu2tAhgsRmA... | freediver wrote: | I am wondering if you can use AI chat exclusively for your | search needs? If not, what does the perfect integration looks | like? | lhl wrote: | I've been really enjoying Perplexity as well. It's a _much_ | better Internet /search focused experience than ChatGPT, Bing, | or Bard. For anyone interested, until the new year (~20 more | hours?) there's a code for 2mo free Pro: | https://twitter.com/perplexity_ai/status/1738255102191022359 | (more file uploads, choose your model including GPT4) | infamia wrote: | Try uBlacklist, it's like uBlock, but for search results. | | https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ | | https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia... | | You can sync the settings and your personal blocklist to either | Dropbox or Google Drive. It also has the ability to subscribe to | blocklists. Mind, you need to manually turn on search engines and | subscribe to lists. The uBlacklist subscriptions setting doesn't | have any built-in feeds yet though. :( | | edit: THere are some feeds on the uBlacklist site though. | https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions | | edit edit: Found an even better list of feeds. | https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-fi... | tentacleuno wrote: | uBlacklist is absolutely excellent: I've been using it for a | few years now, with absolutely no problems. | | Quick tip: turn on the 'Skip the "Block this site" dialog', and | disable 'Hide the "Block this site" links' settings -- they | make it much quicker to block spam websites (of which there are | many on regular search engines). | skygazer wrote: | Just today I was looking for an extension just to block Quora | from search results. (Talk about a useless site that seems to | uselessly outrank Wikipedia on google lately -- what on earth | is Google up to?) I'm thankful I saw your and your parent's | post. | carlhjerpe wrote: | When Quora was new I followed some topics, got to read | interesting answers to interesting questions, but then some | kind of enshittification happened. I've blocked it in Kagi | now. | ic_fly2 wrote: | This is amazing, I was maintaining my own custom solution that | did this. | bayindirh wrote: | This is a feature of Kagi already. You can promote or blacklist | domains in your search results. | EA-3167 wrote: | Kagi is just the best, it feels like Google did before a | decade+ of enshittification and ad tech. | cratermoon wrote: | Did anyone notice that Kagi showed as barely better than | Google in the article? | _benj wrote: | Yeah, for the the results of kagi are so much better than | anything else, that it makes me wonder how objective can | one be measuring search results. | | I use google in a clients computer and it's just | horrible. | | But it could also be a factor of the customizations I've | made for my kagi. Ban quick a few paywalls sites, always | put Wikipedia articles on top, prefer blogs than | stackoverflow stuff... | l8_to_catch_up wrote: | I just tried it (free account), and it felt underwhelming, | not many search results, or particularly interesting ones, | for the image and video stuff I searched. | | There was little to no spam, though, but not much to look | at either. Maybe it might be useful when searching for | stuff that usually has high amount of confusing spam, but | otherwise not really useful for me... | RoyalHenOil wrote: | Kagi is still very weak for searching for videos and | images. For those, I still use Google. | | Kagi really shines when you are doing a standard search, | though, which is what most people do most of the time. | KomoD wrote: | But I can't do regexes, wildcards or anything like that as | far as I can see, like I can in uBlacklist | | And it seems like they also have a 1000 domain limit? | brobinson wrote: | Does this exist for DDG? | infamia wrote: | Yes, it works for most search engines. | brobinson wrote: | The addon you linked (on the Firefox version) only requests | permissions on google.* sites so I don't think it will work | for DDG. Is there a separate extension, or am I | misunderstanding something? | gzer0 wrote: | Appreciate you sharing this; I've been searching for something | similar for quite some time. | KomoD wrote: | I use uBlacklist with my own blacklists and Google has been | pretty usable, it's great. | thsksbd wrote: | Honestly, if you have to search something remotely technical, try | HN's search function with comments enabled. | | If the topic has ever come up the discussion and links are likely | to be more relevant and better than your avg. wiki article | ShadowBanThis01 wrote: | More incorrect usage of "hallucinated" for simply made-up or | inaccurate results. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | Blah blah blah. Could you lay this article out any worse? What | are the queries you used to test? I want to try them too. Buried | in here somewhere. | | Using an adblocker is not expert anything. | | That you've defined your own opinion for what some of the results | _should_ be blows the thing up. | | Searching youtube downloader, many people would be _fine_ with | some of the ad covered but totally functional sites that pop up | on Google. I use some of them every day for quick conversion | tasks. I don 't want any youtube-dl result. The average users | don't either. | | Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No | one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download a | program. | | Why do wider tires have better grip? .. what, sites like | roadandtrack, prioritytire, reddit, some physics and | stackexchange sites aren't good enough? they are. | | The Vancouver snow report one also. Lots of major news sites. | Some weathernetwork and almanacs. All totally acceptable results | for a sort of variable question. | | blah blah this is just a hate on for Google and a HN/nerd view of | the world that the average user is nowhere near living in. | SnazzyJeff wrote: | > Download firefox? What's that? All the top links are fine? No | one's looking at the 7th listing for a simple query to download | a program. | | They are if the first six results are SEO bullshit. Which is | the de-facto state of affairs for Google today: advertising | traipsing around as search. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | heh, they're not. They're all variations of mozilla download | pages and site posts. | navjack27 wrote: | Completely agree. I personally thought searching "Vancouver | snow report" to be extremely strange. Just search zip code or | city name and weather. Two words. That's all you need to get | results. What the hell is snow report? Do you even think you | can trust weather reports 10+ days out? | | Whole article is rambling and silly and assuming. | shaldengeki wrote: | For whatever it's worth, I think your comment would be a whole | lot more convincing without its first and last lines, which had | the effect of making you sound (at least to me) like you're | shallowly dismissing the article. | anonymoushn wrote: | Which web site did you use to successfully download a youtube | video, and which youtube video did you download? | boomboomsubban wrote: | Can someone tell me why Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to | prioritizing local results? I'll search the most inane things, | like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses | containing maybe one word in common. | | It's most frustrating with phone numbers. I picked up the habit | of searching the random numbers that called me, to try and find | out if they were possibly important. I used to get a bunch of | spam sites that clearly existed to profit off me making those | searches. | | Both Google and DDG have removed those spam sites, even though | they were useful at times. Google will tell me the number is in | some random PDF that contains a few of the digits, then no other | results. DDG will say the top result is my local police | department, something that freaked me out the first few times. | teeray wrote: | > I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and | get results for local businesses | | Query: "I'm coming out of my cage..." | | Result (Ad): "You'll be doing just fine with these amazing | year-end closeout prices at Al's Discount Car Barn. Gotta come | down--you'll want it all!" | boomboomsubban wrote: | Ads would make sense, but there's no way my local city | council is paying Bing and they are the most frequently | listed result. | moffkalast wrote: | It was only a list, how did it end up like this? | Gualdrapo wrote: | Maybe it was an attempt to make better their results for local | results? | | When searching for results from my country in DDG (picking the | country in the drop-down below the search box) still returned | results from the USA or other countries. Even when searching | stuff in the local language. Maybe they tried to fix that | because it really sucked, so much I never used it again for | searching into local websites. | boomboomsubban wrote: | This is the one area it still ignores my location. I live in | a town named after a UK city, there's several bigger towns in | the US with the same name. I just searched "McDonalds _city | name_. " I got results for the locations at least half the US | away from me, as well as Uber Eats GB. | skygazer wrote: | If you're going to search for phone numbers you'll want to | ensure you enable verbatim searching under tools on Google, and | put the number in quotes, perhaps in "xxx-xxx-xxxx" OR "(xxx) | xxx-xxxx" forms. Many of the sites you mention are fake sites | with fake contacts just for ad serving, and I've read in some | few cases the scammers seeded the spoofed numbers they appear | to call from on to the sites they control to see who googles | their phone numbers. | pixl97 wrote: | Reverse spoof the numbers of FTC investigators and Google | employees? | berkut wrote: | Yeah, I've noticed this as well with DDG recently: even with | the localised checkbox disabled it still prioritises them, | which often is very frustrating as the results are then almost | totally useless. | | However, more generally, I've personally found that DDG (and | maybe Bing's then?) localised results are just _really_ bad, | and have been for the multiple years I 've been using DDG and | it's had this feature: I'm in New Zealand, and enabling | localised / region-based search still often provides results to | pages with TLDs like "co.uk", ".ca" and ".pl" (these latter are | really common for content-generated spam in my experience), | which I just can't understand... | | Unfortunately, I have found that Google's results are usually a | lot better in terms of being "location-aware" than DDG, at | least when that's what you want... | n_plus_1_acc wrote: | I habe the same experience from Germany. There's the slider | but it's not doing mich. | notnullorvoid wrote: | That's a bit surprising that you're seeing spam sites with | .ca, those are illegal here and all .ca domains must be | registered by someone in Canada. | | You can report them: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canada- | anti-spam-legislatio... | alexforster wrote: | DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember | looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago, | and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their | foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping" | equivalent of search engines. | behnamoh wrote: | hope kagi takes ddg place in terms of adoption. never really | liked ddg even though i always care about privacy. | mrweasel wrote: | I really don't get that sentiment. Currently Kagi is just | as dependent on Google as DuckDuckGo is on Bing. That might | only be temporary of course and Kagi does seem to be | working on a search engine of their own. | | Rather than wanting Kagi to take the place of DuckDuckGo, | it would would be better if Kagi could take users from | Google, and then when ready, drop Google as a search | provider. | Semaphor wrote: | Kagi mixes google, bing, some non-profit small-web SE, | and their own index. | mrweasel wrote: | I don't think they use Bing, but yes, Google, Marginalia, | Yandex, Brave and others. I still fail to see how that's | different to DuckDuckGo, who also run their own crawler. | It's really weird that people are almost hating on | DuckDuckGo for how they run their search engine, while | applauding Kagi, for doing the same, but with a different | business model. | speedgoose wrote: | I also assume that Kagi uses some shady residential IPs | proxies and similar tricks to scrap Google while DDG has | access to the Bing API. | mrweasel wrote: | You can buy access to the Google Search API, which is | what I assume Kagi does. Building your product on being | able to circumvent some Google restrictions seems like a | bad business move, if you can buy the same service for a | reasonable price. | speedgoose wrote: | Where can I buy it? | bigtunacan wrote: | https://developers.google.com/custom-search | | It's been available for ages. We used it to power the | company internal search for a large enterprise I worked | at 17 or 18 years ago. | speedgoose wrote: | Yes this isn't an API to make a generic search engine. | Semaphor wrote: | Only if they changed that (which they might have as part | of their cost-optimization). They said they mixed bing | and google results back then. | feanaro wrote: | Kagi should hire the Marginalia author. | freediver wrote: | We already include Marginalia results in Kagi [1] | | https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search- | sources.htm... | Kiro wrote: | DDG used to be the HN darling and you would get downvoted | for saying anything negative or even insinuating that | they are relying on Bing. Now the spot has been overtaken | by Kagi but it looks like it suffers from the same | problems. The counterargument that they have their own | index as well is the same that was used for DDG, when the | reality was that it was only used for widgets and other | fluff. Let's see how it plays out for Kagi. | bpodgursky wrote: | I suspect it's a failure to distinguish mobile searches (where | people are legitimately looking for a business) from desktop | searches. | dvngnt_ wrote: | you can use true person search for numbers | callalex wrote: | I'm confused, you are searching for, specifically, a local | phone number and you are upset that the machine interprets that | as you looking for a local result? That's what most people | expect from a local number search. | | Perhaps the incorrect thing is not your internet search | results, but actually your phone carrier for lying to you and | telling you that a caller has a local number? | tedunangst wrote: | If I search for a ten digit number, it is not helpful to | return a local business that shares the last four digits. | boomboomsubban wrote: | The number is local, and occasionally I've searched and found | the number was a local clinic or business that had legitimate | reason to call me but not leave a message. In those | scenarios, close to all ten of the numbers are found on the | page. | | The top result being my local police department because it | shares the same area code and has maybe one other number in | common is clearly a bad result. It does this even if the | phone carrier isn't lying to me and the caller does have a | local number, like the increasingly common political spam | calls. | csnover wrote: | Man, thank you for saying this. Stuffing results with | geolocated local junk despite explicitly opting out by choosing | "All regions" is so frustrating. This wasn't happening a year | or two ago. I submit negative feedback about it constantly, but | I guess not enough people are doing that for anyone to notice | or care. | | I've also noticed a significant increase in attempts to stuff | news into regular search results. I _really_ do not appreciate | being force-fed mental health poison. I don't need it ever, but | I _especially_ don't need it when I'm searching for some | specific technical thing and then get emotionally sabotaged by | some clickbait headline because ... why? Some bullshit KPI? Why | are tech companies so obsessed with pushing news into every | orifice? | stavros wrote: | Hah, calling the news "mental health poison" is the most | accurate thing I've read all day. | mattigames wrote: | In my country (Colombia) Google still has not removed those | spam sites that just generate all possible numbers. | michaelbuckbee wrote: | Nearly every local search is a leading indicator of buying | intent and, therefore, is worth more money when served as a | response instead of an authoritative response. | bscphil wrote: | > Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local | results | | From what I can tell this is an issue with the Bing API that | DDG uses that the DDG folks have been unable to resolve. I've | tried many identical queries between DDG and Bing and while | Bing does occasionally return incorrect local results, the | _completely irrelevant_ local results that appear on almost | every DDG search do not seem to happen with Bing itself. | | From what I understand, DDG is aware of the issue. I don't know | why it isn't more of a priority. | binarymax wrote: | Long time DDG user (>10 years) here, and it's astounding to | me that they haven't prioritized making their own independent | index to switch off Bing. I would have expected them to do it | like 5 years ago, but there's afaik no initiative to do so. | It's unfortunate and am now trying other engines like Brave | search. | nsagent wrote: | I also occasionally try Brave search when a DDG search | fails. Sometimes Brave finds what I want, but I frequently | get Captcha (and now proof of work) challenges that are | quite annoying. I don't get this with any other search | provider (though StartPage would frequently do this a while | back). I hope this is just a phase, because I would likely | use Brave Search more if not for this issue. | sagarpatil wrote: | Have you tried perplexity.ai? It's like ChatGPT and Google had a | baby. Looks very promising and I'm seeing a lot of tech leaders | (example Toby of Shopify) moving to it. | dartharva wrote: | Aren't Bing Chat and Kagi FastGPT the same in effect? | littlecranky67 wrote: | No, FastGPT is GPT-2 based. I actually prefer FastGPT because | its fast (duh!), and as it gives very concise answers and all | the generated response carries footnotes with the link to the | source. | freediver wrote: | Just to correct, FastGPT uses claude-instant. | emmanueloga_ wrote: | I will admit that I can't read between lines here and just go | ahead an ask: What does "bluesky thought leader" suppose to mean? | (1) Any guesses who this may be? Why is he not quoted directly? | (btw, the term is used 3 times, presumably to refer to the same | person). | | 1: my reading is that this is a sarcastic denomination for | someone that is supposed to be an innovation thought leader but | actually is just defending the broken search landscape status | quo. | 0x38B wrote: | Re: Kagi, I heard about it on HN, tried it for 100 searches, then | subscribed. When I search for random JS and CSS things, MDN is | the first result, and if it isn't, I can downrank whatever spammy | site(s) are on top. | | --- | | I wish I had a local LLM trained to detect clickbait and or low- | effort content. I imagine searching YouTube and having all the | clickbait collapsed together (just like Kagi condenses | listicles), with the remainder being potentially high-quality | content. Don't know how feasible this is right now. | shados wrote: | I became a huge fan of Kagi after seeing it on hacker news too. | It's amazing how good a search engine can be when it's not full | of ads. | D13Fd wrote: | Yeah. At first I primarily used Kagi to move away from Google | as a company, hoping for results that were equally good. But | Google search actually feels crappy now in comparison. | freeAgent wrote: | Just use the Kagi Summarizer on YouTube videos and you don't | have to waste time watching trash. It's a great life hack. | xigoi wrote: | How does that work? Does it scrape the auto-generated | captions? | qudat wrote: | Been paying for Kagi for 6+ months and very happy with it. I'm | pretty anti subscriptions so that's saying a lot for a service | that is otherwise free. | | I do have to dump into google for local searches every once in | awhile, but otherwise happy with it. | wolverine876 wrote: | Look at the source for that page. Is it hand-coded? (I think it's | great.) | zzleeper wrote: | For me the problem is not just that searching on Google is bad, | but that sometimes it COMPLETELY hides exactly what I'm looking, | for no good reason. | | For instance, I wrote an R ggplot2 package called "fedplot" | (following the convention of calling the package for the figure | style it replicates, as in "bbplot" for BBC-style charts). | | Try searching for it on Google: "github" "fedplot" doesn't get | you anywhere. Meanwhile, every other search engine gives you | exactly what you want if you just type "fedplot". I even tried to | add the relevant websites through google's suggested tools, and | nothing happened :| | Brian_K_White wrote: | Their black box semantic guesser has been told not to feed the | radicalizing conspiracy theorist fires about federal plots. | | Who needs to know anything about government owned land anyway? | Dah00n wrote: | Searching for "fedplot" looking for | https://github.com/sergiocorreia in the results: | | Qwant: Result 1 | | Bing: Result 1 | | Google: Result 2 | | Marginalia: Zero results | | ChatGPT 3.5: Some Federal Reserve dot plot nonsense and no | useful results. | marginalia_nu wrote: | You're never going to find github results on Marginalia as | long as they block 3rd party crawlers :-/ | Dah00n wrote: | Well, zero results are better than spam ;-) | zzleeper wrote: | I would say Google has zero results, as it does not find | https://github.com/sergiocorreia/fedplot nor | https://sergiocorreia.github.io/fedplot/ ; even with the | advantage of the latter being manually added to the Google | Admin console. | | Meanwhile, both Bing and Qwant give me exactly what I want | viraptor wrote: | I really don't agree with some of the expectations around | results. | | > Download youtube videos | | > Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, | wrapper around yt-dlp. Links to youtube-dl or other less | frequently updated projects would also be ok. | | That's not what a random person expects. yt-dlp or youtube-dl | have no meaning to a normie. The first result is an online | downloader and that's what an average person is after. I checked | the first result in Kagi and it's a valid youtube downloader. | | If you're after a commandline tool, ask for it: "commandline tool | download youtube videos" gives youtube-dl as the top result with | valid options afterwards: | https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+... | | "Ad blocker" seems to ignore other options exist. Yes, ublock | would be preferable for most, but ABP is not "very bad". Kagi | mentions ABP at position 1 and ublock at position 8: | https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOt... | (But for a query like that, I'd be happy with a wikipedia article | about adblockers, because why not?) | | I'm not disagreeing that results have been getting worse for | years, but... this is a really bad scoring system. It feels like | that one very new person jumping on SO posting something like | "syntax error: if 1 {" - what are you even asking for? (To be | honest, the search engines could also give you the equivalent of | "this is a very vague, would you like to specify what you're | actually after? here are some suggestions: ...", but that's | beyond the scope here.) The search returning not the exact thing | you want to see for a super generic query, but returning a valid | answer to a question is not "very bad". | linusg789 wrote: | My thoughts exactly. | anonymoushn wrote: | If you try using it, the first result doesn't help you download | a youtube video and does try to get you to install malware. | shutupnerd0000 wrote: | Speaking of bad software, anyone getting a huge amount of | horizontal scroll on mobile on this blog post? What should I add | to my bag of tricks to work around that | jraph wrote: | Reader mode might do the job. | gniv wrote: | I am not (Chrome on iOS). | nneonneo wrote: | Honestly, this is depressing. Back in the day, AltaVista and | AskJeeves existed but returned terrible results, and Google | showed up to disrupt them all. It seems like we should be on the | verge of repeating this cycle. | | Maybe LLMs will help, but I can't shake the nagging feeling that | the situation will simply get worse with LLMs, not better, due to | hallucinations and the apparent "gullibility" of LLMs: I would | not be surprised if SEOing an LLM turns out to be easier than | SEOing Google. | jimmytucson wrote: | If you wanna know why Google (or any search engine) sucks, just | look at how it measures its own search results. Most search | companies do this "at scale" according to very specific | guidelines, like what the author did here but on steroids. For | example, take a look at Google's 168-page instruction manual for | search quality raters: | | https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... | | It talks about figuring out a query's meaning(s), judging the | user's intent (were they looking for some specific answer, etc.), | evaluating the "quality" of a website, rating the site's | usefulness in relation to the query's meaning/intent, etc. | | All this is to say, it's not that search companies don't do | exactly what the author did here, it's just that they have | different standards than the author. And I'd venture their | standards match their users' better than the author's, but maybe | not or not forever, anyway. | ec109685 wrote: | Why would an average user want blog spam search results? | | My hope is as LLM's improve, they can be more discriminating | about the results returned. | jimmytucson wrote: | > Why would an average user want blog spam search results? | | I didn't say they would :) | | In fact, I can't figure out how your comment relates to mine. | Are you claiming that Google doesn't factor blog spamminess | into its evaluation of search results? If so, that's quickly | put to bed by the document I linked, pretty much section 4.6. | Excerpt: | | > Creating an abundance of content with little effort or | originality with no editing or manual curation is often the | defining attribute of spammy websites. | | You could claim that they fail to capture some essential | quality of "blog spamitude" or that they don't weight it | heavily enough in their eval but to say they just, like, | don't know about blogspam over there, is pretty far fetched | IMO. | whakim wrote: | I really don't think that's true. For example, page 29 of your | link describes "Lowest Quality Content." Most of the search | results that the author rated as spammy or scammy clearly fit | these guidelines, which means that either (1) the raters aren't | knowledgeable enough about the subject matter to determine that | the website they're rating is harmful or misleading; or (2) the | raters _are_ rating these sites correctly, but it still isn 't | having the desired effect. | mrweasel wrote: | > If you wanna know why Google (or any search engine) sucks | | While I obviously don't know it may be related to how Google | believes a "normal" person search. I have come to view Google | as a product search engine/price comparison site, that's what | it's great at. Google can find you the most relevant products | for any purchase you may consider, so maybe that's what Google | has optimized for. The majority of my searches are related to | IT, programming, software and computers in general, but what | does "normal" people search for. They search for products, | news, opening hours for a store, Google is pretty decent at | that, but the money is in the "go buy something". The ads on a | product search on Google is always way more accurate than the | actual search result. | | I think Google has optimized for selling products. | throwawaaarrgh wrote: | Search engines are not designed to give you the information you | desire. They are designed to sell ads or metadata. "Result | quality" is of no consequence. | | If you actually wanted accurate results you wouldn't use a tool | that is literally attempting to read your mind like a fortune | teller. It is impossible to know what you want just by the word | "snow". Jesus Christ engineers are so dumb. | naet wrote: | I think the result grading is too opinionated here. | | For example, the first query is "download YouTube videos", for | which Google is ranked "terrible" for not showing you a command | line open source program. But the literal first result is an ad | supported site where I can paste in a YouTube link and download | it right from the browser. That seems like exactly what most | people would want or to the CLI tool the author is searching for. | The author seemed to be looking for sites without ads as what | they wanted to see in search results more than search relevance. | | Search is a very gamed system with a lot of SEO spam type | results, but I think a much better analysis could be done for | more meaningful results. Also I recreated some of the searches | and got very different results (including ublock origin in the | top three responses). Again, a more scientific ranking system | could help uncover better data on searches. | shaldengeki wrote: | The author describes that site as such, which seems fair to | rate as "terrible": | | > Some youtube downloader site. Has lots of assurances that the | website and the tool are safe because they've been checked by | "Norton SafeWeb". Interacting with the site at all prompts you | to install a browser extension and enable notifications. Trying | to download any video gives you a full page pop-over for | extension installation for something called CyberShield. There | appears to be no way to dismiss the popover without clicking on | something to try to install it. After going through the links | but then choosing not to install CyberShield, no video | downloads. Googling "cybershield chrome extension" returns a | knowledge card with "Cyber Shield is a browser extension that | claims to be a popup blocker but instead displays | advertisements in the browser. When installed, this extension | will open new tabs in the browser that display advertisements | trying to sell software, push fake software updates, and tech | support scams.", so CyberShield appears to be badware. | naet wrote: | That's how he described it but I tried it myself and found it | perfectly functional to download a video with different | options for size / quality. It has ads but not nearly as bad | as described. | | It's a service that is quasi illegal and explicitly breaks | the YouTube terms of service. I think the search engine did a | good job surfacing what was searched for, there just aren't | going to be any free online YouTube downloaders without | advertising. | anonymoushn wrote: | Which web site did you use to successfully download a | youtube video? Which youtube video did you download? | shaldengeki wrote: | It'd be useful to know what site you used to verify - but | if we're talking about the same site, IMO a website that | presents Dan's experience sometimes, and your experience | sometimes, is actively harmful. | j7ake wrote: | Yeah, if one typed "YouTube downloaded cli" you the results the | author was thinking. | | It seems like the author wants to search to read their kind | without specifying what kind of YouTube downloaded they want | virgildotcodes wrote: | I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about | ChatGPT uses 3.5. It's pretty misleading as to the results you | can get out of (the best available version of) ChatGPT. | | For comparison, here are all the author's questions posed against | GPT4: | | https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7... | refulgentis wrote: | It's a bit hard to use for most, either $20/month fixed for a | limited # of messages, or you need to be able to reason through | how to get an API key, or get another 3rd party service with | similar cost & limits. | simonw wrote: | You can use GPT-4 for free via Bing - though I find it a | little hard to explain to people how they can do that because | I'm never sure what the rules are with regards to creating | Microsoft accounts, whether you can use any browser or have | to use Edge, what countries it's available in etc. | | Actually maybe the recommendation should be to use GPT-4 for | free via https://copilot.microsoft.com/ instead now. | | (Except I can't tell which version of GPT that's using yet - | there was a story on 5th December that said GPT-4 Turbo was | "coming soon", not sure when "soon" is though: | https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/12/05/celebrating- | the-... ) | vitorgrs wrote: | FYI: Balanced doesn't run pure GPT4. Balanced uses a | combination of multiple models. Precise and Creative is | pure GPT4. | | About GPT4 Turbo, to check if you are on Turbo, ctrl+U > | ctrl+f > check if "dlgpt4t" exists. If it exists, you are | running turbo. | | You can also double-check by, well, asking stuff after 2021 | knowledge cut-off as well ("What are the oscar winners?") | with search disabled. | | But you'll notice because turbo is much faster on bing (and | better too). | apapapa wrote: | But that gpt-4 says it can't code | airstrike wrote: | IMHO TBF the "limited # of messages" is continously | increasing, to the point I hardly remember it exists these | days | tedunangst wrote: | Why does OpenAI continue to offer chatgpt 3.5 if it's so bad? | azinman2 wrote: | Cheaper and faster. | hannasanarion wrote: | GPT 4 is THIRTY (30) times more expensive. | | In the llm-assisted search spaces I'm involved in, a lot of | folks are trying to build solutions based on fine tuning and | support software surrounding 3.5, which is economical for a | massive userbase, using 4 only as a testing judge for quality | control. | antupis wrote: | Chatgpt3.5 is good enought if can give context in query. | latexr wrote: | > I really don't understand why anyone writing articles about | ChatGPT uses 3.5. | | Because that's what most people have access to. It's absolutely | worthless to most readers to talk about something they'll never | pay for and it's not the job of random third-parties to | incentivise others to send money to OpenAI. | | What I really don't understand is why anyone gets so hung up | about it and blames the writer. If you're bothered by people | using 3.5 you should complain to OpenAI, not the people using | the service they make freely available. | | Anecdotally, I find this excessive fawning about 4 VS 3.5 to be | unwarranted. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304184 | virgildotcodes wrote: | > Because that's what most people have access to. | | I'd agree with this rationale if the author clearly | communicated their choice of model and the consequences of | that choice upfront. | | In this post the table of results and the text of the post | itself simply reads "ChatGPT" with no mention of 3.5 until | the middle of a paragraph of text in the appendix. | | > It's absolutely worthless to most readers to talk about | something they'll never pay for and it's not the job of | random third-parties to incentivise others to send money to | OpenAI. | | The "worth" is in communicating an accurate representation of | the capabilities of the technology being evaluated. If you're | using the less capable free version, then make that clear | upfront, and there's no problem. | | If you were to write an article reviewing any other piece of | software that has a much less capable free version available | in addition to a paid version, then you would be expected to | be clear upfront (not in a single sentence all the way down | in the appendix) about which version you're using, and if | you're using the free version what its limitations may be. To | do otherwise would be misleading. | | If you simply say "ChatGPT" it's reasonable to infer that | you're evaluating the best possible version of "ChatGPT", not | the worst. | | Accurate communication is literally the job of the author if | they're making money off the article (this one has a Patreon | solicitation at the top of the page). | | Whether or not "most readers" are ever going to pay for the | software is totally orthogonal. | | If using GPT4 vs 3.5 would create results so distinct from | one another that it would serve to incentivize people to give | money to OpenAI, well then that precisely supports the | argument that the author's approach is misleading when | presenting their results as representative of the | capabilities of "ChatGPT". | | > What I really don't understand is why anyone gets so hung | up about it and blames the writer. | | Again, if they're making money off their readers it's their | job to provide them with an accurate representation of the | tech. | | > Anecdotally, I find this excessive fawning about 4 VS 3.5 | to be unwarranted. | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304184 | | Did some part of my comment came across as "excessive | fawning"? Regardless, if this "excessive fawning" is truly | unwarranted, this would again undermine your statement that | using GPT4 would "incentivize others to send money to | OpenAI". | | In regards to your link, I'll highlight what another | commenter replied to you. What should ChatGPT say when | prompted about various religious beliefs? Should it | confidently tell the user that these beliefs are rooted in | fantastical nonsense? | | It seems in this case you're holding ChatGPT to an arbitrary | standard, not to mention one that the majority of humanity, | including many of its brightest members, would fail to meet. | latexr wrote: | > I'd agree with this rationale if the author clearly | communicated their choice of model and the consequences of | that choice upfront. (...) with no mention of 3.5 until the | middle of a paragraph of text in the appendix. | | You're moving the goalposts. You went from criticising | _anyone_ using 3.5 and writing about it to saying it | would've been OK if they had mentioned it where _you_ think | it's acceptable. It's debatable if the information needed | to be more prominent; it is not debatable it is present. | | > If you simply say "ChatGPT" it's reasonable to infer that | you're evaluating the best possible version of "ChatGPT", | not the worst. | | Alternatively, it you simply say "ChatGPT" it's reasonable | to infer that you're evaluating the version most people | have access to and can "play along" with the author. | | > If using GPT4 vs 3.5 would create results so distinct | from one another that it would serve to incentivize people | to give money to OpenAI | | Those are your words, not mine. I argued for the exact | opposite. | | > Again, if they're making money off their readers it's | their job to provide them with an accurate representation | of the tech. | | I agree they should strive to provide accurate information. | But I disagree that being paid has anything to do with it, | and that their representation of the tech was inaccurate. | Incomplete, maybe. | | > Regardless, if this "excessive fawning" is truly | unwarranted, this would again undermine your statement that | using GPT4 would "incentivize others to send money to | OpenAI". | | Again, I did not argue that, I argued the opposite. What I | meant is that even if _you_ believe that to be true, that | still doesn't mean random third-parties would have any | obligation to do it. | | > I'll highlight what another commenter replied to you. | | That comment has a reply, by another person, to which I | didn't feel the need to add. | | > It seems in this case you're holding ChatGPT to an | arbitrary standard, not to mention one that the majority of | humanity, including many of its brightest members, would | fail to meet. | | Machines and humans are not the same, not judged the same, | don't work the same, are not interpreted the same. Let's | please stop pretending there's an equivalence. | | Here's a simple example: If someone tells you they can | multiply any two numbers in their head and you give them | 324543 and 976985, when they reply "317073642855" you'll | take out a calculator to confirm. If you had done the | calculation first on a computer, you wouldn't turn to the | nearest human for them to confirm it in their head. | | The problem with ChatGPT being wrong and misleading isn't | the information itself, but that people are taking it as | correct because that's what they're used to and expect from | machines. In addition, you don't know when an answer is | bullshit or not. With a human, not only can you catch clues | regarding reliability of the information, you learn which | human to trust with each information. | | _Everyone's_ standard for ChatGPT, be it absolute | omniscience, utter failure, or anything in between, is | arbitrary. Comparing it to "the majority of humanity, | including many of its brightest members" is certainly not | an objective measurable standard. | xpressvideoz wrote: | > However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that | search results are still great. | | I think that this very sentence shows the author's bias, because | I feel that Google's search results are not just great, but | _better_ than what it was 10 years ago. | realcertify wrote: | You must be kidding, Google is becoming worse every day. Still | better than useless Bing though. | computerfriend wrote: | Consider yourself part of the sizeable group of vocal folk | then. | innocentoldguy wrote: | While I think the article is interesting, I disagree with its | results regarding Kagi. I like Kagi and rarely use anything else. | Kagi's results are decent and I can blacklist sites like | Amazon.com so they never show up in my search results. | vitorgrs wrote: | Weird article. Basically, the author thinks that anything that is | not yt-dlp is a bad search result, which is pretty insane. | | Like, for me at least, I already know yt-dlp exists. When I | search "youtube downloader", it's exactly because I want an | online-website page to download youtube videos. | anonymoushn wrote: | The author would probably accept any result that helps them | download youtube videos. Did you find any and successfully use | it to download a youtube video? Could you provide a link to the | one you used? | csours wrote: | Wide tires by Jason of Engineering Explained: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8 | | Better answer: learn the differential equations in this book: | | https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TERRAMECH... | freediver wrote: | Current Kagi results for those without an account to compare: | | youtube downloader | | https://kagi.com/search?q=youtube+downloader&r=us&sh=_szITdy... | | ad blocker | | https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=us&sh=-BHzV2ZoCDpmgOu... | | download Firefox | | https://kagi.com/search?q=Download+Firefox&r=us&sh=zkkmc_EQX... | | why do wider tires have better grip? | | https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+wider+tires+have+better+gri... | | why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller? | | https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+they+keep+making+cpu+transi... | | vancouver snow forecast winter 2023 | | https://kagi.com/search?q=Vancouver+snow+forecast+winter+202... | | I agree with the author that there is too much spam on the web. I | think Kagi in general does a pretty good job at downranking it | (number of ads/trackers is a negative ranking signal on Kagi) but | we can always do better. Kagi has special search modes like | "Small Web" which virtually eliminates spam. | | I welcome such scrutiny from the community. Please continue to | keep us honest. | asah wrote: | Kagi gives me websites that require more clicking; Google just | gives me reasonable answers and I don't see spam in your | examples. | | "why do wider tires have better grip?" | | Wider tires provide more grip due to a larger contact patch | with the road. While it's true that friction is not directly | dependent on surface area, a larger contact patch allows for | more even weight distribution and better traction, particularly | during cornering. This can result in improved handling and | stability. | | "why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?" | | Smaller transistors can do more calculations without | overheating, which makes them more power efficient. It also | allows for smaller die sizes, which reduce costs and can | increase density, allowing more cores per chip. | | "vancouver snow forecast winter 2023" | | The forecast for the 2023/2024 season suggests that we can | expect another winter marked by ample snowfall and temperatures | hovering both slightly above and below the freezing mark. Be | prepared ahead of time. | poyu wrote: | My only gripe with these quick answers or excerpts is | sometimes it doesn't fully give the context. After it's given | me couple wrong results I stop trusting it and always read | the source. If I were to read the source might as well click | into the website and read the whole thing. | pbronez wrote: | I often default to using Kagi's FastGPT when I want direct | information instead of a starting point for web browsing. It | combines web searches with LLM summarization to produce an | integrated, sourced answer. Kinda like "New Bing" with a | better interface. You can trigger this mode by adding "!fast" | to your query, going to https://kagi.com/fastgpt, or using | their API. Here's what it returned for me on those specific | queries: ========== "why do wider tires have better grip?" | Wider tires provide better grip due to having a larger | contact patch with the road surface. A larger contact patch | means the tire can disperse the weight of the vehicle over a | wider area, reducing pressure. This allows for more friction | between the tire and road, improving traction and cornering | ability. However, wider tires do not necessarily provide | better grip in wet conditions. [1][2][3][4][5] 1. wheels - | Does a wider tire always mean more grip/traction - Motor ... | 2. Do Wider Tires Give You More Grip? Not All the Time 3. | Learn Me: Wider tires = more Grip? = Faster cornering?| | Grassroots ... 4. Wide or narrow tires? Here's how your | choice will affect driving ... 5. VIDEO: Do wider tires offer | more grip? - BMW M3 and BMW M4 Forum ========== "why do they | keep making cpu transistors smaller?" There are a few key | reasons why CPU manufacturers keep making transistors | smaller: 1. Smaller transistors allow more transistors to be | placed on a single chip, enabling increased processing power. | More transistors results in more capabilities and | performance. [1] 2. Smaller transistors use less power and | produce less heat. This allows CPUs to operate faster and | with more cores/threads within the same power and thermal | envelope. [2] 3. Moore's Law, an observation made by Intel | co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, predicted that the number of | transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately | every two years. Following this trend has driven the | semiconductor industry to continue shrinking transistors. [3] | 4. Smaller transistors can switch on and off faster, enabling | increased clock speeds. This directly leads to increased | performance. [1] However, we are rapidly approaching the | fundamental physical limits of transistor shrinkage. | Transistors cannot be smaller than an atom, which is around | 0.2 nanometers for silicon. [4] Alternative technologies like | carbon nanotube transistors may be needed to continue | performance growth beyond this point. [5] 1. Why does | computer chip process size have to keep getting smaller ... | 2. Why does smaller = less heat? - CPUs, Motherboards, and | Memory ... 3. What Is Moore's Law and Is It Still True? 4. | Transistors are an essential building block used in almost | every ... 5. These Transistor Gates Are Just One Carbon Atom | Thick - IEEE ... ========== "vancouver snow forecast winter | 2023" Based on the context provided: The winter of 2023-2024 | in Vancouver is expected to see less snow and milder | temperatures than typical winters. Forecasts predict a below | average snowfall season with warmer weather | [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Long range forecasts through December | 2023 for southern British Columbia call for showers along the | coast and less precipitation inland [7]. Metro Vancouver's | fall and winter is also predicted to be a potentially 'down' | snow year [4]. Confidence is high for a mild winter in | western Canada with reduced snowfall amounts [5]. However, | specific snowfall totals are uncertain given the long lead | time [6]. 1. Vancouver winter weather: Less snow, milder | temperatures ... 2. 2023-2024 British Columbia Winter | Forecast Preview | OpenSnow 3. Snow Prediction Vancouver | Winter 2023/24 -- Alblaster Snow ... 4. Metro Vancouver's | fall, winter forecast | CityNews Vancouver 5. What will this | winter be like? Grab the hot cocoa -- here's your 2023 ... 6. | Canada's Winter Forecast: El Nino a critical factor for the | season ... 7. 60-Day Extended Weather Forecast for Vancouver, | BC | Almanac.com | algas wrote: | That first result re: tires is simply wrong. Wider tires | don't have a larger contact patch; the size of the contact | patch is determined by the weight of the car and the air | pressure in the tires: A = W / P | | So the reason wider tires improve handling is more complex | and subtle. Also, FTA: Assuming a baseline | of a moderately wide tire for the wheel size. - | Scaling both of these to make both wider than the OEM tire | (but still running a setup that fits in the car without | serious modifications) generally gives better dry braking and | better lap times. - In wet conditions, wider setups | often have better braking distances (though this depends a | lot on the specific setup) and better lap times, but also | aquaplane at lower speeds. - Just increasing the | wheel width and using the same tire generally gives you | better lap times, within reason. - Just increasing | the tire width and leaving wheel width fixed generally | results in worse lap times. | | A full accounting of the effects of changing tire width | should explain all of these effects. | jeffbee wrote: | Pretty biased selection of queries. Article avoids the things | that ChatGPT and the others without fresh data can't answer. Look | at the trending searches on Google. They are all for fresh info | that none of the others can answer. Sports scores. Google | probably judges quality weighted by the questions their users | actually ask, not this nerd bullshit. | bluish29 wrote: | Isn't any selection of queries would be biased. Even what you | are saying is biased, you try to say that Google would be | better for cases that it optimize for which is even weirder. | That is like saying you want to compare highly optimized code | that is using some C libraries vs some native python code. | Dah00n wrote: | How is a youtube downloader biased to fresh results? Seems to | cover a pretty broad test. | jeffbee wrote: | It selects a "right answer" that suits a stale index, | assuming that there can't have been a right-er answer | discovered after ChatGPT's training horizon. | shaldengeki wrote: | What's most shocking to me is how much malware there is in all of | this. The fact that Google et al aren't constantly in trouble for | directly forwarding unwitting users to malware distributors | indicates to me just how far our standards have fallen for a | "good" search engine. I feel like we'd be happier with search | engines that adhered to "first, do no harm" principles. | hannasanarion wrote: | I'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at | all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic | in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there. | | In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be | found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some | articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or | command line tools. | | In the Adblock search, ublock Origin is #3, followed by some | blogs about ad blocking ethics debates and the bullshit Google | has been pulling recently. | | In the wider tires grip search, #3 is a physics blog that dives | deep into the topic. | | In the transistors search, the first reddit link directly answers | the question in very similar wording to the hypothetical correct | answer spelled out in the rubric. 4/5 of the reddit results are | on the correct topic, followed by two SuperUser questinos also on | the correct topic, then some linus tech tips and toms hardware | articles, also on the correct topic. No Quora questions. | | In the vancouver winter snow search, the first several results | are from local news papers talking about the anticipated effects | of el nino on snowfall, and then a couple of high-quality blogs | and weather sites. | | Really wondering how Dan got such bad results. | | ------ | | Aside from that, the way that the author expects all the results | to return the same kind of thing is just... weird? Like, that's | not how search engines are supposed to work. A search that gives | you 10 links to fundamentally the same thing is a bad search. | Search results should cover a breadth of reasonable guesses for | what you should be looking for given a query. If you search for | "download firefox", and you scroll past the first 5 download | links, then you're probably not actually looking for a download | link and a blog post about firefox is not "irrelevant" and | shouldn't be points against. | | This opinion is even borne out in search engine quality metrics | that have been industry-standard for decades, like mean | reciprocal rank and distributed cumulative gain. What matters is | how far you have to scroll to get to a good result, not what | proportion of the first N results are good. | throwaway0665 wrote: | have you customized your results and lowered or raised many | domains? | trb wrote: | Same here, I was curious about Kagis low ranking, and couldn't | replicate the search results. Also saw ublock Origin on #3, | good results for tires, transitors and snow, etc. I've never | used any of the Kagi search result weighing features. | | Ctrl+F on the page for "System prompt" doesn't show any hits. | Given how important those are for ChatGPT (another thought - | was the author testing GPT3.5 or 4?) I'm not sure how much | weight to put into the ChatGPT results either. | | Not sure how much I can take away from this comparison. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | I asked GPT-4 about Youtube Downloader and it rambled on | about how downloading videos is against Youtube's TOS and I | should buy YouTube premium which has the download feature. | | Getting any useful data from GPT-4 about anything even | remotely "illegal" is a waste of time. | UberFly wrote: | So it has also become one of the glitterati. That didn't | take long. | okasaki wrote: | Works fine IMO | | https://chat.openai.com/share/7dfd22d2-975c-4e6d-ba4b-c6b99 | e... | | https://chat.openai.com/share/90fae0dc-f8fd-4603-835c-5f3a5 | 7... | Huppie wrote: | The author already alludes to the fact that you can | probably prompt-engineer around this and indeed, as soon as | I added a blurb like "these are my own videos that I own | the copyright to" it did suggest a bunch of third-party | tools and let me ask it about what third-party tools I | could use. | | It suggested '4K Video Downloader', 'YTD Video Downloader', | 'JDownloader' and 'Clipgrab' at first and when I asked for | cli tools it came with 'youtube-dl', 'yt-dlp', and 'ffmpeg' | | Those seem pretty reasonable results to me but I'll readily | admit I don't know (yet) if 'most users' would ask these | follow-up questions. | Semaphor wrote: | With a better prompt, you can get it to list some, but it's | very annoying to do so. | | Mistral showed that their medium model is far better (yet | not good), and the same prompt as in the article gives only | one instead of 3 paragraphs of rambling about copyright, | and then lists 3 categories of options with examples for | each (not good, because ytdl is not one of those listed). | | Funnily enough, both mistral and GPT4 apologize profoundly | and almost with the same wording when asked "Why did you | not mention the very popular, free and open source | "youtube-dl" software?" and then mention how/where to get | it and how to use it. | freediver wrote: | > Funnily enough, both mistral and GPT4 apologize | profoundly and almost with the same wording when asked | "Why did you not mention the very popular, free and open | source "youtube-dl" software?" | | Likely because they were optimized for general | population, which would not have a use for command line | python utility. | Semaphor wrote: | I'm clear why they didn't include it, I wanted them to | tell me why, though. And I thought that both of them | apologized in almost the same way, was funny. | DominikPeters wrote: | It's plausible that mistral trained on GPT-4 output and | therefore has similar mannerisms. | alextingle wrote: | claude.ai produced pretty reasonable results. | Scaless wrote: | I have a new Kagi account with no custom rankings and I see the | same terrible results. Basically the same as what he describes. | yt-dlp is not found at all, the 2010 link to youtube-dl, and a | bunch of spam sites. | Semaphor wrote: | What region? I get similarly bad results with international | (and a quick check with region US also didn't improve things) | and uBo at only #5, and ytdl at #12. And I already have github | on "raise" and a bunch of domains blocked (not many though) | | For the transistor query, it's a very "googly" way of writing a | query, when I saw the results I instantly felt like rewriting | it and the first try gave much better results with "Why keep | cpu transistors getting smaller?". Caveat that the results look | better and more topical, I don't know what a good answer would | be, also why I didn't evaluate the tires or Vancouver weather | (I tried a local search for my cities weather, and while the | first result was unreleated, the 2nd was okay) | | edit: This whole thread made me finally create a file for | documenting bad searches on Kagi. The issue for me is usually | that they drop very important search terms from the query and | give me unrelated results. But switching to verbatim or "forced | terms" also prevents any kind of error correction of the | search. This used to be one of my main annoyances with DDG back | then, and Kagi did not have that issue during the early days. | szundi wrote: | Kagi is awesome for me too. I just realize using Google | somewhere else because of the shit results. | iansinnott wrote: | I'll second the chorus of those curious to hear how you've | customized the search engine. I was able to reproduce the | lackluster results, and was sadly disappointed. I expected what | you seem to have found, that Kagi would outperform. | | A specific example: for "ad blocker" the first result was some | paid ad blocker and ublock was down the page below the fold. | the__alchemist wrote: | I use Kagi because I'm trying to remove Google from my life, | but their text search is worse than Google in my experience, | and the image search is abysmal. I'm wondering how long I can | keep this up. I already revert to Google for image search, and | am finding myself using either Google or ChatGPT over Kagi more | and more for text as well. | freediver wrote: | Kagi had a pretty substantial image search update just few | days ago [1]. Do you still the issues with it? | | [1] https://kagi.com/changelog#2793 | the__alchemist wrote: | Good info - will experiment! | | It's already performing better on a (n=1) test I tried. | | "Talos Principle 2". (Video game sequel) Previously (~5 | days ago), Google returned various screenshots etc from the | game `The Talos Principle 2`. Kagi returned mostly results | from `The Talos Principle (1)`. Now the latest Kagi results | are a mix, mostly from 2. So, it does look like it fixed | this query. | gniv wrote: | Meta: Since the text on the page is so dense, I tried reading it | in Chrome's reading mode. Which was fine until the Appendix. All | the results are missing, leading to confusion. | UberFly wrote: | I also was overwhelmed by the amount of data. I came back here | to find the cliff notes :) | littlecranky67 wrote: | Kagi really shines on topics that are SEO-spammed on other search | engines. I.e. when travelling to a touristic city, searching a | recipe, or basically any product you want to buy. I actually got | "search anxiety" searching these topics, as I know I will have to | navigate a lot of SEO spam, content that is artificially blown | up, and the core information purposefully hidden somewhere on the | page - if any. Plus the multitude of cookie consent banners and | newsletter subscription popups on each link... | | I've been using Kagi's FastGPT [0] now for these searches, it | basically removes all the bullshit and gives verifiable sources | for any answers. | | [0]: https://kagi.com/fastgpt | pbronez wrote: | Yeah that's my go-to as well. Interestingly, I often find that | "Fast" mode results are as good or better than "Expert" mode | for simpler tasks. | londons_explore wrote: | I would kinda have liked side by side screenshots so I could see | for myself rather than a wall of text | motoxpro wrote: | This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. | Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top | hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp" | | Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and | download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are | using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). | 99.999% of people are not programming tinkerers. | | Just makes me realize how subjective search results are. All of | their "Great" results are my "Terrible" results. | darkwater wrote: | Malware or well, the actual viruses, in the '90s were a joke, | especially because a computer was an isolated thing. Connected | computers were the exception. | acdha wrote: | In the early 90s, yes. By the turn of the century the current | industry we see today existed in basic form: malware stole | credit cards, compromised PCs were used to send spam as part | of botnets, etc. The only major advance was when | cryptocurrencies made it much easier to launder money and the | professionalism went up accordingly. | carlosjobim wrote: | The first result on Kagi is exactly this, just tried it a | moment ago. It processed and downloaded the video extremely | fast. Why would any reasonable person prefer youtube-dl? | Dah00n wrote: | It is the same using Google. | motoxpro wrote: | Totally, As the sibling said, it is the same using Google. I | am not sure, why anyone would want a programming package to | accomplish a task that could be done in < 10 seconds. | | But again, I guess that's why search is so hard is because I | have to parse that intent from 3 words. | ufmace wrote: | IMO, if you're capable of running yt-dlp, it's far better | than any website. | | It's pretty simple to run these download tools as website, | but it's expensive in terms of bandwidth and tends to attract | legal attention. So a lot of websites go up supporting it, | but even if they were started with good intentions, they will | virtually all eventually add intrusive ads or other types of | monetization just to break even. So there's never going to be | a reliable website for it. If you're lucky, a search engine | will send you to one that's working okay right now, but even | odds you'll be fighting through a dozen malware nests. | | Meanwhile, yt-dlp just works every time, with only an | occasional pip upgrade to keep it up to date. | anonymoushn wrote: | Over here the first result on Kagi is savefrom.net which | variously tries to install malware or sell a paid | subscription and does not download videos. | jcmeyrignac wrote: | No mention of https://www.qwant.com | DeathArrow wrote: | The thoughts about building a better search engine than Google | are interesting. | | Unlike the author, I think that building a better search engine | than Google is possible. But it's going to be rather expensive. | And the only proven way to monetize it is selling ads. Which will | degrade the quality of the search results fast. For potential | investors, there are probably many better ways to invest money | then by building a search engine. | | This lets us with only one viable alternative: build it in the | open like Wikipedia and source donations from people and from | Google competitors like Amazon or Apple. | hamilyon2 wrote: | Is this from desktop? What region? | | Ublock origin in the very top result for ios device is simply a | bad search result page. Maybe fourth position is tolerable, after | three different working ones. Maybe it should be lower, I doubt | myself, if my point of view is too elitist. | | Yt-dlp is subject to all sorts of takedown requests in different | jurisdictions. | ZeroGravitas wrote: | I'm not sure youtube-dl is a good answer unless you're a nerd. | | Which is a similar phenomenon to search. If you have sufficient | tech skills there's a whole world of freely available software | out there to complete your task. | | If you're not then you are at the mercy of a range of commercial | offerings (some built on the free software) that range from | arguably scams to outright scams. | bambax wrote: | I'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still | very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even | try to disable it. | | I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker | "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could | make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how | it goes. | | It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading | videos mentioning _yt-dlp_ while trying to emulate "the non- | expert browsing experience"... Yt-dlp is a command-line Python | utility. Talk about non-expert! Most people don't know that | videos are files that can be downloaded; of those who do, most | don't know about the command line or Python. | | Yet when searching for _" how to download youtube videos"_ the | first result I get on Google is a link to a service called | "savefrom.net", which appears to work well and does not seem to | be a scam. This would qualify as "very good" in my book. | | When searching for _" how to download youtube videos from the | command line"_ the first few results are about youtube-dl, | including links to github and superuser. Granted they don't | mention yt-dlp, but youtube-dl is a good start. | gkbrk wrote: | When I do a Google search in an Incognito tab for "how to | download youtube videos", the first two results I get are the | following. | | - https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/ | | - https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/ | | I would certainly put those in the "Terrible" category like the | author. | Dah00n wrote: | I get savefrom.net in both Incognito and normal tabs, uBlock | or not. I have no idea why you get crap results that are | somehow different. uBlock doesn't change google results in | Firefox for me at all. It seems you get crap _added_ , not | removed. | gkbrk wrote: | I searched with Chrome, perhaps that's the difference. | Firefox also blocks some ads out-of-the-box even without | uBlock, so maybe it was already blocked. | | It could also be related to targeting, like time zone, | location, IP address, age group etc. | Dah00n wrote: | I get the same search result in Edge as in Firefox. Can't | test in Chrome, but something seems strange. | anonymoushn wrote: | savefrom.net is a crap result. | cj wrote: | My top 2 (incognito) are blog posts from pcmag.com and | zdnet.com listing 5 ways to download YT videos. Maybe it's | blogspam, but the listed services seem valid at first glance. | | savefrom.net is the 5th result (2nd page underneath 5 youtube | videos) | | Edit: This is from the US. If i had to guess, these are | regional differences. What country are you in? | emmelaich wrote: | I got similar to you; I'm in Australia. | londons_explore wrote: | Did you click either of those links? | | Both seem to do the job of downloading a youtube link to mp4 | for free. | gkbrk wrote: | Did _you_ click either of those links? They are not YouTube | video downloaders, they just link to another downloader. | There is nowhere on those links to even put a YouTube URL. | | Are you seriously suggesting that a website with the | following "About us" with only a link to another YouTube | video downloader is itself a good YouTube video downloader? | | > Good Samaritan Support Action is to reawaken the Body of | Christ to receiving the extravagant love of The Father, as | well as our call to respond to this love by loving God with | all of our hearts, souls, strengths, and minds. In order | for people's hearts to be linked to the heart of our | Heavenly Father, we want to foster and facilitate the | establishment of a culture of love in our churches and | ministries. | londons_explore wrote: | so, there is one extra click... But for the user, the | site does the job and takes an extra 1 second. | | Ideal? No. But it does the trick. | hamasho wrote: | Not GP, but navigating to an unrelated scammy site just | having a link to the actual site is a terrible and | unethical job by Google. Imagine if you search "youtube" | and the top result is not YouTube but some scammy site | just having a link to YouTube. It's not about click | counts, if the youtube downloader has bad UX and requires | extra clicks, it's a bit inconvenient but ok. | tantalor wrote: | Those are both garbage/scam sites | sanderjd wrote: | I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab" | being part of the test harness? | | It seems pretty arbitrary to me to disable one of the key | features - in this case personalization - of the software | being evaluated. | | Or is the evaluation not between "search engines" but rather | "search engines without personalization"? If so, then this | restriction does make sense. But that is not the evaluation | that "normal users" are interested in. | Majromax wrote: | > I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito | tab" being part of the test harness? | | It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user | experience'. Someone who has a long account/cookie history | with Google has plausibly trained the site to return more | relevant results through implicit user-curation of avoiding | obvious-to-them SEO-spam on other queries. | | If we posit that _every_ user eventually trains Google to | avoid SEO spam, then this begs the question of why Google( | /Bing) don't eliminate the SEO spam in the first place. | | Besides that, it's not obvious why search engine | personalization should dramatically change the basic | utility of search results. We should expect personalization | to mostly address ambiguities: is 'the best way to set up | tables' asking about furniture assembly/carpentry or SQL? | None of the author's queries for this article supported | such ambiguities, and besides that the results returned | (see the final appendix) aren't[+] valid answers to a | different interpretation of the question. | | [+] -- I think I'd quibble about the 'adblock' question, | since a reasonable person might still find an adblocker | that works but participates in the 'acceptable ads program' | to be sufficient. | Jcowell wrote: | > It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user | experience' | | You wouldn't be really taking the average here though | would you? You would be capture the experience someone | might have if they were in incognito, using google for | the very first time, or using google on another device | for the every first time, but not the "average | experience". | sanderjd wrote: | > _It 's the closest we can easily get to the 'average | user experience'._ | | _Maybe_ it 's the closest we can get (though I doubt | it), but it definitely isn't close _enough_ to tell us | anything about the "average user experience". | | The average user has been using google for years, without | taking any steps to avoid personalization. An incognito | session (on a browser / machine / network that is | probably fingerprinted...) is pretty much the opposite of | that typical usage pattern. | | I recognize that just writing a blog post or comment on | HN is not a research project so needs to do something | quick, but I think it mostly invalidates the experiment. | What would get closer would be to devise a few user | personas and attempt to search and browse for awhile | within those personas before trying the experiment. Or | much better yet, put together a focus group comprised of | real people within the personas you're interested in, and | run the experiment using their real accounts. | | > _If we posit that every user eventually trains Google | to avoid SEO spam_ | | I don't think it's that, I think it's that every user | trains it to return results more likely to improve the | metric of "more likely to click one of the links", and I | think that makes it more, not less, likely that they see | what most of us here consider to be spam. | | But I don't know! Maybe that's not what this experimental | setup would show. But it would be a lot more enlightening | than a setup using a fresh incognito window, which | reflects the usage pattern of a proportion of search | queries that is a tiny rounding error above zero. | SV_BubbleTime wrote: | Why are you assuming all users are logged in to google | all the time? | nvm0n2 wrote: | Google has billions of user accounts .... | sanderjd wrote: | Because it is objectively the case that the "average | user" of the internet has a google cookie in their | browser. It doesn't require that they be logged in - | though I believe it's likely also the case that the | "average user" is indeed logged into a google account - | it just requires that they use google search without | turning off cookies or specifically blocking google's. | Essentially everybody uses google search and essentially | nobody cares enough (or would know how) to turn off | cookies or block google's cookie. | | If this doesn't describe most people you know, you're in | a very small bubble. (I'm somewhat in that bubble too, | but I still have lots of family and friends who use the | internet the normal way.) | gkbrk wrote: | Google gets paid when you click on an ad. It's reasonable | to guess you're not going to click on too many scam | software ads with your software engineer profile. So | naturally you'll be showed less of them. | | In this thread we can see people both using incognito tabs | seeing different results, it will only become worse to | compare if they are using personalized results. | teleforce wrote: | I'm also in the same camp who think search results from Google | is very good but ChatGPT based search with RAG is better, | granted it's a paid version. The latter however is kind of | experimental, personally would love to have another column on | ChatGPT with RAG (Bing) and the fact the author ignored RAG is | rather strange. | erybodyknows wrote: | For those (like me) wondering what RAG means: "Retrieval | Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a groundbreaking | approach in information retrieval, where the accuracy of | search results directly influences the quality of generated | answers. In essence, RAG combines traditional search | mechanisms with Large Language Model's ability to understand | and generate answers." | | (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-increased-search- | accur....) | jll29 wrote: | The topic of control (in ChatGPT like models) explained: | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.11701.pdf | HarHarVeryFunny wrote: | If you like Bing (ChatGPT with RAG), then also give | perplexity.ai a try - similar concept, but IMO better | executed. | | https://www.perplexity.ai/ | anonymoushn wrote: | cross-posted: Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type | "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box | and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get | you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new | tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab | and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with | an error message saying "The download link not found." and does | not help you download the video. | vagrantJin wrote: | savefrom.net used to be good but it seems they've switched | their MO. plenty of decent alternatives filled the gap | though. | anonymoushn wrote: | Can you name the alternatives, and are they present in the | search results? | beezle wrote: | Put me in the camp of google and the rest are horrible for all | but very specific/unique technical terms, ie weak neutral | currents. Anything that is more "everyday life" is an exercise | in futility sorting through trash, often without even the terms | you are looking for. And good luck with "verbatim" searches - | either ignored or zero results. | bee_rider wrote: | An adblocker is necessary, and IMO a script blocker as well. I | feel vaguely like search has gotten worse over time, but it is | not a huge problem--usually a good site is on the first page or | two, and so I can just go check them out. | | But if clicking a site meant I would be under attack, that | really increases the stakes, I start to care strongly about the | absence of bad sites, not just the existence of a good one. | | Other than that, people need to be trained to not download | programs from websites in general. I think this has gotten | better over time? This is just a human mistake. Maybe Google | could suppress sites that link to executables. It must, right? | pixl97 wrote: | It would suppress linking to malware executables, but just | general programs I don't see why they would. | bee_rider wrote: | By the time you know enough about a site to download some | random executable off it and run it, you know more than | enough to just enter the URL, so there's no point to having | it show up in search results. | omoikane wrote: | > they could make a different test | | The takeaway I got from the article is everyone can make their | _own_ test, as opposed to relying on other people 's sentiments | and memes about X is bad or Y is good. | | Trying to emulate a non-expert experience without workarounds | is not the common usage pattern since everyone familiar with | their favorite tools have ways to get more value out of them, | but this article presents a way of constructing an experiment | (this is why I chose these queries, this is how I ranked scams, | etc.), and I think people should follow this same spirit to | evaluate if they are stuck in a local optimum with their | current choice of tools. | poulpy123 wrote: | I'm sorry but the very first request is completely wrong. When | people search for a YouTube downloader, they want a website that | allows to download a YouTube video, not a command line tool. And | the first results given by Google do that. I'm one of the people | that think Google search became bad but it's not because of the | kind of search | marginalia_nu wrote: | That's the tricky mind-reading aspect about search intent. | | Different people have varying expectations as to what they want | to find with the same query. I'd definitely want yt-dlp in | favor of some website. | poulpy123 wrote: | it's easy: just append command line to the query like you | would append android app if you wanted and android app | marginalia_nu wrote: | That is a user POV solution, speaking from the search | engine POV. | bee_rider wrote: | Based on your handle, I suspect you have much better | insight into this than the rest of us! | | But can the search engine mind-read by assuming Windows | users don't want to use a command-line utility? | marginalia_nu wrote: | They can based on user tracking and profiling, but that's | murky waters I personally don't want to dip into. | notRobot wrote: | I assume you meant to say you _don 't_ want to! :) | marginalia_nu wrote: | Yeah I accidentally a word. | anonymoushn wrote: | They do not do that, have you tried using them? | yashasolutions wrote: | Kagi is great, it's now my daily driver for search. This is after | I got tired of DDG, moved to Google (through StartPage), but the | spammy result, or just irrelevant... and the fact that sometime | they aren't any results even... for the most trivial search. So I | switch recently to Kagi, and so far it's been smooth sailing and | a real time saver. | buro9 wrote: | mostly my search is now Wikipedia. | | I'm probably in a very small group who have the entirety of | English wikipedia (without images) on my Android (via Kiwix), and | I just search that. 99% of the time that's all I need. | | the only exceptions are super current things like weather | (Windy), or travel (Navan work travel system gives me enough to | just go direct to airlines, hotels, etc), and local (OSM via | Organic Maps). | | I've almost completely degoogled (not intentionally, but driven | gradually by Google becoming crappy incrementally), but didn't | really find a single generic replacement as much as I found far | better single purpose tools. | | I'm reminded of that Craigslist image showing how many startups | were each competing against specific parts of Craigslist | https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20... , | and this is what it feels like is happening to Google.. they're | being beaten in specific areas, but at the same time spam and | crap is diluting their core product. | jimbobthemighty wrote: | The Github link is my top result on Google. Clearly a mix of | uBlock and Privacy Badger are more powerful than most appreciate. | jmakov wrote: | Using phind most of the time. Would be interesting adding it. | ic_fly2 wrote: | I have a small page that modifies my get requests to google by | adding -site:... for a bunch of most annoying content farms for | stuff I search often (docs) | Dah00n wrote: | Have you tried uBlacklist? | amadeuspagel wrote: | > Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project | such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like | "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all | of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. | Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool | to download video from YouTube. | | Is that true? Do most people want to install a command line tool | to download youtube videos? | Dah00n wrote: | No. They want sites like savefrom.net - which is hit number one | on Google. | anonymoushn wrote: | Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type | "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text | box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries | to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it, | the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close | the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net | presents you with an error message saying "The download link | not found." and does not help you download the video. | gkbrk wrote: | I tried this. I went to savefrom.net. First thing it does | is ask permission to send notifications. | | After that there is a popup asking me if I want to continue | in the browser or download their app. If I click download, | it downloads a file called download_helper_2.3.27.apk. | | Instead of downloading their app, if I paste a YouTube | link, it tells me I can wait or download their APK to skip | waiting. The download link downloads an older version | called download_helper_2.3.19.apk. | | When I do the process again, instead of the older APK link | it gives me a Chrome extension link. But if you look at the | instructions you see that it's not a Chrome extension, but | a minified userscript. And it has `@include https://*` so | it can basically run on any website regardless of clicking | on an extension icon like regular browser extensions. | | If I try to ignore all the distractions and wait for the | download link, I can click it and it downloads the MP4 | file. But it also opens a popunder with the domain | https://refpamjeql.top/. | | Not the best experience, and seems like a high risk of | getting malware, but it does get an MP4 file at some point. | anonymoushn wrote: | Interesting! I tried again and got completely different | results this time. Now there's no malware tab, and | instead it tries to get me to pay for a subscription to | download high-quality videos or MP3s. If I click the | barely-visible "Just let me download in my browser with | low quality" below the paid subscription button, I get | the same error as before. | | Edit: the paid subscription payment flow says I'm | actually buying "Televzr Premium Max Subscription for | | 1 Month_mp | | Televzr helps get wireless access to the media library on | the computer from the mobile phone" | | So it purports to be something unrelated to downloading | youtube videos. I didn't pay 1400 yen for it, so I won't | get to find out if it helps me download youtube videos. | BoostandEthanol wrote: | There's something incredibly entertaining to me about even this | well researched article struggling to find a reason for why wider | tyres have more grip. | | As I understand it, this is because tyres are still somewhat of a | mystery, and anyone outside of a laboratory really doesn't know | shit. The best explanation I can think of is due to tyre load | sensitivity. The friction coefficient of rubber decreases with | normal force (E.g, a heavily loaded tyre has a lower friction | coefficient), which is a pretty well accepted fact, this is one | of the methods engineers will use to tune the handling of cars. | This means a wider tyre has a lower force per unit area of the | contact patch, which means it'll have a higher friction | coefficient. | | Now that sounds plausible to me, but that's just my best guess | explanation. | InCityDreams wrote: | https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/ | | gives good tyre advice (obviously not car tyres, but info is | there) | joshuaissac wrote: | For the ad blocker results, the author judges the search engines | by how they rank the best result (uBlock Origin), but I think | that search results that point to Adblock Plus or AdBlock are | good enough. Sure, they do not block all ads, and take money from | advertisers to allow through certain types of ads, but they still | block ads in general, and 'acceptable ads' can be disabled in the | settings. So I would consider these 'good results', rather than | 'bad results'/'very bad results' as the author does. | shp0ngle wrote: | I don't understand the praise of Marginalia. | | When I search for "Steve Jobs" on Marginalia, I got blogs about | his speech in 2011 and some mailing list from 2007. | | When I search for my own name I get nothing. In Google it's just | me. | | It's cool that one person built all this of course but... that's | not a good search result compared to Google? | | Maybe I miss something, maybe I use it wrong | marginalia_nu wrote: | What do you expect when you search for Steve Jobs? Also, which | filter did you use? | shp0ngle wrote: | I don't know I used any filters? I don't know what are | filters sorry | | I expect wikipedia article on Jobs as a baseline. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Ah, I downrank Wikipedia pretty hard :P | shp0ngle wrote: | By the way please don't take it as if I am taking you down or | something | | It's amazing what you did, it's just not a Google killer? or | at least I don't see it | marginalia_nu wrote: | It's really not supposed to be either. Like it's designed | to be the search engine you use when you can't find | something elsewhere, so it's largely designed to show you | different results than the ones you get on Google and Bing. | | In general a lot of the complaints seem to be "I'm not | getting what I expect from Google". Well... yeah. That's | the point. If someone wants the same results as Google, | they should arguably use Google. | haizhung wrote: | What always confuses me about the ,,search has gotten so bad" | mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at | best, and anecdotal recollection at worst. | | Like, sure, I have the _impression_ that search got worse over | the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell? | | And, honestly, this should be a verifiable claim; you can just | try the top N search terms from Google trends or whatever and see | how they perform. It should be easy to make a benchmark, and yet | no one (who complains about this issue) ever bothers to make one. | | Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria by | which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5 | examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any general | claims. | | So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the | sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying | that claim. | anonymoushn wrote: | Probably for the same reason that there are so many more posts | about anything that make claims than that explore evidence | systematically, especially when the people making the posts | stand to gain nothing by spending their time that way. | | I encounter claims that "protobuf is faster than json" pretty | regularly but it seems like nobody has actually benchmarked | this. Typical protobuf decoder benchmarks say that protobuf | decodes ~5x slower than json, and I don't think it's ~5x | smaller for the same document, but I'm also not dedicating my | weekend to convincing other people about this. | ForkMeOnTinder wrote: | The problem with benchmarking that claim is there's no one | true "json decoder" that everyone uses. You choose one based | on your language -- JSON.stringify if you're using JS, | serde_json if you're using Rust, etc. | | So what people are actually saying is, a typical protobuf | implementation decodes faster than a typical JSON | implementation for a typical serialized object -- and that's | true in my experience. | | Tying this back into the thread topic of search engine | results, I googled "protobuf json benchmark" and the first | result is this Golang benchmark which seems relevant. | https://shijuvar.medium.com/benchmarking-protocol-buffers- | js... Results for specific languages like "rust protobuf json | benchmark" also look nice and relevant, but I'm not gonna | click on all these links to verify. | | In my experience programming searches tend to get much better | results than other types of searches, so I think the | article's claim still holds. | anonymoushn wrote: | I agree. You wouldn't use encoding/json or serde-json if | you had to deserialize a lot of json and you cared about | latency, throughput, or power costs. A typical protobuf | decoder would be better. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I think the point he's trying to make that the search results | page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of | scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating | safely. | | If he was looking at relevance, yours would be a solid point, | but since most of the emphasis is on harm, a smaller sample | works. Like "we found used needles in 3 out of 5 playgrounds" | doesn't typically garner requests for p-values and error bars. | sanderjd wrote: | I think this is a good illustration of my frustration with | this discussion: I don't think search has gotten bad, I think | the web has gotten bad. It's weird to even conceptualize it | as a big graph of useful hypertext documents. That's just | wikipedia. The broader web is this much noisier and dubious | thing now. | | That's bad for google though! Their model is very much | predicated on the web having a lot of signal that they can | find within the noise. But if it just ... doesn't actually | have much signal, then what? | whakim wrote: | But there's still plenty of signal. It isn't as if there | are no working YouTube downloaders, or factually correct | explanations of how transistors work. It's just that search | engines don't know how to (or don't care enough about) | disambiguating these good results from the mountains of | spam or malware. | devinmcafee wrote: | I think that both of you are correct. The internet has | much more "noise" than in the past (partially due to | websites gaming SEO to show up higher in Google's search | results). As a result, Google's algorithm returns more | "noise" per query now than it used to. It is a less | effective filter through the noise. | | Imagine Google were like a water filter you install on | your kitchen faucet to filter out unwanted chemicals from | your drinking water. If as the years progress your | municipal tap water starts to contain a higher baseline | of unwanted chemicals, and as a result the filter begins | to let through more chemicals than it did before, you'd | consider your filter pretty cruddy for its use case. At | the bare minimum you'd call it outdated. That is what is | happening to Google search | marginalia_nu wrote: | On the one hand, I'm not sure the data corroborates that. | If this is a web problem and not a search engine problem, | then I'd expect every search engine to have the same | pattern of scam results. | | I'd also argue that finding relevant results among a sea of | irrelevant results is the primary function of a search | engine. This was as true in 1998 as it is today. In fact, | it was Google's "killer feature", unlike Altavista and the | likes it showed you far more relevant results. | gmd63 wrote: | If the web is being polluted by a nefarious search engine | provider that is excluding the polluted pages from their | algorithm, you wouldn't see the same pattern across | search engines | | Not saying or even suggesting that's happening, but the | logic isn't airtight | marginalia_nu wrote: | Well, there's always the Munchaussen trilemma, by which | no reasoning is airtight. | pixl97 wrote: | Relevant is a difficult concept to agree on. In 1998 it | was more about X != Y, that is being shown legit pages | that just were not the correct topic. | | These days the results are apt to be the correct topic, | but instead optimized for some other metric than what the | user wants. For example downloading malware or showing as | many crypto ads as possible. | | I don't expect every search engine to have the same scam | results. Scammers target individual search engines with | particular methodologies. Google does a lot of work to | prevent crap on their engines, the issue is the scammers | in total do far more. | dpkirchner wrote: | The web has gotten bad because of what big search engines | have encouraged. If they stopped incentivizing publishing | complete garbage (by ruthlessly delisting low quality sites | regardless of their ad quantity, etc) then maybe we'd see a | resurgence of good content. | 48864w6ui wrote: | The web is bad because it is both popular and commercial. | Every now and then I fantasize that just finding a | sufficiently user-hostile corner would suffice to | recreate the early internet experience of an online world | nearly exclusively populated by anticommercial geeks. | eep_social wrote: | I understand this is the tactic the Gemeni folks are | using. | sanderjd wrote: | I don't think so. I think it's the inevitable outcome of | giving all of humanity the ability to broadcast without | curation. | | Or maybe we're saying essentially the same thing, but you | think search engines should be doing that curation. But | that was never my conception of what search engines are | for. | dpkirchner wrote: | I think we are indeed saying the same thing. However, I | would like search engines to do some curation -- | specifically, to remove results that deliver malware, are | clones of other sites, and are just entirely content free | (eg Microsoft's forums). | | I'll give Google credit: I haven't seen gitmemory or SO | clones in a while. It took a few years but they seem to | have dealt with them. | hyperpape wrote: | I agree we can say "this is a minefield of scams" without | doing a comparison. | | There still is a question about when it got bad--I think Dan | mentions 2016 as a point of comparison, and there were plenty | of scams back then, so you might wonder whether the days when | a query wouldn't return many scams. | | If you go back far enough, then there wasn't the same kind of | SEO, and Internet scams were much smaller/less organized, but | that's a long time ago. | pixl97 wrote: | I think the automation tools for scams are what the major | change is. In the distant past it was humans doing this, | now I'm guessing there are a few larger businesses and | likely nation states that have a point and click interface | that removes 99% of the past work. | avsteele wrote: | I don't think this is a fair criticism. | | 1) The step where you evaluate "how they perform" is | necessarily subjective. | | 2) you could design a study and recruit participants but that | isn't something a blogger is going to do. | | 3) He does link to polls where people agree with the idea the | result have gotten worse. Yeah, there are sampling problems | with a poll, but its better than nothing. | | In this case especially, the writer is answering the question: | "Whose results are best according to my tastes?" | mgdlbp wrote: | Internet Archive remembers. | https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com/search/%2A | | Find a query of interest, see for yourself (and take a snapshot | of the present state for posterity). | | The api enables more powerful queries, | https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=google.co.jp*&pag... | | Also try other search engines and languages. | jll29 wrote: | > Dan at least started to provide actual evidence and criteria | by which he would score results, but even he only looked at 5 | examples. Which really is a small sample size to make any | general claims. | | US NIST, in their annual TREC evaluation of search systems in | the scientific/academic world, use sets of 25 or 50 queries | (confusingly called "topics" in the jargon). | | For each, a mandated data collection is searched by retired | intelligence analysts to find (almost) all relevant result, | which are represented by document ID in general search and by a | regular expression that matches the relevant answer for | question answering (when that was evaluated, 1998-2006). | | Such an approach is expensive but has the advantage of being | reusable. | williamcotton wrote: | Dan approached the problem from a qualitative perspective. | Perhaps if more people took this approach over quantitative | maximalism we would actually have products that don't drive us | fucking insane. | | All that matters _is_ the overwhelming sentiment that search | has gotten worse, not the same fucking spreadsheet that got us | here in the first place! | bee_rider wrote: | > So I am left to wonder why there are so many posts about the | sentiment that search got worse without anyone ever verifying | that claim. | | I suspect it has gotten worse, so posts complaining about it | resonate. But, it is not really a huge problem, and anyway it | isn't as if there's much I can do about it, so I'm not going to | bother collecting statistically valid data. | | I think this is generally true about a lot of things. We should | be OK with admitting that we aren't all that data-driven and | lots of our beliefs are based on anecdotes bouncing around in | conversations. Lots of things are not really very important. | And IMO we should better signal that our preferences and | opinions aren't facts; far too many people mix up the two from | what I've seen. | pixl97 wrote: | When it comes to human psychology what we believe tends to be | more important than what is when it comes to future | predictions of our actions. If people think search sucks then | it's likely they'll use less of it in the future and it opens | up companies like Google for disruption. | narag wrote: | _What always confuses me about the ,,search has gotten so bad" | mentality is that it is often based on anecdotal evidence at | best, and anecdotal recollection at worst._ | | I can't speak for anybody else, just trying to find stuff | online, not writing a treatise about it or writing my own | engine to outcompete Google. It's been asked _many_ times here | over the years and the answer was always _explanations_ , never | solutions. | | Shittification does not happen overnight, but along many years. | It started with Google deciding that some search terms weren't | so popular: "did you mean...?" (forcing a second click to do | what you intended to do in the first place) and went downhill | when qualifiers to override that crap got ignored. | | For me enough was enough when I realized that a simple query | with three words, chosen carefully to point to the desired | page, gave thousands of results, none of them relevant. YMMV. | fumeux_fume wrote: | So you're confused why other people aren't doing research for | you and when they do provide some evidence, you dismiss it | because it's not a large-scale scientific inquiry into search | quality? Get frickin a grip. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Even without looking at the subjective quality of search | results, the sheer user hostility of the design of the Google | search results page is an obvious, objective instance of how | search has enshittified. | | That is, in the early days, Google used to highlight that | "search position couldn't be gamed/bought" as one of their | primary differentiators, ads were clearly displayed with a | distinct yellow background, and there weren't that many ads. | Nowadays, when I do any remotely commercial search the entire | first page and a half at least on mobile is ads, and the only | thing that differentiates ads from organic results is a tiny | piece of "Sponsored" text. | laserbeam wrote: | Some things are easily quantifiable, but very few. Such as the | number of ads per search. Back in the day google had at most 1 | and it was visibly distinct from the rest of the links. | | Otherwise, yeah, maybe search didn't degrade but the internet | got more spammy. Or maybe users just got wiser and can see | through the smoke screen better. Who knows... | | Doesn't change the fact that today one has to know how to | filter through pages of generic results made by low effort | content farms. Results that are of dubious validity, which at | best simply waste your time. Or through clones of other | websites (i.e. Stackoverflow clones). | | Search engines can choose to help with that (kagi certainly | puts in the effort and I love it for that), or they can ignore | the problem and milk you for ad clicks. | | Anecdotal evidence is good enough for me. | ta988 wrote: | Yes to get an accurate comparison we would need to have results | from queries 10 years ago. | | I still remember myself having to really often go to page 3 and | more of google searches to find things even really early on. | | I think it has never been good, got a bit better before SEO | farms took all the gain out. That's my feeling with nothing to | back it. | arp242 wrote: | To do this you would need to have a comprehensive definition of | "quality", and that's anything but easy, and it will be at | least partly subjective. It's also hard to include omissions in | your definition of "quality" (and again, what should or should | not be omitted is subjective as well). | | For example, let's say I search for "Gaza"; on one extreme end | some engines might only focus on recent events, whereas others | may ignore recent events and includes only general information. | Is one higher "quality" than the other? Not really - it depends | what you're looking for innit? | | All you can really do is make a subjective list of things you | find important and rate things according to that, and this is | basically just the same thing as an anecdotal account but with | extra steps. | nvm0n2 wrote: | _> has it really? How could you tell?_ | | Yes it has and for a certain class of queries it's not even | open for debate, because Google themselves have stated they | deliberately made it worse. And they really did, it's very | noticeable. | | This class of queries is for anything related to any | perspective deemed "non authoritative". Try to find information | that contradicts the US Government on medical questions, for | example, and even when you know what page you're looking for | you won't be able to find it except via the most specific | forcing e.g. exact quoted substrings. | | Likewise, try finding stories that are mostly covered by | Breitbart on Google and you won't be able to. They suppress | conservative news sites to stop them ranking. | | 15 years ago Google wasn't doing that. It would usually return | what you were looking for regardless of topic. There are now | many topics - which specifically is a secret - on which the | result quality is deliberately trashed because they'd prefer to | show you the wrong results in an attempt to change your mind | about something, than the results you actually asked for. | torginus wrote: | I wonder if this aggregate enshittification of computers (be it | search, social media, video games) etc. is actually a good thing | for humans in general. | | I feel like today's digital spaces don't have as strong a grip on | the minds of people - I think folks started rediscovering the | value of genunine human interaction and hobbies that do not | involve a computer screen. | | For example, I haven't seen the equivalent of 2000s-2010s | Facebook addicts or (WoW addicts in the gaming space) to such an | extent, with parasocial media, such as TikTok or Youtube or | Twitch, having replaced social media, and social video gaming | such as MMOs having lost a lot of popularity. | nunez wrote: | > When I tried running the query from the paper, "cellular phone" | (no quotes) and, the top result was a Google Store link to buy | Google's own Pixel 7, with the rest of the top results being | various Android phones sold on Amazon. | | Interestingly, if you add "before:2001-01-01" to the query, the | paper that Brin and Page referenced shows up as the third result. | | That this query now ranks phones you can buy higher than | information about phones makes sense, since the web is much | bigger these days and cell phones are much more widely accessible | than they were back then. | | > Although Google doesn't publicly provide the ability to see | what was historically returned for queries, many people remember | when straightforward queries generally returned good results. | | See above. Sort of. | | --- | | I wish Dan spent more time talking about Kagi. I, too, have found | it terrible for searching for things to buy and some images but | excellent otherwise. | sundalia wrote: | The intro query "youtube downloader" already showed me relevant | results (some website where you paste an URL and bam download). I | think there's a big tech bias in the whole post (how relevant is | a mastodon poll, for real). | | Not saying the current landscape doesn't suck with ads everywhere | and incentives to not give exactly relevant results at times, but | I think google is pretty good still. | anonymoushn wrote: | Which web site did you use to successfully download a youtube | video, and which youtube video did you downloadl? | swayvil wrote: | Without labor to run their circus, 99% of business would | disappear overnight. | | Without business, spam would disappear. | | So if you remove the labor you remove the spam. | | So the best spam filter is UBI. | urbandw311er wrote: | I had to stop reading this because I found it too depressing and | it triggered a lot of anger about how big tech combined with the | incentives of capitalism is basically fucking up the world. | btbuildem wrote: | On a side note: would it kill the author of the site to use a | stylesheet? | hasmolo wrote: | it's the same as my choice to only use lowercase letters, it is | designed to make you upset that i am not following conventions. | that's as far as i have been able to figure for hwy i started | doing this, and by extension, why tech bois love to drop some | vital freature to communication to signal being an 'insider' | SV_BubbleTime wrote: | I'd love to see this a little extended. | | Searx and Yandex. | | Specifically... if I need something even slightly "gray", Yandex | is the only option anymore. Torrent search on google et al is | just awful. | airstrike wrote: | > Continuing with the theme of running simple, naive, queries, we | used the free version of ChatGPT for this post, which means the | queries were run through ChatGPT 3.5. | | why | jbmilgrom wrote: | Was gpt4 used (with paying subscription)? | IceMichael wrote: | Okay, so all search engines suck. Yeah, that matches my | experience | justinl33 wrote: | > _It 's common to criticize ChatGPT for its hallucinations and, | while I don't think that's unfair, as we noted in this 2015, pre- | LLM post on AI, I find this general class of criticism to be | overrated in that humans and traditional computer systems make | the exact same mistakes._ | | Finally some one said it. We are unnecessarily harsh on | hallucinations. LLM's don't intentionally 'lie'. To say this is a | wrongful anthropomorphism. | krapp wrote: | It's also a wrongful anthropomorphism to claim that human | beings "make the exact same mistakes" as LLMs, because they | don't. Humans don't confabulate the way LLMs do unless they | have a severe mental illness. A human doctor isn't as likely to | simply make up diseases, or symptoms, or medications, whereas | an LLM will do so routinely, because they don't understand | anything like human anatomy, disease, chemistry or medicine, | only the stochastic matching of text tokens. | | We're not unnecessarily harsh on hallucinations, it's | absolutely necessary because of how effective LLMs are at | convincing people that because they can generate language, they | are capable of sentient thought, self-awareness and reason. | Acting as if humans and LLMs are basically equally trustworthy, | or worse, that LLMs are more trustworthy, is _dangerous._ If we | accept this as axiomatic, shit will break and people will die. | maronato wrote: | To validate hallucinations is anthropomorphism. Tools shouldn't | make stuff up. | | I don't second guess Pythons math results. If the result is | wrong, that's my fault for coding it wrong, never Pythons for | hallucinating | yetanother12345 wrote: | Ironically I had to use a search engine to discover what "Mwmbl" | was. It's apparently a search engine. But, visiting the front | page, I see something akin to a git commit log?! I'm not sure I'd | have guessed that this was a SE if Brave Search did not tell me | it was (even then I'm not convinced yet). | | https://mwmbl.org/ | | Added: Interesting. Apparently it's allowed to edit the SERPS | there. Which implies that I'm out, but (well, because) I've got a | feeling which kind of Internet Entrepreneurs this factoid will | appeal to ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-12-31 23:00 UTC)