I switched to DuckDuckGo for a few years, then went to Ecosia for a while, and now I’m using searx. I’m not sure how searx prioritises the results, so I’m still adjusting to it, but overall it works okay.
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.
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.
this is wrong, because today you won’t find the thing you’re looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.
but this doesn’t depict results you’re looking for in “now” unless you assume it is a product search.
And then you notice that your search term was “corrected” to something completely different. Looking at you too, Amazon.
Fuuuuuuuck Amazon is even worse, if that’s possible. You used to be able to search for a product and would get that as the first result or at least on the first page. Now, they just return shit that is vaguely related but is a paid sponsor or someone manipulating their search algorithms.
i follow a channel on youtube called yitube that’s impossible to look up because it gets corrected to youtube. it’s maddening.
It’s an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.
I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the “Don’t be evil” slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore “we” cannot “fix” this. Only they could, and only if they want.
But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to “have things”, but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.
SearXNG does pretty well.
There’s also an ongoing project called Yacy which is trying to make a decentralized ever-growing index, but it’s small enough right now that the results are still quite poor even when federating with other users until you spend enough time fine-tuning it, which most people don’t want or have time to do.
That’s neat - though I would worry that it could get polluted easily, e.g. China, Russia, and/or fascists everywhere would very much like to control the conversation, so as it got a wider userbase that would be the time for it to cease functioning, whereas before that it could be allowed as something to occupy our time. So much of our daily lives are impacted by such geopolitics that we don’t even/often think of.
I hope that we (people writing FOSS) can explore the concept of voting more - e.g. how wikipedia does its edits with “trust actors”, similarly the Fediverse (& searching) could have a much wider pool of trusted community mods (or potentially a lesser category of that, lacking full post-removal capability as current ones do) where mods could vote and once something went below a certain threshold (e.g. 5x more down- than up-votes from such community curators), then a flag could go up like “this post has been marked as containing potential misinformation - are you sure that you would like to read it?” By distributing the load like that, it could help make this place MUCH more active, by lowering the barrier to moderation as it conjoins normal reading activities with a very simple button bush for most people. (and then a higher category of mods can double-check the curator mods, etc.)
On the other hand, authoritarian developers are unlikely to want to extend the Lemmy code along those lines, and rather go the opposite direction so that anytime someone says something even the slightest bit against their party line, boop the person becomes insta-banned in every single community that they have ever interacted in, even if never having commented but solely voted in them (I am not exaggerating this up - for one see the notes for the upcoming v0.19.4 release allowing this capability, and multiple recent threads discussing how this has already happened to numerous people - e.g. here is one excellent accounting of that process).
So anyway, if someone is willing to build a good system, then the people do seem willing to take it forward - e.g. see how many have already done so to Google Maps with all the reviews & pics including menus & such to share with everyone. But ofc there will be resistance to now doing that again for somewhere else, and perhaps still yet again if that one fails, and so on in perpetuity.:-(
Seems like you’re trying to address systemic problems of learned human nature at this point, which is something that can’t really be done through software alone. There needs to be a fundamental culture shift for that. Yacy is mostly good because it’s self-hosted with the option to federate to a decentralized index, and so is able to be tailored to your own needs without any external entity. However, the tailoring process means that the initial search results are absolutely atrocious compared even to Google at first, and then get much better over time. SearXNG, on the other hand, is a sort of self-hosted aggregator of search results from dozens of other search engines, rather than being a search engine in itself. It also serves as a proxy, since it is doing the searching and not you.
Complex problems will not be solved overnight, it’s true, but we can get there one step at a time!:-)
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…
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That’s exactly how you make money in the search engine world - by not knowing what your paying customers do.
That’s big business on the Internet! No morals, no conscience, just churning out profit for the do nothing class.
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Been like this for years now, I jumped ship 4 years ago to DuckDuckGo, might even jump that ship if it gets any worse, but alternatives…
I tried using DDG for about 3 months, until I had to ditch it. I want to use it, but its results are even worse than Googles.
While on Google I might have to scroll past the ads, sponsored links and obvious AI blog results, the first page will usually at least contain a relevant result somewhere, whereas DDG simply doesn’t bother to show any relevant results at all. Even on it’s first page, it will stray far from the actual search term.
This seems like a good time for someone to create a search engine.
Try duck duck go. It’s mature and seemingly flawless
Try Kagi. It’s a paid service, but what can you do… You either pay or you are the product.
They have a free trial though, and it looks very promising.
I’m currently prioritizing DuckDuckGo over Google and others for a better quality of search results. There ain’t much ads to mess your attention, and the results are quite good most of the time.
You’re still using google?
Instead of the childishly condescending question, suggest alternatives for those who don’t know
Duckduckgo works great
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
Same with visiting almost any website.
Then
- Click on link to website.
- Read website.
Now
- Click on link to website.
- Click on Cookie options.
- Scroll down looking for ‘Reject All’.
- Discover there is no ‘Reject All’.
- Scroll back through list turning off all optional cookies.
- Scroll back to the bottom to click on ‘Confirm my choices’.
- Hunt for the close X on the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ pop-up.
- Click on the close X on the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ pop-up.
- Read the website.
- Discover the website is just more AI generated SEO garbage.
- Go outside, walk on the grass barefoot, weep for the future of humanity.
I’ve just switch from DDG to Qwant. I didn’t do research about how they make there algorithm but DDG that IS to say Being was returning me unrelated stuff and even things I ask not to see in my request. The result is not amazing quality but no more amazingly bad quality.
I want to learn more about search algorithm, what there referencement politic is and what use of AI they have. It not possible today to pick a search engin algorithm randomly and get pertinent résultat like it was two years ago.
Maybe if less people sucked the dick of LLMs then it wouldn’t pervade every facet of our lives?
This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.
I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.
I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.
The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.
