Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing now all return the same shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites to most of my searches, and don’t respect my literal search terms even when I put them in quotes.
I’m not ready to pay for search, yet.
Is there any alternative?
I use Qwant sometimes but it’s sourced from Bing. Searx is better if you can self-host. Kagi is better if you can afford to pay (but you asked for free).
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist is supposed to remove AI slop from the results of various search engines. Wants the uBlacklist browser addon though.
uBlacklist is an excellent add on anyway
Startpage.com works well enough
What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.
Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn’t respect your double-quotes?
I think they are referring to the search engines returning LLM content farm websites.
Maybe I’m a little out of the loop, what are llm content farm websites?
Forbes for example
Low effort websites made easier by LLM generated text. It’s not new, just made easier with the ubiquity of LLM tools. Think of it as the latest generation of spam websites 🙃
Ah I see. Junk ‘news’ and other regurgitated blah. Yeah, I’d guess any free search engine will probably be bloated with that. Not to mention that it’s google, bing, and orange bing. Not a ton of crawlers out there indexing everything is there?
The only other (not absolutely tiny) one I’m aware of is brave, but it has its own issues
They’re clearly not.
Posted this previously:
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
- ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
- duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
- any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
- marginalia.nu - specifically ‘random’ - 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.
I think Searx is a good suggestion. Can be a bit slow to return results because it runs the search on a bunch of search engines and compiles the results, but that helps to make sure better stuff rises to the top.
The other suggestions aren’t suggestions at all. They are obsoleted by searx.space
DDG … obsolete
startpage.com … obsolete
Browsers have default search engines. Curse everytime, DDG is accidentally queried.
DDG is a curse word!
Any centralized site, with privacy claims, is treated as lying thru their teeth. Front run future news.
Also 4get.ca
Reply to this for me to see tomorrow please
ok
Not sure if its untrustworthly or not, but switched over to Startpage and been liking the results. Just wished it would implement the !bang system from ddg
They use Googles results with a bit of Bing mixed in. Bangs should work too, like !wiki for Wikipedia or !d for DeepL They’re partly owned by an adtech company though (and say they dont share anything).
Kagi if you are willing to pay for the service. I think that’s reasonable but your needs may vary.
I might pay for quality search if my searches weren’t linked back to my credit card and therefore identity.
SHUM
This
