"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of "AI" stuff, but come on, one of these isn't even in English, and that's what I have my language set to.
Instead of getting a search service with some ads on the side, you're provided ads with search results sprinkled in
I searched up how to stop a stratis pool (Redhat knockoff ZFS) and Google gleefully gave me instructions to destroy the stratis pool, and then claimed there was no way to take down a stratis pool without destroying the data.
I think clicked on the top link which was a RedHat article that told you right from the beginning that it's stratis pool stop --name
Only reason I had to even search was because I didn't have the stratis CLI installed, so no manpage
Switch to Startpage, it's actually pretty great
I like Startpage, but I had to switch to DDG because it was giving me captchas constantly for using a VPN.
I moved to startpage sinc eit was default when i moved to waterfox. Its mostly been good, but I've had a few times where it's been painful slow.
+1
I know. I'm trying not to use DuckDuckGo because of their AI support. I was told this was a good search engine to use instead, but it often spits random stuff back at me.
The noai.duckduckgo.com URL is important to notice in the screenshot.
im guessing op is aware that you can turn ai off, but generally opposed to using duckduckgo since they are generally a pro ai company
That's my take as well. You can also remove AI results from Google by adding the &udm=14 string to force web results only, but it doesn't absolve them of blame for how much they push AI. DDG deserves equal criticism.
It's like old Reddit. Sure it still exists, but it only gets worse and worse as they double down on the version everyone hates until the majority don't even know there's another option. And there's no guarantee they keep supporting the option that makes them less money.
Possibly, though as another commenter mentioned, using the noai URL for the moment is a good way to voice discontent. Not using it just falls into the "everyone uses google" narrative in a different way.
If DDG's own poll didn't spell that out for them, I don't think they care.
Yeah, fair point. I wish DDG were going in a different direction.
Well that's interesting as a poll result. 👍
The article behind the link at the bottom of the site shows that this is a marketing stunt
the poll numbers are still 😇
You really do either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
SearXNG is a mixed bag to be honest...I find that Ononoki's SearXNG delivers decent results...It's a bit mixed at times with PieFed being the third option. Some topics are surfaced better than others, so your mileage will vary with SearXNG.
Using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo sends them a message that their bet on "AI" isn't going to win them any accolades. It's an easy way to push back. As they are tracking those metrics and people can see the numbers of how many users disapprove of AI.
Bing and yahoo are VERY bad, it seems they detect that they are being used through proxies, I made another comment for what i use in searxng.
DDG's backend is really just Bing, though ...
They give different results, it seems they have different treatment to the data, which is interesting. Startpage gives different results than google, duckduckgo gives different results than bing, but on the bigger picture, a bigger sample gives the statistically optimal result??? (closer to the source truth on the most probable good result) question mark, huge number theory on statistics.
(i'm drunk)
Bing in a sandboxed session yielded results identical to DDG in my experiments.
In searxng they don't give the same results, bing brings some completely different stuff both on an selfhosted instance and on an public instance (it just gives random garbage), it seems proxying does some stuff to bings internal algorithm, as google is different than startpage on searxng.
Edit: a screenshot showing it.
Given the same methodology (search algorithm) a larger sample size gives a truer picture of what that methodology favors. If the methodology isn't neutral or doesn't bias in the same way as your desired outcome then a smaller sample size analyzed by a different methodology may provide better results.
Ah shit, I forgot to turn both those off. Ugh, I've been playing browser shuffle...Good catch!
What search engine?
It's just Bing wearing a duck hat anyway
I use brave search, in the settings you can turn off ai answer and anonymous telemetry
So you know:
CEO is a anti-vaxxer anti-masker asshole, and incredibly pro-AI and pro-crypto.
Also the browser did at one point "accidentally" have a crypto farm built into it.
I'm so tired of the insistence that you have to agree with everything that the CEO does or says if you use a piece of software... You can turn off the ai and crypto in browser settings with a couple clicks. Also I'm talking about the search engine not the browser. I don't use the browser purely because the Linux builds split mode doesn't work nearly as clean as Zen, plus i prefer Firefox forks
I use it cause it's a search engine that gives good results and that can disable ai answers... Until I'm able to get my server PC finished to selfhost searxng
Edit they actually slopped up the browser to the point it's beyond disabling it. Literally just garbage
I don't care what a CEO (for free software) thinks or says I care what the software does. Is the software good?... The browser no. It's complete garbage the search engine. Yeah it's pretty decent. If the CEO's garbage ideals bleed into the software like it does in the browser, yeah it's trash. The search engine like almost every other mainstream search engine has AI answers except unlike a lot of others it lets you turn that off. It doesn't skew results towards his ideals, doesn't bury results under sponsored links, Has no crypto nonsense, it's just a search engine. It's not that deep
I'll just leave this here: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
it seems crazy to me that people still use brave--i've been reading nothing but terrible shit about them for years
Same, been there too. Still, it's easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
very helpful ty!
Bing on searxng is shit, yahoo ultimately is bad too, I use this combination, it helps a lot:
This doesn't look right:
I use searxng too, it's decent mostly. Check your language settings?
I see you're trying to solve the problem, that's nice 🙂
But I had to laugh at the sites logic: Let's detect users language, Ah! Must be country xyz, with knowing that: Go to chat GPT and ask there 😂
It's such a bad search result, doesn't matter if language is set or not.
Whaaat? That's bizzare, I swear I had that set.
Nope, it wasn't set. Still returned weird results so I'll try that configuration the other commenter posted.
I hate subs, for any kind of entertainment most of all, but I think they’re necessary for VPN/private email.
I’m adding an another item to that list. Kagi. De-enshittified search results. My partner bought it, so it’s a shared sub, but I’m sold on it. It’s like it’s 2005 again, and that’s a good thing.
Also heard praise and got recommended personally to me.
The language detection is a bit bugged currently. Set default language to "all" in the UI (or set in the config file).
Use startpage or kagi or searxng
I’ve been genuinely happy with Kagi.
I love that you can rewrite URLs. Reddit seems to block old.reddit.com from being indexed, but I have a URL rewrite in Kagi so you can site: reddit.com (or use a Reddit lense) then when you click links it goes to old.reddit.com
Literally the only case I use this but it's the example Kagi uses so it was probably made specifically for this purpose.