To be fair Google’s results have been shite since the SEO arms race in about 2014.
Yeah, I use other search engines.; they might not be that much better but at least they don’t start off with scams and “suggested” websites.
I mean Google made its own bed here. Their chronic enshitification because they thought they were invulnerable really means the digital landscape doesn’t have a solid accessible alternative and “Web 2.0” capitalization of network effects to concentrate attention means viable competition is always going to be niche.
This is mostly the fault of the tech giants, but if we’re being honest, we all played a role in letting it get this bad. Kids are just following the path of least resistance.
Google has been just good enough for it not to start a mass exodus to alternatives. Even if those alternatives are just google/bing front-ends themselves with no real indexing of their own.
But Google is pushing its own AI at the top of its searches. As if search is going to “soon be deprecated”.
Ditching Google is good, but not for AI. We should take the ditching part and redirect the young people to use other search engines.
Ditching Google is good, but not for AI.
LLMs and their precursors were always how search engines compiled and ranked their search results. Google has been using some form of AI to build up its base of information for decades.
The absurd turn of the last decade was Google C-level pivot from engagement through useful results to engagement through bad results that force you to click around on the site longer. “How do we get more ad interaction?” became the question that dominated the development of their technology.
That’s what enahittified their website. Not “AI”.
given that by LLMs, people generally refer to the transformer architecture, it definitely wasn’t how google always did search. they famously started out by using pagerank. now, back then this was definitely seen as AI, but what gets called ai by the general public has changed over the last couple of decades. now people use it almost exclusively to refer to deep learning models or even just llms.
so yes, in a strict sense google has always used ai for search. but when the general public says AI now, they usually mean llms specifically and using that to replace actually going to the source websites is new
Search is probably one of the few “ok” uses for LLMs if you find a way to reduce the carbon footprint and train on ethical material
Which, up until maybe eight or nine years ago, Google was pretty good at.
But then we went into this insane build-out cycle, where you were seemingly incentivized to be extra sloppy with every aspect of the business.
I think we need more solutions like Kagi, but less expensive.
Since you’re the customer, no ads are served to you, and the search results are in your best interest and can be fully customized.
Since you’re the customer, no ads
I remember the streaming services making this claim when they first took off.
Oof :(
Yeah. It’s almost impossible to create a system grounded in ethics in a hyper-capitalist architecture. Misinformation is by its very nature more entertaining and easier to make, so the unavoidable market incentive is to eventually shift the revenue base away from a broad, but low capitalization user base toward the handful of high capitalization snake-oil mongers. It’s a direct product of market concentration that’s allowed a handful of talented liars to accumulate more wealth than the majority of the rest of humanity.
I thought Kagi was expensive until I used it for a year. Worth every penny.
I’m Canadian and their prices aren’t adjusted per market, so it’s pretty expensive for us. It’s about the price of YouTube Premium for a base plan. (I’ll go double check)
Edit: nope, YT Premium is a wild $27 CAD now, far from the $14 CAD for the cheapest unlimited search Kagi plan lol
$5 a month is really not expensive, though. That’s less than the price of a AAA game for a full year. Google is only free because they make their money selling user data. How cheap does a good search engine need to be?
I’m not considering the 300 searches plan, I bust that basically instantly. The minimum plan I can use is the $10 USD, which is about $14 CAD.
That’s wild to me; I feel like I search a lot, and I only go over the 300 searches rarely. Those few times I do, it’s painless to just start the cycle a few days early.
I’ve been enjoying using https://marginalia-search.com/ for various topics.
Impossible. The problem is not in the search process, but in data availability. LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question while the search engine gives you dead links or spam.
A concrete, concise answer that’s often confidently incorrect.
I’ve had MS Copilot first tell me to use a Microsoft product that was retired nearly a decade ago, and when called out it told me to use one that didn’t exist.
Also, the garbage web results are because of LLMs.
LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question while the search engine gives you dead links or spam.
LLM also very confidently gives you a wrong answer way too often. Just over the weekend I tinkered with diy-home automation gadget and fed a bunch of documents to duck.ai in hope that it could dig up protocol and electrical behavior of HAN port on our electric meter. The documentation is there, but it’s recursively referenced to a crapload of different standards so the actual answer is pretty labour intensive to dig up manually.
LLM spat out an answer which seemed to make sense, but the solution it offered didn’t work and when I asked for sources for spesific facts it just said that it doesn’t have any and that it shouldn’t have recommended such a solution in the first place, with apologies of course.
I’d much prefer the old school way of searching things, but that doesn’t really exist anymore either. Search engines, google specially, are far less useful than they used to be. Part of the problem is LLM slop filling the whole internet but somehow I feel that’s not the only reason.
LLMs give you sycophantic bullshit. Tell it it’s wrong even if the response is correct and see what it does.
LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question
That may be true for basic, simple questions, but it is not true for medium or hard questions.
They will give an answer, yes, but often it’s not answering what you asked, or giving the wrong answer.
Then you use a better search engine, not flock to an AI that has no real concept of what’s true or false so just feeds you whatever looks right
Here’s an example of a time where a single letter spelling error affected the outcome even though Google knew it was a typo. Yea, LLMs will give an answer but anecdotally it’s correct less than half the time on any question of substance and at least 10%+ miss rate on simple questions.
I think the SEO blogspam was already contributing to brain rot but not to the extent that 5 years of AI generated blogspam ingested to the models, fed to people without critical thinking abilities.
Test it on topics you’re going to dig into already (to minimize work), and you’ll quickly find how horrifying this practice is.
My favorite is when the bot “infers an answer based on what information is available”, in other words, makes shit up, instead of saying “I don’t know.”
It won’t tell you it’s doing this unless you demand source material. Spoiler: what is linked below the answers as source material can be completely unrelated to the response. Like cited sources in an Ann Coulter book.
And even when you do, it may not accurately respond with it. Companies are conflating complicated word-relationship math with “information”, and there’s no means by which these systems can actually verify that something that came out is accurate or not, since language models just don’t work that way. They can straight up point at sources that’re real but make the wrong conclusion because the word relationships lean that way in relation to what was quoted, and no “this new model is better!” can really solve that fundamental flaw with Large Language Models in general, or things that operate like they do.
Watson was groundbreaking because of the way it worked as an information match model, designed not to be generative but merely to match one prompt “concept” with a target scored on relations. It was almost like how LLM scoring works but fundamentally still different, with a TON of hand-training done to get there. And I was just thinking about, the other day, how much I think these companies want people to correlated what Watson was doing on Jeopardy with LLMs.
As if Google and other big providers deciding that giving you bad results so you’d have to view ADs for longer wasn’t bad enough for the young people’s ability to critically think and find information…
Now they’re going to AIs that’ll outright lie to them with confidence of someone about to say “I told you so”.
