This has got me thinking and possibly worrying.

Google is expanding its use of AI in their search engine. The current AI assistance in Google Search is a massive pain in the ass. Far too many of the search results are AI synopsis of the subject, which are untrustworthy and inaccurate more often then not. The lousy search results stem from the Google AI using Reddit as a database to learn from, so obvious bias and inaccuracies comes with the search results.

So what are the alternatives to using Google search? Is there a search engine out there that is wide reaching and produces accurate results that are useful? Google has been the default for a long while.

Some alternatives include:

DuckDuckGo (my go to)
Brave
Gibiru

You can also use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 , where "%s" is the search words. This pulls up google results without the crappy AI summary. Most browsers have a way you can add a url with %s like that to create a search shortcut.

Quote from: Zalman on March 09, 2025, 07:20:14 AMSome alternatives include:

DuckDuckGo (my go to)
Brave
Gibiru

You can also use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 , where "%s" is the search words. This pulls up google results without the crappy AI summary. Most browsers have a way you can add a url with %s like that to create a search shortcut.

I believe Duck Duck Go uses Google's search algorithms and just anonymizes the search.  If so, that's not going to help much if the search begins to incorporate AI in the algorithms....

Quote from: jeff37923 on March 09, 2025, 01:03:38 AM

This has got me thinking and possibly worrying.

Google is expanding its use of AI in their search engine. The current AI assistance in Google Search is a massive pain in the ass. Far too many of the search results are AI synopsis of the subject, which are untrustworthy and inaccurate more often then not. The lousy search results stem from the Google AI using Reddit as a database to learn from, so obvious bias and inaccuracies comes with the search results.

So what are the alternatives to using Google search? Is there a search engine out there that is wide reaching and produces accurate results that are useful? Google has been the default for a long while.

Google has just been getting worse and worse. Not sure what a good alternative is. Is Ask Jeeves Still around?

Quote from: Eirikrautha on March 09, 2025, 01:18:28 PMI believe Duck Duck Go uses Google's search algorithms and just anonymizes the search.  If so, that's not going to help much if the search begins to incorporate AI in the algorithms....

They switched some time back to leveraging Bing through a Yahoo-Bing search alliance. At some point, everything underlying search will incorporate AI.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on March 09, 2025, 02:21:19 PMIs Ask Jeeves Still around?

You could Google it...

We are entering a digital dark age, where the caretakers of the internet have quite intentionally become controlling tyrants.

That said, their reign will be short lived because Google is in the middle of being trust-busted. I don't think anyone can actually disagree that Google needs to be anti-trusted, but the nature of advertisement networks is that the larger they become, the more valuable they become, so the instant you break a part of the Google ecosystem off, the whole of the Google ecosystem--including the removed part--loses value.

This is probably a uniquely painful antitrust case, where the antitrust lawsuit will likely destroy billions of dollars of advertising network value. Heck, the damages could actually go into the trillions of dollars because Alphabet's total valuation is, in fact, just over $2 Trillion. So if the antitrusting breaks more than half of Alphabet's value, you have over $1 Trillion in losses and about 3% of the US GDP evaporates in a single court case proceeding. Looking at these numbers, I think Google is trying to play chicken with the DOJ by positioning themselves as too big to safely antitrust.

Looking at figures like this, I am increasingly thinking the internet will have to go back to the late 90s model of self-hosting.