this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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I'm more surprised that people still use Google search at all after the years of enshittification — first the SEO crap, then "personalized search" bubbles, and finally the "AI" idiocy. Even shouting questions down a wishing well seems more productive at this point.
Not to sound confrontational, but you're way too focused on your - likely rather advanced - usage.
90% of people search for very simple stuff. They want to know the weather or want to know about that new movie they don't quite remember the name of. And for that use case, Google is perfectly serviceable. And since people are used to it, for example by it being the default on most platforms, they use it.
A lot of market leaders are objectively a bad choice, but they're a known brand. Coca cola, McDonald's, Oracle, etc.
I don't think you sound confrontational, but neither do I consider my internet searching particularly advanced. A lot of my searches are exactly what you describe, and a lot is trying to find a good research rabbit hole to go down. Call me curious.
I'm just sceptical, primarily of Google Search's inroads into surveillance monetisation and effective monopoly. For the same reasons I am as critical of the other "market leaders" you mention; I don't consider the ability to inspire brand loyalty in millions of consumers to sell crap products a quality 🤷
I would honestly consider anyone that uses Lemmy or the Fediverse to be more advanced than the average user.
I would go even one step further. For dumb little things like a movie or song you can't remember, or a factoid to win an argument amongst friends the AI summaries are really helpful.
Yeah no. Just had someone IRL try to use the AI summary to prove something that was blatantly false.
Even more fitting: factoid means something believed to be true, but is false. It's not a "cute little tidbit of info" like you used it as.
So yeah, AI summaries are full of factoids, you are correct.
I actually did use "factoid" correctly here. According to the Cambridge dictionary the Definition is
And that's exactly what I use it for. I'm not talking about debating economic policy on national television (but tbf, the ai summary probably does a better job than the talking heads haha) but just stupid little things you """debate""" with your friends.
Some examples Ive used it for recently.
"Were the cars in mad max real cars" and heres the response
And then it had some details about some of the big cars. And then it linked to articles like this one or this one
Or "how much does a da Vinci (surgery robot) cost?", and heres it's answer:
And then had some details of different models of da Vinci machines. But it also linked to this source and this source
And those are just two of the recent searches I have in my search history. For stupid factoids like that it's really great. For anything more nuanced or complicated than that it falls apart.
And yeah it has incorrect information sometimes. But you know what else gets incorrect information? Me when I drunkenly skim the first article that pops up while my friends drunkenly yell over each other. So id say it washes out.
Google AI: quality you can rely on (when you’re blacked out)
And that's good enough for me because that's all I use it for lmao
that's funny, cus the AI summary for "what is a factoid" told me it's an incorrectly believed idea. So which is it? Is the AI correct and you're wrong, or is the AI incorrect and you're still wrong?
Whooooosh
If the AI summary is incorrect, then his point about trusting AI is incorrect. If the AI summary is correct, then it contradicts what he said the definition is and he is once again incorrect. Literally, no matter what, he's wrong. It's was a fun way to show the absurdity of blindly trusting AI. His logic itself is flawed.
People have tried to use these against me already. It's not helpful because all they get is a mouthful of how shitty and chronically incorrect AI summaries are.
I said it's helpful to win an argument. Not 100% perfectly correct every single time lmfao
If you knew when it was and was not correct then you wouldn't need it in the first place.
Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc all suffer the same problems. I’d love to hear other alternatives (and I don’t mean alternatives like searx that is little more than lipstick on a pig and proxies search results from said engines).
DuckDuckGo is just Bing wearing a duck hat
And yet it works better than Bing somehow.
It actually doesn't.
Mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/
Thanks! I’ll give it a try.
There's nothing perfect. I use Kagi which uses many other indexes including Google, but with a focus on "small web" results and no ads or mandatory AI nonsense.
...but it costs money.
Well worth it in my opinion. My results have been better than Google for me, and I've been using it for like a year now. Highly recommend.
How is DuckDuckGo shitty? It suits me fine.
Here are my gripes:
Ah yes, I have to admit the constant AI shilling does make me want to look elsewhere. I also didn't know that it's basically askjeeves but for B‽ng, lol
That's not the word I would use but yeah, it's basically a frontend for Bing. And what's especially annoying is that it serves you links to unpaywalled news that's behind an MSN paywall.
I daily DDG but !g bang out to Google 80% of the time
Hit the back button once this month though - DDG was better than Google!!!
Has only happened twice I’ve noticed in a year!
DDG, pls use my data to be less terribly terrible (and stop rearranging results, as reported years ago)
PS: will get Kagi once I find a job cuz too lazy or something to get into SearXNG properly like I should. And Mullvad’s got Leta btw which like bundles searches for privacy
Brave uses their own index
It's like the fucking 90s all over again but for completely different reasons.
Google supports searching "specific phrases", -excluding_words, +ensuring_keywords, and whatever * is. I havent found any other indexers that allow me to make use of searches with that level of detail, which is often the only way you can find specific things these days.
Duckduckgo does plenty with its advanced search operators, which are pretty similar to Google's. * is a wildcard, meaning if you were to search c*y, results word return something including a sequence beginning with 'c' and ending with 'y', but having any sequence of characters in between them.
Pretty sure Yandex at least allows for all of those search operators. As far as meta search engines, basically anything that uses google's results like Startpage will also likely support them.
Left out shadow banning raw footages on YT while front page promoting the same footage with heavy edits and narration that lied about what happened ('see no resisting'). -Leading to riots, increased racism, civil unrest, anti-cop sentiment, innocent lives, jobs, and property lost, etc. All to distract us from a racist genocide they support.
Yandex is the only search I'm aware of that passes tests (using verifiable facts) on the subject. -Grok the only AI.
Is Kagi still good? If not, what engine should I use?
So, this is not a proper answer to your question. (The closest I'd give there, personally, is DDG, Qwant or Ecosia, all with their own caveats). But, I've been evangelizing a bit in favour of helping Mwmbl develop further.
Basically, it is an attempt to do for search engines what Wikipedia did for encyclopedic knowledge. It's still basically just a dream with an interface that's experimental and a search index still being built, currently seemingly bottlenecked by available (monetary) resources.
Oh, and a matrix community, where the actual community work seems to be happening.
But even though it's an infant with not that much more than a dream at this moment - I think their project shows promise, in audacity to challenge search engine giants alone, if nothing else. Currently, I am using it as my go to "first search" search engine, helping with curating results if possible (although, truth be told, in the past weeks most searches did not give anything useful at all). I also have the index building web crawling script running on the same server as my Fediverse instances - but there is also a firefox extension for more casual volunteer crawling without a cli script.
I can't sell this as a "proper" search engine, but still, am happy in evangelising it to anyone interested in supporting what tries to become a proper, open search engine not just on FOSS software, but FOSS principles.
DDG is just Bing under the hood.
Indeed, which is why I couldn't recommend it without caveats and I at least don't know of a search engine I could recommend without caveats at all.
Not the response I wanted, but probably the one I need. DDG has been disappointing, even compared to Google, but you've given me a lot of great options. Thank you.
I've had really good success with https://www.qwant.com/ and with https://www.startpage.com/
Isn't StartPage just Google's results, but less personalized?
I believe it uses a combo of bing and google with anonymizers, yes. I've just started poking around there due to waterfox mobile using it by default.
Thanks! I'll give it a try.
Yeah kagi is still good. I've been using it for a while and am very happy.
Kagi is great if you have the change to spare.
Probably off topic, but now I'm imagining myself shaking a cup of change at passers by.
"Spare some change to help an old man get ad-free search results?"