Consider Kagi far superior.
I ditched Google and Gmail.
Best AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google - included in one $25/mo subscription with our Ultimate plan.
Same trash.
Privacy company offers privacy focused LLMs for users that would’ve otherwise paid for ChatGPT. Unbelievable
Did you actually ever try Kagi or do you just want to spit uninformed delusions?
Ok so what’s your alternative then?
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I ended up having to install a CalDAV client on my other people’s Android phone.
Google’s been garbage for years now, I kind of miss Copernic Pro which is what I used before Google it searched all the search engines available and combined and resorted all the results.
Google was perfect at launch but in recent years it’s worse than Yahoo!.
If you’re tech savvy, look into selfhosting SearXNG.
I think there are public instances as well.
Would it run on a Raspberry pi 5?
Yeah it doesn’t use many resources.
I’m running one on pi5 with no issue. It takes less than 5 minutes to install one under docker.
No effing way! I got a 16gb model, doing this right………now.
!lemmysilver
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ohthankgod!
I stopped using Google at the same time I closed my accounts with Facebook, instagram, Reddit and Amazon. Currently I’m using Ecosia which I think is German. I’m dumping all the US companies I can based on all the Trump crap. It is taking time and effort but I should be able to actually close the Google account soon and I replaced windows with Linux on all but one of my PCs.
Ecosia still uses American services though - they use Google, Bing, Yahoo and Wikipedia for search results.
ecosia is developing their own engine apparently
I hope that goes well for them. It’s hard and extremely expensive, which is why there’s so few good search engines and half of them just use Bing’s API.
Yeah but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Among other things, they just recently announced that they’re starting to build an alternative index with Qwant.
I’ve never heard of Ecosia, but I don’t understand your logic on this.
Problem: Google bad!
Solution: Don’t use google, use Ecosia instead.
Error: Ecosia also uses google.
How is this a good move? If anything it’s just a lateral move with the same problem.
Eventually they’ll stop using G and MAYBE they have better impact in the climate. Why be a fucking prick about it?
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You’re right but it’s still important to point out in this case since an American index would be subject to any American censorship law. It’s better to use Ecosia than Google for sure but we still gotta be aware of the type of bias we’re working with.
Definitely true. I’ll have to try it out. Is Ecosia better than DuckDuckGo or Kagi?
I’m using Qwant, used Ecosia before. Really OK for most stuff. I still revert to googling occasionally - mainly for local businesses on maps and sometimes shopping results. But I agree, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, well said.
Google maps is still the best for looking up local businesses and reviews. I wish people would go back to using a modern version of yellow pages.
In Ecosia’s settings you can set it to primarily use Google results instead of Bing. Makes it a lot more enjoyable to use.
What about DuckDuckGo?
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At this point Bing is better than Google, so using a privacy based skin of Bing seems like a good idea.
95+% of all websites you visit are hosted on AWS or use Cloudflare.
But that’s their decision, not yours.Do you have a source for that? I think it’s nowhere near 95% of sites given there’s several major providers that aren’t AWS or Cloudflare (eg Hetzner, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Wordpress.com, and a bunch more)
Same here! Loved the switch to Linux.
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I wouldn’t say dogshit, I would say the results are good enough for most purposes, not great, my priority just as the moment is dumping USA based companies and I thought Ecosia planting trees was a nice touch. Although as someone else pointed out it is still possibly using crawlers from google and bing in the background. I’m still keen to try out other search engines.
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Yandex is better than any American service by far imo.
Yandex LLC is a Russian technology company that
…
Sad its results are less censored due to the others pairing with corporations.
Didn’t read the article but use Qwant since Trump.
Or Ecosia
Nice to see this choice is making an actual difference.
I almost never use them now.
You’re even a verified user. So you must be right. 😝
Didn’t think Lemmy had such a concept.
It was just a joke, because of his avatar.
Google been degrading as time has gone on. The other search engines (like all of them) are getting or surpassing google in certain subjects. AI has really made them look like fools in all of this. Googles AI sucks for results and (while I dont like it) others are using chatgpt for search results.
I would say it is just the opposite. Google used to be good before they tried to post-process results in this extreme way and AI is just an even more extreme way to do that. ChatGPT and all the other LLMs just increase the noise to signal ratio (noise coming first because there is so much more of it than signal these days).
I actually agree. Others use chatgpt for just about everything. I dont like it for many…many reasons.
Google was much better pre-2020.
People use chat gpt to tell them what to buy. We are doomed. Our brains are about to shrink to the size of a pea in 10 years. All is going to plan for the elite.
Its funny because you can totally run good LLMs on local systems but people are just going to chat because its what they know and its easy to work with. Like I get it, but they are starting to put ads in the prompts now.
Google was best in the 2000s, but things were different back then. They were still a young company trying to improve the world, SEO spam wasn’t really a thing yet, there were far fewer websites, and most online discussions were archived and searchable (compared to today where there’s platforms like Discord that aren’t indexable in search engines at all).
interesting. looks like yandex and yahoo are the ones who took it.
Makes sense when you consider that Yandex is owned by a Russian oligarch, and Google has been fined more money than exists in Russia.
I’m glad to contribute to that metric.
These numbers underline the current trend to choose European services instead of American ones, which followed the trend to deGoogle.
[the chart shows stats for American Google, American Bing, Russian Yandex, American Yahoo!, American DuckDuckGo, and Other]
Russian Yandex
Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.
Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.
Thanks for mentioning Yandex, bringing is back onto my radar.
And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
I’m not using their products now as I don’t want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.Who still uses search engines to find torrent, though?
It’s been common ever since magnet links were created, since you can post a magnet link anywhere (even in a plain text file) rather than having to upload a .torrent file somewhere like in the old days.
Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.
Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn’t find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.
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the discussion is about search engines, not browsers.
Yeah, that statement wasn’t supported by the data at all. It seemed to only be included as a way to link to their other articles about European alternatives and de-Googling.
What would be a good EU alternative?
Qwant or Ecosia.
Thanks!
I went long enough without using Google (probably a year-ish) that, when I accidentally made a Google search a few days ago, it was a jarring experience.
It felt wrong the same way other search engines did when I first deGoogled. It was kind of nice actually.
I had that happen too. Couldn’t find something with DDG. Hopped over to Google and was shocked at how completely unusable it was.
The irony is Gemini is really good (like significantly better than ChatGPT), and cheap for them (no GPUs needed), yet somehow they made it utterly unbearable in search.
Gemini is really good at confidently talking nonsense but other than that I don’t really see where you get the idea that it is good. Mind you, that isn’t much better with the other LLMs.
So it’s really good at the thing LLMs are good at. Don’t judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree etc…
No, it is mediocre at best compared to other models but LLMs in general have a very minimal usefulness.
I get the desire to say this, but I find them extremely helpful in my line of work. Literally everything they say needs to be validated, but so does Wikipedia and we all know that Wikipedia is extremely useful. It’s just another tool. But its a very useful tool if you know how to apply it.
But Wikipedia is basically correct 99% of the time on basic facts if you look at non-controversial topics where nobody has an incentive to manipulate it. LLMs meanwhile are lucky if 20% of what they see even has any relationship to reality. Not just complex facts either, if an LLM got wrong how many hands a human being has I wouldn’t be surprised.
LLMs with access to the internet are usually about as factually correct as their search results. If it searches someone’s blog, you’re right, the results will suck. But if you tell it to use higher quality resources, it returns better information. They’re good if you know how to use them. And they aren’t good enough to be replacing as many jobs as all these companies are hoping. LLMs are just going to speed up productivity. They need babysitting and validating. But they’re still an extremely useful tool that’s only going to get better and LLMs are here to stay.
It can be grounded in facts. It’s great at RAG. But even alone, Gemini 2.5 is kinda shockingly smart.
…But the bigger point is how Google presents it. It shouldn’t be the top result of every search just thrown into your face, it should be a opt-in, transparent, conditional feature with clear warnings, and only if it can source a set of whitelisted, reliable websites.
After just trying it again a few times today for a few practical problems that it not only misunderstood at first completely and then gave me a completely hallucinated answer to every single one I am sorry, but the only thing shocking about it is how stupid it is despite Google’s vast resources. Not that stupid/smart really apply to statistical analysis of language.
Gemini 2.5? Low temperature, like 0.2?
The one they use in search is awful, and not the same thing. Also, it’s not all knowing, you gotta treat it like it has no internet access (because generally it doesn’t).
The one they use on gemini.google.com (which is 2.5 right now but was awful in earlier versions too).
Try it here instead, set the temperature to like 0.1 or 0.2, and be sure to set 2.5 Pro:
It is indeed still awful for many things. It’s a text prediction tool, not a magic box, even though everyone advertises it kinda like the later.
“Significantly better than ChatGPT” and “Good” aren’t the same. Like ipecac is significantly better to drink than sewage water.
I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.
Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.
15+ years ago you could search for an error code, or an error message, or a part number and actually find it.
they also ruined their own platform by creating and encouraging an entire business around gaming search results.
I ditched it around 2014 when I noticed it had effectively become the yellow pages. Its pretending to be one thing to the ‘user’ when its actually serving someone else. This is transparent of course but the balance/compromise or tradeoff of it still providing some utility to the user despite this is what may vary for different people. My threshold was low. That and the privacy violations. Unfortunately its a corporation.
