In the past when I tried different engines, I’d eventually get frustrated with a specific queery and resort to google to get what I needed

Lately, if duck duck fails me, if I bother trying google then the results are even worse. It feels like the end of an era

I wonder if we’re going to come full circle back to list servers and manually curated content. That doesn’t solve search though. It’s also very difficult to reliable detect an AI vs an actual human.

I dread having to find answers on random pages now. Its this weird discomfort of not knowing if I’ve gotten dumber and don’t understand stuff I should be able to, or if it just doesn’t make sense. Its so much work to figure out, and im just not sure which at any given time anymore.

The antidote is in the poison. We’re going to have to start self-hosting smaller, local LLMs specifically tailored to searching the web to find what you’re looking for (and providing links instead of summaries), while ignoring all the garbage.

If it can check thousands or millions of pages in a few seconds, it can find stuff buried so deep under all the slop that we would never find it manually.

Even if you’re not ready to accept this yet, at least download a copy of a model or two from huggingface before nvidia locks it down. 7-14B parameters is probably okay if you don’t have much space/memory.

Eventually we can use codeberg or ipfs to redistribute what we salvage as a collective. If everyone mirrors a few different models we’ll be in much better shape later down the road when big tech companies start approaching their endgame (full user-lock and ecosystem control expanding into the internet itself)

DDG with limiting results to before 2020 helps even more. As long as the things you’re looking for existed before LLMs

google is good if you’re seeking to buy stuff

noai.duckduckgo.com

I use that too but it doesn’t feel like it helps much anymore. Or it does help and search without it would be absolute hell.

You still get many links to weird webpages with tons and tons of fluff text without any real information important to you.

I do some origami here and there and use the search often to see if I can find a page with diagrams I don’t yet know about. There’s AI generated pages waffling on about origami diagrams with no actual diagrams shown. It is so sad to see.

Duckduckgo’s search results are the internet equivalent of hotdog water.

DuckDuckGo is AI opt-out, and for me that’s a non-starter.

I’ve personally found Kagi the best search alternative.

Kagi is fantastic. Highly recommended.

Being a paid service is a feature, not a downside to me. Even their AI implication, opt-in of course, is reasonable.

300 searches a month isn’t nearly enough and $10/mo. for unlimited is too much. Especially since they’ll probably raise it in a couple of years, and it will keep going up.

Tutamail.

Protonmail announced their intention to gargle MAGA balls some months back…