Do you have some methods to mitigate the downsides of search engines and “AI” summarizers? Besides talking to folks online, what other methods might one use to sift through the internet’s vast expanses?
Not that I mind the last option, but for any of us to be able to provide each other novel information that we couldn’t otherwise search, it seems like there must be some other way to find info that one hasn’t produced or compiled themselves.
Edit:
For a more recent & livelier discussion of a similar topic, see this thread.
Unfortunately the only way google is useful is if you add site:reddit.com
You got downvotes but this is still true
I disagree. If you format your search query correctly, you can the right Reddit thread to appear without needing to directly ask for Reddit results
If that’s your intention, why not just state it directly?
Man, back in the day, Google would search for what you typed and nothing else. You could put in whatever words you wanted and it would give you back results with those words and only those words. If you wanted to search only for a literal phrase (where the words you provided appeared consecutively and in the order you gave them) you’d put them in quotes. And Google never strayed from your exact instructions.
Those were good days. I don’t think that’s a thing any more.
I use DuckDuckGo today, but it sells your info to Microsoft, apparently, so I’m not sure it’s really much better than Bing or Google on that score. And the search results are probably objectively worse.
Let’s burn the internet to the ground and start over.
Man, back in the day, Google would search for what you typed and nothing else
You are mixing it up with Altavista. Precision was their way.
Google has always been ‘and something else, too’
No, there was a time boolean search was honoured
I use searx.be, I feel like it’s better than DDG
Fuck man it’s hard. All of the search engines are broken. I don’t know, I look for research papers, read books, internet searches fenagling with phrasing and keywords, try 5 different engines, talk to people online and offline.
I don’t use LLMs for research.
I personally use perplexity.ai and, although not perfect, the way it goes about finding he answer makes it much less prone to hallucination-answers.
I use SearXNG (specifically search.cronobox.one at the moment, although I’ve had to switch instances a couple times over the summer), and DuckDuckGo (DDG) Lite in the intermittent periods between when I switch.
SearXNG is a metasearch engine, e.g. it pools together the results from a bunch of sites without giving them your info. You can choose which sites you trust. I usually use DDG, Startpage, Bing, and Qwant, and I block Google (at least directly).
The problem is that once your instance grows too large, the search provider will block it from searching on their site. What ends up happening when all the “big players” catch on is that your results…kinda have a stroke. You start to get random Wikibooks, Wikiquote, and other “weird” results for reasonable queries. This means that it’s time to switch.
IMO, this is a reasonable tradeoff for no ads and not giving my info to search providers, save for the initial 24 hours where I haven’t overcome the “inertia” to go change my browser to use a different instance and I just end up using DDG Lite for that session. DDG Lite is DDG but without JavaScript.
Isn’t including both bing and DDG double-counting? DDG uses Bing for results right?
I don’t have any good modern day answers, other than to revert to older lists of links and check the Internet Archive.
Here’s a nice older list of links I found posted here on Lemmy…
Switched to kagi.com recently and started finding stuff again without sifting through endless amounts of not related stuff because Google decides to give me what it thinks I want and not what I requested…
Although I find it a bit expensive if you use it exclusively. For me it is worth it.
Bing Chat provides links to the sources. You can read the original articles to verify.
