this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
954 points (98.5% liked)

memes

10681 readers
2584 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I hate that search engine degradation is what’s lead me to use AI more. Instead of searching past pages full of 8 ads for a waffle recipe, I ask Copilot or something: “Give me a basic waffle recipe”.

So much computation to go back to what the web used to be great at.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I knew Google started ignoring double quotes for required text years ago, but I found out yesterday that it doesn't even think "site:xyz.com" needs to be followed.

I was researching something and saw some Reddit posts. Clicked below it to view results from Reddit and a third of them were other websites.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Google has always respected my double quote and site: searches. Please share a screenshot of it borken, I looked online and don’t see examples. If you have the time for a silly little thing :)

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There are literally tens of thousands of examples of them ignoring any and all of their operators on Reddit and Google help. You can find them easily if you look.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

The examples I’ve found fall into “caveat” territory.

From the adware company blog:

Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.

Caveats:

Quoted searches may match content not readily visible on a page.

Quoted terms may only appear in title links and URLs.

Snippets might not show multiple quoted terms.

Quoted searches don’t work for local results.

I would be ticked if quotes didn’t work. My screenshots do show them working.

An example of them appearing to ignore quotes came up. When they pull this, I can ignore the results below the error/red line:

Further discussion:

I can’t reproduce but I wanna! (Prolly not kids though)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

They ignore any and all of their operators if there is more money to be made by doing so.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

I know Lemmy doesn't like it, but Kagi is really great

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy doesn't like it for a reason.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Im a massive proponent of FOSS, But I have not heard a single sustainable FOSS model for maintaining free search engines. It just takes so much capital to operate.

I think a paid model is much better than a privacy disrespecting / ad driven one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

if its individually paid, you don't have privacy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It is if they dont store search queries, which they claim they dont. I have no reason to distrust them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

FOSS and paid are not mutually exclusive, but Kagi is not FOSS and of dubious transparency/trustworthiness.

Also Kagi is not operating a search engine, but a search aggregator mostly dependent on Google. They don't need much upfront capital to operate.

An actual search indexer competitive with Google is too expensive to be profitable without (tens of) millions of paid users or hundreds of millions of free ones (i.e. bing and maaaaybe yandex?).

True google alternatives are therefore only going to come out of big capital (MSFT), or less likely a government (EU?) funded company. There might be an argument to be made for decentralized search as well, but the only actual contender in that field right now is a crypto thing that probably relies mostly on bing/google. Still, a decentralized open indexer may actually make some sense in theory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Right, but nobody hates google because ofits results. They hate that its privacy invasive.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

If I wanted to pay to talk to people, I'd go to a therapist.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Lemmy just likes shitting on popular things to feel superior

You keep on Kagi'ing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Lemmy loves Kagi. At least this Lemming does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Astroturfing bad

Good search good

The former is unconfirmed to be sure

I’m liking $0 SearXNG: lots of instances if you don’t host your own (for max privacy I think)

Germany/Spain hosted instance with all the checkmarks (Vanilla, IPv6, 100% uptime): https://searxng.site

If you fancy paying for a decent cause, don’t see a problem with the paid option sometimes suspiciously mentioned on Lemmy. Free trialing it saw a pleasant experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Responding to the human who typed:

I know Lemmy doesn't like it

Explaining many Lemmings seem to like it, and attempting to explain why some may bristle at its mention

That’s all :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You said it was astroturfing, implying I was astroturfing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, meant it as a reply to each segment of your sentence, to clarify what I think we like and don’t like:

Lemmy doesn’t like [astroturfing], but [Lemmy likes] great [search]

I haven’t seen anybody say Kagi’s search itself is bad! Oh, I should have mentioned some don’t like the idea of paid search period. That’s another complaint.

Overall positive impressions from many users here, is what I see. “Lemmy doesn’t like Kagi” is somewhat of a mischaracterization I think.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Totally fair, sorry for the misunderstanding

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Stop being reasonable and fight more for our amusement!

JK, good on you guys for being civil.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I friggin love this site

Hope you have a nice day & weekend ‘round the corner

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I just tell AI to google stuff for me and link me to the best results...let it wade through the ads and spam.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Kagi has a really neat feature that if you phrase your search in the form of a question and add a question mark to the end of it, it'll summarize all of the top results and give footnotes to the pages that it evaluated. It saves me tons of time!