Probably with a FOSS alternative but with the owner class working is to death for below survival wages who has the time?
If search engines really wanted to fix this–and it would require Google and Bing taking action, not smaller search engines–they could de-list any company that engaged in SEO so that nothing from that company showed up in searches at all.
That would just change how SEO worked, since the old methods would be less optimal. Search engines have to rank results somehow, and whatever that is there’s going to be some way to game it.
Maybe I should have said that any attempts to game ranking–versus actually creating content (e.g., no repackaged content)–would result in being blacklisted until such content was removed.
Mojeek and Qwant are my go to if duck, duck go isn’t great. It should probably be the other way around.
If you need to use Google, I’d recommend the &udm=14 trick, as demonstrated on the linked site. It goes straight to a “web only” filter for search results. There are some tricks and tips to set that to your default search option in settings, or you can get a browser extension.
You’re still using google?
Instead of the childishly condescending question, suggest alternatives for those who don’t know
I’ve been sticking with Kagi in the hope that it improves
Duckduckgo works great
I like alternative bing clients too! Personally I use yahoo. A colleage of mine uses an open source thing called searx, it works pretty darn well
Kagi looks nice! Going by how the results are pretty much the same, it looks like it’s a proxy for bing in the us. Like duckduckgo, ecosia and yahoo
Oh my god, you’re still using Yahoo
Again, actually. Yahoo as integrated to the browser search bar is basically what googled used to be a decade ago. It’s just a proxy for bing tho
Oh my god, you’re still using a browser lol
Yea, it’s not a bad idea to have one
Maybe if less people sucked the dick of LLMs then it wouldn’t pervade every facet of our lives?
Bro. Use ublock origin. I haven’t seen a sponsored link on google in like 10 years
Searching “SpaceX starship” on Google just now in Firefox with adblock origin, not logged into Google, on mobile I get:
- Summary of the vehicle from Wikipedia with relevant pictures on the first card
- The SpaceX page for the vehicle on the second card
- Relevant videos on the third card
- SpaceX’s twitter on the fourth card
Doing the same in mobile chrome, logged in, no ad block:
- Adverts for starship toys in the first card
- Relevant news stories in the second card
- Wikipedia summary
- SpaceX’s starship page
- Relevant videos
- SpaceX twitter
So if you’re getting other crap, use ad block. I presume the comic was made while Google was adding LLM results, which they aren’t doing now. I can’t say I noticed the LLM results while they were included.
AI, ads, and useless google add-ons can all literally be switched off - that’s basically the value add of any given Google alternative. What’s harder to beat is SEO.
I think the only way to beat SEO is with a dedicated “anti-SEO team” that manually flags shitty/generated websites to be downranked. It would take a lot of labor and it would be impossible to do in a purely neutral way, but something human-run would be preferable to any automated system which everyone would quickly figure out how to “game”. A vote system to get mass reports on good/bad results might help but you would still need the upper tier of people making sure that brigades and bots aren’t constantly fucking things up.
It’s not scalable. Sure you could have humans comb through the most common 1000 or so results, but there’s got to be billions of unique searches every day
Yeah but downranking one AI-generated page downranks it from all search results, and you could come up with rules like downranking specific service providers or companies that are repeat offenders. I don’t think it would be easy but I think it’s the only way to get something better than what we have with techniques that currently exist.
The amount of man hours this would require would bankrupt even Google. You’d be better off building a new index of whitelisted sites
idk. Google used to automatically highlight pages that you landed on then stopped your search, which indicates you got a good result. They basically scrapped that, though, since their advertising arm wanted people to spend more time searching, running more queries, to get more ad impressions. Google literally sabotaged their own search algorithm to increase “engagement”.
Congratulations you invented a 90s search engine.
Do you mean to tell me that I keep scrolling I’ll eventually get to the yellow promised land?
Just one more “o”, maybe it will be there…
that’s what she said
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For the unaware, this is a scifi term which describe humans overthrowing robot overlords.
Slight update to this comic, to call out the dangers of Google’s Sponsored Results.
Examples, for those that are not aware of this risk:
- https://www.techradar.com/avoid-google-ad-malware
- https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/scams-verify/google-ads-scammers-redirect-website-url-different-search/536-4ef6c41d-087e-4db9-a281-86bcf7637c68
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/01/using-google-search-to-find-software-can-be-risky/
- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/rogue-sites-causing-trouble-in-google-advert-results
I rarely trust top results from google, since I’m uncertain if I somehow missed the tiny gray text saying that it’s an add.
Yeah, that shit is illegal where I live and search engines do it anyways. Unfortunately not enough lawsuits…
It’s disgusting that Google will happily make money from scammers while completely aware of what’s going on
That’s big business on the Internet! No morals, no conscience, just churning out profit for the do nothing class.
That’s exactly how you make money in the search engine world - by not knowing what your paying customers do.
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I was (trying to) use AI to help me with something on my PC a few nights ago. It was telling me to go menus and choose options that literally don’t exist.
Wtf is going on with AI right now? About a year ago, I found it useful for certain things. But it seems to have totally shit itself recently, and is pretty much useless now.
Models got downgraded because they were too popular/expensive to run.
Also layers of guardrails reduce inputs and output usefulness.
I tried getting xpadder yesterday and the top search results were fake websites. I’m still not convinced I found the real one
Just double checked the email confirmation from when I bought it in 2016. Most recent xpadder version is 2024.05.01.
Also if you’re looking for controller remapping software (and you’re on windows OS), check out DS4Windows. Contrary to the name, it works for most brands of controller, and it’s got a lot of stuff that xpadder doesn’t.
I landed on it for the better control stick adjusting (you can change dead zone/max zone, and also sensitivity curve). I stuck with it because it can use an emulated controller while hiding the actual controller from programs and games (which solves any double input jank from shit like steam).
Also it can also map gyro controls to mouse input, which is real neat for essentially using my joycons as a remote for my pc, and the occasion where splatoon style gyro aiming fits in games without being too barfy.
Is that software still being maintained? I have an old copy that doesn’t work anymore. But that app used to be super handy
Last update a month and a half ago. Great for what it is, but ds4windows is my go to until it stops working for me. More complicated, but it offers a good deal more finetuning.
Oh damn, thank you!
