I’ve replaced search engines with Wikipedia as the first step in looking for information. skimming an article is much faster than opening and closing a dozen sloppy s.e.o. 'd websites :p
I hate it when i need to google programming stuff because Google Gemini LOVES to make stuff up and takes up half a page trying to answer
stop googling, start ducking.
is “ducking” an actual term now? Come to think of it, ducking doesn’t sound any sillier than googling
I know the rankings change like every month, but isn’t Gemini one of the “dumber” ones? I’ve only tried it a few times and got annoyed, but it’s been a while.
It’s certainly no leader for software engineering tasks.
Oh it is, it has the same issues as the first few iterations of Chat GPT if you ever used AI in the early days
May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.
They even have a direct URL for it if you don’t want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Better yet:
and you can add it as a custom search for firefox/waterfox as:
This is nice but I never figured out the search suggestions query string.
They also give you the option to (do their best at) blocking AI-generated search results. (Not perfect, of course, but it does a decent job of reducing how much AI slop you get in your search results.)
Or Qwant. It’s Euroopan and doesn’t even have the AI option.
join the elite: kagi.com
Join the elite: create an account and pay $120/year to a private American company for search results.
That’s still full of AI, the filter quality you can see for yourself without an account for a limited amount of searches. If I search an image and the URLs on slop I see in the results with the slop filter enabled that literally contains keywords related to AI slop and KAGI doesn’t filter them out…well, I draw conclusions.
Don’t worry, they’re also super AI-pilled and known for randomly cancelling projects. But I’m sure the search is great or whatever
A search engine you have to sign up for?
And pay, i’d not mind a sign up but i’d rather not pay, especially if i cannot even have the option to self host
That and TVTropes of course
That website was such a timesink. Amazing.
Me after losing 6 days of testing broken theories from an ai search when I could have just spent an hour watching a video that a human made that was fully functional from the start.
That said: No doubt that human spent way longer discovering the technique and then making the video: this should also be considered as a reality that creating something good takes time. And humans are still better at creating scalable content just give them the proper R&D time ffs.
LLMs fundamentally can’t learn. They will continue to fail the same thing over and over until they guess and check into a response that appears coherent and correct.
AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.
It’s absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It’s like we collectively pushing for a mass extinction.
What’s even crazier is for a lot of things we already had a quick result overview. Like if you wanted the definition of a word. For a long time it was the case that you could just “define socks” and you’d get a widget at the top with the definition. Why would you replace that with AI, and have an AI process that request every single time someone wants to define socks instead of just keeping the old widget!?
Indeed.
I’m pretty sure a good percentage of the searches are also just people typing the name of the website they want to access in the search bar. They don’t want any information, just a link. All these searches now consume a massive amout of energy for basically nothing.
“Innovation” lol
I sure would hope that those AI overviews are cached. Querying an LLMs for every repeated search sounds very wasteful
If it didn’t do the AInsearch repeatedly they couldn’t use the billions of daily searches to artificially boost their AI engagement metrics and further inflate this bubble.
But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026… (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)
Ooo, they’re cramming in the ads now eh?
Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.
Fucking hell, lol
Let them waste money on generating an AI overview I’ll happily skip on my way to the wikipedia link.
I like the old ways because I also see/learn about unexpected things.
All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.
It’s like getting the info from some rando at some party. It’s to be lightly penciled in.
If you need nuance and background, wikipedia is NOT the place to get that. Maybe you can get some good links at the bottom of the page to real information, but that can be hit or miss also.
for any question worth asking
Do you really mean questions about things people might not know that yet have simple answers that don’t need pages of context, are not worth asking?
Okay so how much glue to keep the cheese on my pizza?
4 seems like a good amount.
This question certainly wasn’t worth asking.
I would say that even simple answers at least deserve a source or citation. This is my biggest complaint with AI search, you get an “answer” with no qualification. The citations listed in the AI summary often don’t contain the actual info being presented.
You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.
THIS! I recall somebody doing contract review and having AI summarize the contracts just to see how well they did… The AI left out some really important stuff and also occasionally hallucinated stuff that wasn’t there. Summarizing a contract should be pretty black-n-white – if AI can’t handle that properly, I’m not going to trust its summary of something more complex.
6? That’s rookie numbers man, you gotta pump those numbers up.
The Wikipedia marathon doesn’t stop til you get to Hitler.
That’s right. I didn’t put the question in the search bar for you to tell me the answer. That question was the first shoveling of dirt in a 6 hour rabbit hole that I was fixing to explore.
Yep. I still have yet to see an actual use for AI. People are like “but summaries!” Summarize this: summaries are only useful if the information being summarized doesn’t matter, which to me means you could just skip the entire thing.
This isn’t a high school test, this is real life. Why are you trying to use SparkNotes?
They are great to tell you the words you need to search for something; they are great for analyzing “vibes” out of texts; they are reasonably good to generate you a link to some site that answers a hard to find question, traditional search would be better if there were any one around that isn’t completely broken.
I still have yet to see an actual use for AI.
It’s great for when you want made-up bullshit.
Fake product reviews, for example. AI is fantastic for that. Want to buff up your shitty product’s Amazon reviews? AI can generate the text for those reviews perfectly well.
As someone with ADHD, I disagree. Sometimes the information is important, and I don’t want to have to dig through a wall of text to find it. One thing that annoys me about normies when they write, is that they tend to blab on forever on things that don’t matter instead of getting straight to the point.
If people wouldn’t use so many unnecessary words, I wouldn’t need a god damn LLM to summarize their ramblings into something my brain can actually parse.
