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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worse yet, people are starting to use AI chat bots as Google, and frequently getting the wrong answer and/or inaccurate information
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Except they just make shit up constantly.
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
Not going to pretend it doesn’t suck but I think this is actually a good thing in even the medium term.
Google was within spitting distance of being a de facto monopoly in the search space. For Eothas’s sake, it is the verb for searching for information.
Google shitting the bed DID make a massive gap for all the people who only ever wanted the top result to switch to LLMs (which actually are great for search engine purposes… if you take them with a grain of salt). But it also made a huge opening to actually innovate on what a search engine should be.
I am a huge fan of Kagi (the product, not the company) because… yeah there is a lot of bullshit in there and more every year. But it also largely decouples predictive algorithms from my search results and gives me the power to prioritize some sites or outright remove others from the results. And while I never realized it… that is exactly what I want. Fandom wiki when there are actually good ones? Block fandom. Shitty news site? Block it. Actually useful blog? Prioritize. And so forth.
It sucks but… I am not sure how much was actually lost. The people who weren’t really searching moved on to the next thing and the people who were can either use bing (support BDS, etc) or duckduckgo or spend a few bucks a year on one of the new products and… yeah.
That said, a Google that collapses destroys every web browser in existence since everything is either Chromium or funded by it. But… that is like a next year problem?
Every major tech company has a stake in chromium. Google could die tomorrow, and someone would bankroll it for their own selfish use.
You thing Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon wouldn’t jump at basically owning the development of the worlds most popular web browser?
Every major tech company has a stake in chromium. Google could die tomorrow, and someone would bankroll it for their own selfish use.
That really isn’t how it works.
Every major company has a stake in Chromium because the company that prints money out of the aether maintains it. Throwing a few bucks Chromium’s way for publicity is MUCH cheaper than hiring qualified developers to build and maintain their own browsers. Chromium is so successful that Google outright funds a good chunk of Mozilla just so nobody can say they have a monopoly.
Google no longer backing Chromium wouldn’t be the immediate death of the project. But it would mean the end of professional support as the vast majority of downstream companies MIGHT hire some staff to work on their own internal forks. But they aren’t going to be paying people to add new features (for good or for ill) to the upstream.
Disclaimer: Brave sucks, I know.
I use Brave Search. It finds the correct results for me almost every time. The exception is usually local businesses, or products.
Every time I use Google I do not find what I am looking for.
…Google became the de facto entry point for learning new skills and information…
Oh, so this is why everyone is a fucking idiot.
