In the past when I tried different engines, I’d eventually get frustrated with a specific queery and resort to google to get what I needed

Lately, if duck duck fails me, if I bother trying google then the results are even worse. It feels like the end of an era

noai.duckduckgo.com

I use that too but it doesn't feel like it helps much anymore. Or it does help and search without it would be absolute hell.

You still get many links to weird webpages with tons and tons of fluff text without any real information important to you.

I do some origami here and there and use the search often to see if I can find a page with diagrams I don't yet know about. There's AI generated pages waffling on about origami diagrams with no actual diagrams shown. It is so sad to see.

Tutamail.

Protonmail announced their intention to gargle MAGA balls some months back...

DuckDuckGo is AI opt-out, and for me that’s a non-starter.

I’ve personally found Kagi the best search alternative.

Duckduckgo's search results are the internet equivalent of hotdog water.

theres entire AI generated websites that are just filled with popular key words and bullshit to put it at the top of the search results.

SEO is as bad as AI when it comes to finding shit on the internet.

I miss the old internet too, before we even had search engines.. when the only way to find a webpage was a webring, or the internet yellow pages.. which was just a directory of all known urls at the time.

I wish there was a Firefox extension to filter that crap out.

The unbounded profit motive, or more simply greed, ruins everything. This happens across time, continents, cultures, everything. It's human nature, or at least common enough that we've never been able to do anything more than slow it down temporarily.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

not quite, by 2020 the part of Google that cared about the quality of the results fully lost to those who only care about maximizing ad revenue

so they made it worse on purpose to get you to search more, and set the stage for the SEO abuse takeover

SEO is s crime against humanity and the people who pushed it should be punished

SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it's not balanced with opposing interest.

I'll explain: there's no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there's no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn't rate results by some obscure metric.

I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.

The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.

Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.

Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that's one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.

Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.

In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.

There's a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there's no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole "Web" thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.

OK, I'm thinking about this again, what the hell.

Saw a video once of one of the slop generators (not the type of person you would expect too!) Being very angry about the 2010s "summaries" that google would give you. Wish I could find the video again.

I remember being taught about search operators in school. Of course they'd take that away, it's such a powerful way to get exactly what you're looking for, no bullshit.

Damn I miss quotes being respected.

I want the old google where + operator worked...

Truth.

I just really wish someone would come out with a search engine that works like Google worked around 2004. There was a brief beautiful window of time where it seemed like no matter how obscure something was, if it existed on a publicly indexable website, and you knew the tricks for tweaking your search query, you could find it with Google. But I think I started noticing it going downhill not too long after they killed Google Video and acquired YouTube. Definitely after they also became a phone company.

It just seems crazy to me that we figured out how to do it over 20 years ago and then stopped almost immediately. And in all the time since then nobody has stepped up to fill the gap. Like, DuckDuckGo is better than Google now, but it's only because Google became terrible, not because DDG got better.

I know its love it or hate it but i use Kagi. Closest thing to old Google i've found. I haven't tried their AI stuff though.

Google-fu is now duckduck-fu. Honestly I still feel DDG now is still not in par with google circa 2015-2020*

*I'm pulling this out if my ass; I already don't remember when's the last time google search is good. Please send help :(

Yeah it wasn't AI. It was the head of Google Ads (who got promoted to head of Google Search) that changed the search results so they were less accurate so users would spend more time on the results page and thus look at ads longer.

The Man Who Killed Google Search

Yeah, google been shit for over a decade now. Not long after SEO became the norm and Google figured out a way to profit from it.

LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.

And not some sponsored or SEO optimized shithole.

100%

Just to say, its minimal effort to set up. Its the kind of annoyance ypu get scratching an itch - a momentary effort for long term relief.

For the full old person experience:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=ballsack&kp=-2&k1=-1&kac=-1&kz=-1&kae=d&ia=web

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ is even better, unless you want images or other slop categories.

more like they'll call it google classic, and charge you 25 dollars a month for the privledge of using it.

but don't worry, after 6 months they'll start putting AI and ads back into it.

#️⃣Yahoo Clear or bust

Google was really awesome at a point in time. You could throw it the most obscure query using natural language with in-text Boolean operators and the number one result would direct you to an html-only geocities page that hadn’t been updated since 1999 with the EXACT answer you needed and citations from 3-4 actual, physical books to back up that answer. IMHO, those were peak times for the internet as an information resource; approximately 1998-2008.

Now every page just seems to be a bloated, poorly-coded monument to engagement baiting, subscription model services, and ad revenue generation. It’s genuinely sad to have watched the degradation over the years…

I think they mean google 20 years ago, like missing YouTube before google bought it, or instagram etc. back when you competed by making a better product, and not ya know, buying the better product and making it worse.

Before Google we used to have to go to a library to source information.

SEO is what ruined Google, then AI came along and was used to SEO the shit out of the shittiest websites

Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn't fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.

People ask me how I like DDG and I’m like. It’s better than google these days. Not because DDG got better, but because google got worse.

because they found out people would click the next page a few times before giving up, so they started making their results worse, so they could get more page views and more ads shown.

It seems they add 2 more sponsored links a year too.

Hey bro reminder to talk to your doctor about colon health

Alta Vista and a Netscape browser

I miss veronica

AskJeeves