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.<p>Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>---<p>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.
Current Kagi results for those without an account to compare:<p>youtube downloader<p><a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=youtube+downloader&r=us&sh=_szITdyvMw_yudQFEzvtvg" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=youtube+downloader&r=us&sh=_szITdy...</a><p>ad blocker<p><a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=us&sh=-BHzV2ZoCDpmgOupDo07XA" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=us&sh=-BHzV2ZoCDpmgOu...</a><p>download Firefox<p><a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=Download+Firefox&r=us&sh=zkkmc_EQXRGi8tHNSG_ZWw" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=Download+Firefox&r=us&sh=zkkmc_EQX...</a><p>why do wider tires have better grip?<p><a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+wider+tires+have+better+grip%3F&r=us&sh=RsPMTWospLnZLksx_Ejb3g" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+wider+tires+have+better+gri...</a><p>why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?<p><a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+they+keep+making+cpu+transistors+smaller%3F&r=us&sh=mDb6sXbQFPtzNghLWV5bAQ" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=Why+do+they+keep+making+cpu+transi...</a><p>vancouver snow forecast winter 2023<p><a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=Vancouver+snow+forecast+winter+2023&r=us&sh=fHojvLtqz__Zv7zHF6df-w" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=Vancouver+snow+forecast+winter+202...</a><p>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.<p>I welcome such scrutiny from the community. Please continue to keep us honest.
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.<p>For comparison, here are all the author's questions posed against GPT4:<p><a href="https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7525a64" rel="nofollow">https://chat.openai.com/share/ed8695cf-132e-45f3-ad27-600da7...</a>
Try uBlacklist, it's like uBlock, but for search results.<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/</a><p><a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...</a><p>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. :(<p>edit: THere are some feeds on the uBlacklist site though. <a href="https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions</a><p>edit edit: Found an even better list of feeds.
<a href="https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-filter-formats-ublacklist-hosts-filter-">https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter#other-fi...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos mentioning <i>yt-dlp</i> 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.<p>Yet when searching for <i>"how to download youtube videos"</i> 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.<p>When searching for <i>"how to download youtube videos from the command line"</i> 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.
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"<p>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.<p>Just makes me realize how subjective search results are. All of their "Great" results are my "Terrible" results.
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.<p>Like, sure, I have the <i>impression</i> that search got worse over the last years, but .. has it really? How could you tell?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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:<p><a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...</a><p>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.<p>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.
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
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>In the wider tires grip search, #3 is a physics blog that dives deep into the topic.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Really wondering how Dan got such bad results.<p>------<p>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.<p>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.
The issue with traditional search engines is that keyword-first algorithms are extremely gameable.<p>Try <a href="https://search.metaphor.systems">https://search.metaphor.systems</a> - it's fully neural embeddings-based search. No keywords, only an embedding of what the actual content of a webpage is.<p>So in the mentioned example of searching for Youtube downloaders, with Metaphor you'll get only Youtube downloaders (<a href="https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20best%20Youtube%20downloader">https://search.metaphor.systems/search?q=This%20is%20the%20b...</a>)<p>Full disclosure - I work there :p
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.
> 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.<p>Is that true? Do most people want to install a command line tool to download youtube videos?
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.
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).
I think the result grading is too opinionated here.<p>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.<p>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.
I really don't agree with some of the expectations around results.<p>> Download youtube videos<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+videos&r=au&sh=Sjez-gTHDNE5r9wcy3o6AA" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=commandline+tool+Download+youtube+...</a><p>"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: <a href="https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOtsPNNhHA" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/search?q=Ad+blocker&r=au&sh=4VHApDrTEfuxMOt...</a> (But for a query like that, I'd be happy with a wikipedia article about adblockers, because why not?)<p>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".
Weird article. Basically, the author thinks that anything that is not yt-dlp is a bad search result, which is pretty insane.<p>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.
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...<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://kagi.com/fastgpt" rel="nofollow">https://kagi.com/fastgpt</a>
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).<p><a href="https://mwmbl.org/" rel="nofollow">https://mwmbl.org/</a><p>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
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.<p>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).<p>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 :|
I have found appending site:edu remarkably improves google results.<p>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.<p>Why this is needed and whether a noncommercial, information rich web portal should exist are questions for another thread.
Wide tires by Jason of Engineering Explained: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa2gZNqmT8</a><p>Better answer: learn the differential equations in this book:<p><a href="https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TERRAMECHANICS%20AND%20MOBILITY/epdf.pub_tyre-and-vehicle-dynamics-second-edition.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TERRAMECH...</a>
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.
I use serpapi for my hot RAG and the results are fine.<p>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
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.
mostly my search is now Wikipedia.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>I'm reminded of that Craigslist image showing how many startups were each competing against specific parts of Craigslist <a href="https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/craigslist.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://cbi-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20...</a> , 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.
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).<p>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.
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.
I have recently started using kagi after seeing a recommendation here.<p>From what I understand, it aggregates results from multiple sources rather than having their own indexer.<p>The results aren’t really any better, but the lack of ads and videos in the results makes for a cleaner experience.<p>I also haven’t yet taken advantage of the extra features to block certain websites from results.<p>Personally, I pay the $5 mostly in an attempt to support another competitor in the space.
I'm not sure youtube-dl is a good answer unless you're a nerd.<p>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.<p>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.
I don't understand the praise of Marginalia.<p>When I search for "Steve Jobs" on Marginalia, I got blogs about his speech in 2011 and some mailing list from 2007.<p>When I search for my own name I get nothing. In Google it's just me.<p>It's cool that one person built all this of course but... that's not a good search result compared to Google?<p>Maybe I miss something, maybe I use it wrong
> 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.<p>Interestingly, if you add "before:2001-01-01" to the query, the paper that Brin and Page referenced shows up as the third result.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>See above. Sort of.<p>---<p>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.
The appendix describing the individual search results is both entertaining and scary e.g.<p>"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."
> However, there's a sizable group of vocal folks who claim that search results are still great.<p>I think that this very sentence shows the author's bias, because I feel that Google's search results are not just great, but <i>better</i> than what it was 10 years ago.
The thoughts about building a better search engine than Google are interesting.<p>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.<p>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.
> <i>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.</i><p>Finally some one said it. We are unnecessarily harsh on hallucinations. LLM’s don’t intentionally ‘lie’. To say this is a wrongful anthropomorphism.
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
I got different results for Google on "ad block".<p>And changing the query to "ad blocker" like Google suggested raised ublock origin way up in the results
"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."<p>Also, the article tested Mwmbl as well, not mentioned in the title here.
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.
Honestly, if you have to search something remotely technical, try HN's search function with comments enabled.<p>If the topic has ever come up the discussion and links are likely to be more relevant and better than your avg. wiki article
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.<p>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.<p>Now that sounds plausible to me, but that’s just my best guess explanation.
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).<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
I’d love to see this a little extended.<p>Searx and Yandex.<p>Specifically… if I need something even slightly “gray”, Yandex is the only option anymore. Torrent search on google et al is just awful.
> 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.<p>why
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)
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.
Without labor to run their circus, 99% of business would disappear overnight.<p>Without business, spam would disappear.<p>So if you remove the labor you remove the spam.<p>So the best spam filter is UBI.
Is this from desktop? What region?<p>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.<p>Yt-dlp is subject to all sorts of takedown requests in different jurisdictions.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I am not sure what the intention of this post is. In <i>my</i> handpicked results Kagi far outperforms Marginalia.<p>#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.<p>#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.<p>#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).<p>> How is Marginalia, a search engine built by a single person, so good?<p>Because it's not good?
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.<p>Using an adblocker is not expert anything.<p>That you've defined your own opinion for what some of the results <i>should</i> be blows the thing up.<p>Searching youtube downloader, many people would be <i>fine</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Why do wider tires have better grip? .. what, sites like roadandtrack, prioritytire, reddit, some physics and stackexchange sites aren't good enough? they are.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at bing? It looks like google results are similar.
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.<p>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.