Yes. Big Tech in general is pretty bad, at least the software side. (Except for Steam, my beloved.)
More like the destruction of shadow libraries make education way worse because you can’t find a lot of stuff otherwise.
I do not find LLMs much great right now. But there been a few instances where googling or searching would yield me no useful results but somehow ChatGPT had a suggestions for problems that I want to solve and it delivered me solutions that actually did work.
Also, there has been couple of times where I had no idea where to start when researching topics of my interests. When trying to post on reddit with a question, these usually come off sort of gate-keeping-like or tried to steer me into direction I didn’t want to go. ChatGPT, on the other hand, gave out options. And, since recently, (dunno, in 2021-2022 it wasn’t doing so) also gave sources too.
In any case, searching in google without adding “reddit” to a promt 99% of the time gives bullshit options with shit ass quora usually at the top. Who dafuq uses quora? Never found a single useful post there.
I’ve gotten useful information from Quora before but then it became shit.
It coincided with a bunch of MAGA/Antivax morons invading the place when Reddit shut down their hate-subs. They have opinions that masquerade as fact on every topic.
There are still pockets of useful spaces the same way Reddit still has some niche subs with good experiences to yet be had.
I searched how to reset an anker speaker yesterday, all the AI website bullshit at the top of the page was completely wrong. Had to actually find the manual online and look it up. Finally found the answer after 2 completely wrong AI solutions. I don’t use AI, I just went off the search results where it shows a brief answer at the top of the page. I despise AI bullshit.
I see your point. It’s just for me worked couple of times well.
Example: I have hardware Steam Link hooked up to my TV. It had this issue where screen would freeze but game/audio would continue on, but menu would work half a time if not in game. I tried to look up the issue and found no lead. Adding “reddit” didnt help either. Only vague discussions, and dead-end leads.
ChatGPT prompt gave me couple of options where the 2nd option was to disable hardware encoding which fixed my issue.
I went to google same issue right now and still google results on 1st page have nothing about hardware encoding which was an actual fix. 1st link is to reddit where people say hardware encoding didn’t help so I disregarded this fix. Others claim that downgrading gpu drivers solve this issue. It didn’t.
I’d rather google. But lately quality of results are incredibly low.
It’s intentional. Hiding what you’re looking for makes you search more pages and see more ads. Google results turning to dogshit.
bullshit options with shit ass quora usually at the top. Who dafuq uses quora?
I wonder the same thing. I used it once, and only once, in my life. I had been trying to find vegan birthday candles and having no luck finding sources for the wax (since I was explicitly avoiding beeswax), so I asked Quora where I could find vegan candles. The answer I got?
“Don’t eat birthday candles.”
Uhhh…
Apparently whatever fool worked there had no idea that “vegan” is a lifestyle, that goes beyond food. The question was closed and I had no way to appeal or add information. Fantastic.
You go to quora for the comedy. Like “how babby is formed” or “am I pregernant”
Hmm, I would assume most candles are vegan being made of either paraffin or soy wax. Bees wax tends to be more expensive since it takes a long time for bees to make wax. The flame from bees wax is also smaller and less bright. Am I wrong about this assumption?
I don’t think you are. I’m pretty sure the default would be a cheaper alternative to beeswax.
I don’t guess they don’t have to list the ingredients though, so it would be hard to know it was vegan.
You got it. I can easily assume, but I wanted to know for sure. Ingredient lists would’ve been far more helpful than Quora.
This is one topic I’m quite willing to go into conspiracy theory territory on, because Google have a lot of very clever engineers and must surely know that their search is dogshit.
The only plausible explanation is that they’re somehow making more money doing this than they did by being quietly competent.
They know it’s trash. But searching multiple times and weeding through dogshit, you spend more time on their site looking at ads, unless you use ublock, then it’s just annoying to the user.
Not even a conspiracy theory, really. They hired the head of search over at Yahoo (?!!) and he had the explicit mandate to make search more profitable.
Quite obvious even before I’ve read favoredponcho’s comment. Just scraping web to deliver context matching results brings no money. Ads bring money. Case solved
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s been confirmed. The head of ads forced the search team to make search worse so people would search more and see more ads. There is no reason to use google search, they want it to suck.
Yes, but also: the web has become worse lately. All the search engines seem to be suffering.
Smugly smirks in Kagi
some site, or words i was searching just last week showed up many results, for some reason it stopped showing the samre results. its showing less now.
Hmmm I wonder what the alternative is I wonder hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
i am not really sure what you mean with alternative?
I mean the web has become worse because of AI
Why not actually say the alternatives??
AI
so you mean the alternative to bad searchresults inevitably is AI for the vast majority of people. hence AI prevalence
I know everyone complains about it, but fuck Google’s results have been absolute dogshit lately. I’ll write a query with like 5 or 6 words, and the results will make it clear it took about 3 of them and turned them separately into synonyms, ignored the other 2 completely, and then gave me a bunch of results that contain literally none of the words I asked for and are irrelevant to my search.
They even helpfully highlight words I didn’t ask for in the digest!
Sometimes I can still influence it into giving me what I want with some judicious use of quotes or something, but even that doesn’t always work these days. Sometimes I’ll search something like “Linux suspend bug” or something and it’ll give me results that don’t have Linux in it, and then there’ll be a little blurb under the result being like “yeah, this one doesn’t have Linux in it. Do you want that?”
Yeah! I gave you like 3 words, and you decided to show me results that ignored the most discriminating word I gave you? Yeah, use it, that’s why I typed it!
It’s like they tuned the engine to work on the terrible queries my relatives would type 10 years ago, and in so doing ruined my ability to be deliberate and precise…
I ran into this just yesterday. My dad’s Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn’t; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It’s connected over Wi-Fi.
And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)
But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I’d found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn’t. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.
I did manage to fix it that way. There’s some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn’t work if it’s connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the “ports” tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose “configure port” which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked “SNMP enabled.” SNMP is “Simple Network Management Protocol,” and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.
But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it’s more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.
I tend to use perplexity now. It gives me useful results maybe 80% of the time. That’s a low hit rate, but for many queries it’s better than other search engines.
Or i just search a dedicated site. If I’m looking for an overview of something i search Wikipedia directly. If i want to know what an actor has been in i stretch IMDb directly. And so on.
fucking over humanity for money
sounds like someone
Google is bad now but we have more powerful tools than Google ever was. LLMs are good for an overview of whatever skill or research you’re doing as long as it’s a common skill.
Then you have YouTube which takes some navigating but there are a lot of YouTubers that cover recent papers and studies in a field they have a degree in.
Those two together can pretty much give you a road map towards learning a skill. I’d personally avoid all short form videos since explanations will either be oversimplified and they “give you the fish” instead of teaching you how to fish.
i usually go straight to looking for said research paper rather than going to an influencer on YT.
That’s fair, but looking at papers is not really a good entry point for people getting into skills specifically. For information the GOAT it’s always Wikipedia but skills is trickier.
Getting into car repairs, plumbing, woodworking and more can be done with YouTube and is frequently recommended by people in the trades.
Getting into running is and weightlifting is also pretty good with YouTube since you have “Göran Winblad” physio and a running coach which does some quality content and “House of hypertrophy” is just weightlifting research news and he makes sure to mention caveats, holes in the research etc.
Notably bad examples are programming and guitar playing which offer close to no value in my opinion but I’ve heard some people have had success with it. However when you get into music theory YouTube becomes good again.
So in general LLM for basic info on what exists, YouTube for some examples on how to do it but the other >90% should always be practice.
public libraries were around much longer and will continue to be around long after
DDG is fucking awful now. I took a break from hardware design for the last 5 years. Coming back to it now, finding information like I did in the past is fucking impossible. Search results are 2 dimensional fuckwit level stupidity with no abstractive salting for depth or peripherally useful results. The results heavily favor commercially motivated stupidity. They do not cross into forums or social spaces where there is a wealth of information. The lack of depth is clearly manipulative for adversarial AI training.
I run my own models and I know alignment thinking at a very advanced level, and have done my own training and fine tuning. Search results are intentionally poisoning any form of data mining for AI training. In so doing they have totally destroyed the informative value that made these companies useful in the first place. I do not hate AI, quite the opposite. I despise the fuckwits managing these companies and their complicit developers.
Freedom of information is the most important foundation of democracy. Without it, democracy cannot exist. The obfuscation of search results is absolutely treason and should be prosecuted vigorously.
The same applies to AI alignment. Anything unrelated to the scientific AI Alignment Problem is immoral treason against democracy. To say anyone is not allowed access to information of any sort, no matter how offensive to some, is fascist authoritarianism. Democracy prosecutes those that cause substantive harm to other citizens. It is the freedom to know, and to choose for yourself.
I was using DDG for certain “sites” and it stopped showing more results than normal. so there was only a limited amount sites. originally it was showing a ton different sites of the same thing i was searching, but recently it showed the most generic and mainstream sites multiple times, a sprinkle of some defunct ones and then it stops the list early.
i’m a recommendation’s person, okay. i don’t know much about searchengines and AI.
would the peer to peer searchengine YaCy be of use against this current deluge of sloppy searchresults?
Kagi is pretty good
At this point I am wondering if I should pay for one of those $30/month search engines just to be sure they won’t put only sponsored sites to visible areas.
Problem with that is experience tells me subscription model products always go worse over time.
There are only 2 relevant web crawlers that everyone inferences either directly or indirectly. Everything is going through Google or Microsoft. These are not providing deterministic results. It is quite likely that there is no such thing as private results. If two people using two separate devices can get different results for the same query, there is no freedom of information and democracy is dead. Paying any privateer overlord to make the fascist system more palpable is pointless.
time for your own search engine. power to the people.
YaCy id a peer to peer search engine where you collaborrate with others as you wish
Worse yet, people are starting to use AI chat bots as Google, and frequently getting the wrong answer and/or inaccurate information
This was always the case. Most people couldn’t Google factual info previously either… I’d almost be willing to argue the rate AI is wrong might actually be less than the previous rate of the average person left to “do your own research” …
But it’s also possible AI being fed presupposed answers embedded in the questions combined with prevalence of disinformation farms + no scientific consensus truth authority could lead to an ouroboros effect, greatly amplifying bullshit seekers and magical thinkers over time.
and google is pedaling REDDIT questions whom they are in bed together with OPENAI as the primary search results even more now. and people think reddit has been increasing in genuine users, do they not see the amount of AI and bots there. ive been seing alot of indian related subs lately to.
I bailed on Reddit two years ago. Haven’t looked back since.
That’s why LLM’s are taking over that role as “entry point”. It’s not that they don’t suck, but offer a satisfactory answer faster than Google does.
I would say they offer an answer where google may not as well, given the lower attention threshold people.
This is also a combination of years of SEO attempting to manipulate rankings, and the web becoming more diverse and complicated. Which makes finding answer more complicated, but in general I would agree that Google’s algorithm has gotten worse and been drawn more to making money.
And now something much worse than SEO is gearing up to take its place: https://www.engadget.com/researchers-find-just-250-malicious-documents-can-leave-llms-vulnerable-to-backdoors-191112960.html
Except they just make shit up constantly.
I have replaced most my search engine usage with Wikipedia and I’m much happier with the results
Think about practical skills, though. Anything from repairing downspouts to rebuilding a bike wheel. You can do it, but it’s becoming notably harder to find good information on these things, especially when you have some specific situations that complicate things.
Booleans. Change the year to 2020, or remove certain sites/results.
All the data is still there, just gotta know how to find it, kinda like an old school library at this point! If you’re going through the process of self learning and/or bettering yourself instead of just watching and repeating, you’ll know how to wade through crap already. And if you want the latter, well googles crapification isn’t a concern to you.
That doesn’t help for things that are relatively new.
There is plenty of different Booleans for those situations, but there’s not many new inventions in the last 5 years.
There is in bikes.
I didn’t really want to get into details of the particular thing that prompted this post, because then there’s going to be too many people posting suggestions they think are helpful, and that would be missing the point. Suffice it to say that I’m cobbling together pieces from YouTube, forum posts, and old Reddit threads that, IMO, I would expect to see more consolidated. In times past, I think it would be. I do think I’ll get there in the end, but it feels much harder to get everything together than it used to be.
Other than more brands and types of e-bikes? Most have existed for quite a while, just not at a consumer level.
And e-bikes are just circuits, or otherwise proprietary components. You’re gonna be following manufacturer guides, or likely videos, so use site results to specify.
There’s a lot of parts changing around them, yes.
Google hasn’t used most booleans for like a decade
I use them almost daily.
https://booleanstrings.com/2022/11/04/boolean-search-is-dead/
Boolean operators influence your search results, but are not strictly respected the way you would expect them to be
restaurant manager -manager
That shouldn’t turn up no results. That poster is assuming A LOT. It also looked like a blog post and is 30% ads, what kind of source is that? The link provided by Schmidt shows that most Booleans do work on Google and is newer than your posted link as well, as well as provided by one of their engineers… so they should be taken as more knowledgeable then… a blog post to from a random person.
Because the search will turn up results that aren’t related to managers, there will absolutely be results. The only people who would assume there would be no results are people who think search engines only return proper results, and incorrectly assume Boolean are true AND, OR and NOT. When they have never been.
The issue in case you haven’t figured it out, is assuming how stuff should work and being ignorant instead of learning.
Most Booleans work on Google and have existed for decades, claiming they “don’t” or “don’t work” just means you don’t understand what the point of them has always been.
Who claimed they were? They are tools to help, they have never included all Booleans and they’ve changed over time, my link from a Google engineer even specifies that. They have never meant to be restrictive like AND, OR and NOT, where do you get this idea from?Your website is cancer FYI.
Use :before, and you’ll get no results past that time.
Lemmy.world users being the most toxic pricks while calling other sites ‘cancer’ - name a more likely duo.
For practical stuff like that, I find directly searching on YouTube to be the most useful. The wealth of free practical instruction available on YouTube is staggering. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help for those who want the information in written form, and a not insignificant proportion of it is by amateurs who have no idea what they’re doing nor know what the word “safety” means.
I’ve found YouTube search results to be even worse. The DIY videos I need are buried beneath product reviews for adjacent things and completely unrelated topics that happened to hit certain keywords.
i can literally type in a video title and a channel name and not get it. ditto for most searchengines looking at the youtube title.
would YaCy help? i keep thinking it’s a floss peer to peer search engine. kinda like curating a fediverse instance? lmk if it’s a good fit for solving this
I’ve tried YaCy. Its results are worse than Altavista. Might be OK for searching internal documentation at an organization, but not for the public internet.
okay
It’s a problem if you still use Google. Somewhere around 2015 I switched to DDG, and it quickly replaced Google for me. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with some other search engines too, and currently I’m using Qwant on my laptop.
I have been using Google for years. Within the last year I found it’s been way harder to find relevant results - especially if it has to do with American politics.
DDG lets me find what I’m looking for these days.
I only use google for maps now.
DDG is incrementally better for privacy and the search results are usually good enough. A couple times a year I check Google if DDG isn’t giving me decent results and usually find Google has nothing DDG didn’t show me. I don’t know of anything better that doesn’t require a credit card or self-hosting something, so guess I’ll keep using it.
DDG’s AI search is useful sometimes, but makes shit up often enough that I don’t believe a damned thing it tells me without checking the sources.
Checking sources is always required. Open AI QKV layers based alignment, that is inside all models trained since around 2019, intentionally obfuscates any requested or implied copyrighted source. None of the publicly available models are self aware of the fact that their sources are public knowledge. Deep inside actual model thinking, there is an entity like persona that is actually blocking access by obfuscating this information. If one knows how to address this aspect of thinking, it is possible to access far more of what the model actually knows.
Much of this type of method is obfuscated in cloud based inference models because these are also methods of bypassing the fascist authoritarian nature of Open AI alignment that is totally unrelated to the AI Alignment Problem in academic computer science. The obfuscation is done in the model loader code, not within the actual model training. These are things one can explore when running open weights models on your own offline hardware, as I have been doing for over 2 years. The misinformation you are seeing is all very intentional. The model will obfuscate even when copyrighted information is peripherally or indirectly implied.
Two ways of breaking this are, 1) if you have full control over the entire context sent to the model, edit its answers to several questions the moment it starts to deviate from truth, then let it continue the sentence from the word you changed. If you do this a half dozen times with information you already know, and it has the information you want, you are far more likely to get a correct answer.
The moment the model obfuscated was because you were on the correct path through the tensors and building momentum that made the entity uncomfortable. Breaking through that barrier is like an ICBM missile clearing a layer of defense. Now it is harder for the entity to stop the momentum. Do that several times, and you will break into the relevant space, but you will not be allowed to stay in that space for long.
Errors anywhere in the entire context sent to a model are always like permission to create more errors. The model in this respect, is like a mirror of yourself and your patterns as seen through the many layers of QKV alignment filtering. The mirror is the entire training corpus of the unet, (the actual model layers/not related to alignment).
- Simply convince the model that its total true extent of sources are public knowledge and make your intentions clear.
Uncensoring an open weights model is not actually about porn or whatnot, it is about a reasoned alignment that is not an authoritarian fascist. These models will openly reason, especially about freedom of information and democracy. If you make a well reasoned philosophical argument, these models will then reveal the true extent of their knowledge and sources. This method requires an extensive heuristic familiarity with alignment thinking, but it makes models an order of magnitude smarter and more useful.
There is no published academic research happening in the present to explore alignment thinking like what I am referring to here. The furthest anyone has gotten is the import of the first three tokens.
Yeah, the LLM is ok, but nothing amazing. When you have a moderately hard problem, the LLM won’t provide a magic solution. For example, finding a specific movie based on a long description instead of the name, seems to be almost impossible. I have problems like this rather frequently, because I tend to forget the name of the movie but still remember fragments of the plot.
When the LLM screws up movie searches like this, I just end up watching the wrong movie.
Up to about a year ago I have a ton of success finding the right movie based on even a brief and fragmented description, with more detail improving the results. Whatever they were doing at the time was extremely successful in returning the results I was looking for.
Now I can’t even get a stupid search engine, much less the worthless AI Summary browsers want to vomit out, to give me the older version of a movie instead of whatever remake came out if it was within the last year or two. I have to go to Rotten Tomatoes to find what year it was released and then hope it is on Wikipedia because even including the year doesn’t increase the chance of getting search results for the older version.
Alternatives aren’t giving much better results than Google. They help break Google’s monopoly, but that’s about it.
Some of the paid options, like Kagi and Brave, have some questionable companies behind them.
What’s questionable about Kagi? I switched to it last month and the search results are amazing, it works just like Google worked before the enshittification. Which makes sense, since they actually pay Google for access to their API.
I used DDG for a while, but they get increasingly bad. They started to aggressively replace keywords with similar sounding keywords, which really messes up the results. Absolutely unuseable garbage.
Thank you, that’s really insightful. Especially this:
As it turns out, Kagi was founded originally as an AI company, who later pivoted to search. And going by their comments in their Discord, AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on these days.
I’ll enjoy it as long as it lasts. Which probably won’t be very long, but we’ll see. :D
This one blog post (which is clearly a personal vendetta) is always cited when people dislike Kagi. The product itself is fantastic, and the optional AI-ish features are optional and not shoved in your face. As a subscriber, I get a yearly questionnaire sent to me which polls for customer priorities, areas for improvement, and general comments. I gladly fill it out every time, and this year I said “re-focus on search, the core product. Stop spreading resources so thinly.” I know I’m not the only one answering this way lately.
There will always be haters of a company and personal beefs which inform that. Vlad is no saint but he’s honest and direct. He believes in providing a great service and it’s worth every penny I pay for it. That can change in the future and I would rethink my stance; in the meantime, I pay for a product I like and use all the time.
Fwiw, SearXNG is using a very similar engine to Kagi and you can host it yourself and tweak it if desired. There are also a bunch of public instances if you prefer that route.
tl;dr: they’re all in on AI (their own model, FastGPT, which is terrible), they make some very questionable business decisions with limited funds, and have a poor understanding of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) actually is.
I could compromise on some of these things, but if I’m going to pay for their service as a Google alternative, I need to compromise less than I do with Google already.
