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  • Hacker News
  • I don't think it's really an "AI problem", we just got to the "worse" part of the "Worse is better".

    Back in the day one of competitors of the World Wide Web was Project Xanadu. Project Xanadu was supposed to address the concerns like content persistence and version management within the core design. As such it was much more complex, opinionated and centralized.

    WWW on the other hand comes with no guarantees - you might get a document in response to a HTTP request, and that's it. But WWW service can be rolled out in a completely permissionless way, and is quite simple - effectively, the contents of the file system can be shared with the world, so e.g. a document can be published just by putting its file into a particular directory within the file system.

    Thus Web could get to a "good enough" state much faster and quickly spread all over the world. But its permissionlessness and simplicity lead to downsides: impersistence and chaos of broken links, web search provided by mega-corporations, etc.

    WWW evolution was, unfortunately, not "incentive compatible" with features like advanced persistence and identification clarity: there was much more focus on entertainment content and ads

    by killerstorm
  • Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.
    by bichiliad
  • Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was.

    And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.

    I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.

    by schaefer
  • I had tried Kagi a few years ago but it didn't stick. Tried it again now and it feels like a breath of fresh air, which is probably less of a statement about Kagi's advancements and more a statement of what Google has become.
    by brandon272
  • I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.
    by bigstrat2003
  • I’ve been using Kagi for about a year now and I genuinely get worried that there are no alternatives if it goes out of business. The results are extremely good, especially in the last 4 months. I like their opt in AI summary as well, just add a question mark at the end.

    I pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.

    by Mabusto
  • I'm a long time Kagi user and I haven't used Google search in about a year.

    I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.

    Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.

    by jeorb
  • I was wondering how would Kagi scale/expand if all of a sudden google were to stop serving search altogether (not likely) or alter search such that users look for alternatives.
    by onemoresoop
  • Gemini has been a hilarious companion to my while I fixed the balance shaft chain guides in my old Mitsubishi triton (mighty max for US readers).

    First it told me I could just remove said balance shaft chain as an emergency repair. Sorry Gemini, it also drives the oil pump.

    Then it told me I could remove the water contaminated oil caused by removing the timing case by filling the crankcase with hot, soapy water and running the engine. Lord no.

    Then it gave the wrong instructions for putting new gears on the balance shafts which meant the chain guides didn’t align with the chain. I’ll do it my way thanks Gemini.

    The rest of the mistakes are too trivial to recount and sure it’s a pretty obscure subject but if I trusted it with a topic I’m not familiar with there is a huge potential for damage if you blindly follow it’s overconfidence. I miss normal searching.

    by smackeyacky
  • Meanwhile, ChatGPT correctly diagnosed what was wrong with my plant from a single photo, identified which leaves I should cut, and annotated the picture showing where to cut and what not to touch.

    I honestly expected a made-up useless generated image that matched the idea but not the actual thing.

    Guess I’m still living in 2024.

    by ElFitz
  • I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI.

    There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.

    by umvi
  • Isn’t this what the paper-bound encyclopedia companies do, albeit shallowly
    by asawfofor
  • > There will come a day (and probably soon)

    That day has already arrived, it is already happening.

    by latexr
  • If I ever curate again it will certainly not be for the public. That led to PageRank which kickstarted this whole dystopian nightmare that Google has been planning since as early as 2003. No thank you.
    by altairprime
  • This already exists, there are archives of Reddit or other sites, and Anna's Archive for papers and books.
    by satvikpendem
  • That’s what is going on right now.

    As I recall there are data labelling jobs now for people who have experience working at McKinsey.

    by intended
  • Reddit has already begun the effort to start poising the well - https://www.reddit.com/r/poisonai/
    by marcd35
  • I think most everyone already has a curated training library; Web scraping exists but I don't think anyone is still using it as a primary information vector
    by hadlock
  • All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias
    by jessetemp
  • The article touches on something that I've been thinking about with regards to Google's AI strategy; the automatically-generated AI search summaries are not great. They very frequently confidently misinterpret what the user is searching for and generate half a page of useless information that pushes actual results down the page, and they are occasionally hilariously incorrect, with hallucinated facts.

    This is probably a difficult-to-solve problem; given that they generate billions of these a day, not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results. You can see this by selecting the "AI mode" from the search interface after getting the mediocre summary - the results are much better and generally perfectly usable. Though even that is probably a special minimal-compute version of the lowest tier of Gemini, it's still maybe an order of magnitude more capable than whatever generates the search summaries.

    The bigger problem is that these search summaries are the default and by far the most common interaction that the general public has with "AI", and because this experience sucks, they just assume that all LLMs are similarly stupid and mostly useless. In non-technical spaces I frequently see the argument that "AI" is not useful for anything, all it generates is garbage hallucinations, and almost invariably they cite some actual terrible experience with the Google AI search summary. I would argue that the strategy of adding LLM summaries to every search is the worst of both worlds - it makes classic search worse while poisoning users against the idea of actual LLM-assisted search.

    by CommieBobDole
  • > not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results

    https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...

    by oblio
  • I occasionally use Google Search when DuckDuckGo fails to give me relevant. Almost always, Google has better results.

    Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for.

    DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.

    by novafunc
  • Yeah, there are times where DDG has like, literally three results. Yet, I know for an absolute fact, there are hundreds of pages on the web that contain the terms I specified. Web search is becoming utter garbage.
    by amatecha
  • I've used DDG for years (thousands of searches) and when I switch back to Google thinking I might be missing something... I'm always let down. Seriously, the results are pathetically bad now and have been for years.
    by josefresco
  • That was true until a few months ago. Now, it almost never has relevant results, and I've given up on it.
    by a2ff6eeb0
  • https://noai.duckduckgo.com is a thing fyi

    i don’t agree with the google has better results thing. sometimes it does. most of the time it’s just that google has the site i want higher in the ordering than DDG. personally i’m fine scrolling down a little bit more. it’s rare i need to go to google for something that DDG doesn’t have at all in their results, but it does happen.

    i do have to go to google for maps/directions/planning travel. a lot that’s annoying.

    by dijksterhuis
  • that control (so I can turn it off completely) is why I picked DDG to replace Google, who force feeds us the hallucinations

    I've stopped using DDG now because of result quality. I now use a "meta" search backed by EXA, Tavily, and SearXNG in parallel. It can be agentically de-dupped or summarized as needed. Search as we knew it is done, largely because clicking through to evaluate result relevance before diving deeper sucks. Now we have agents that can do that portion and perform multiple searches, building on information in the last batch, to collect good results

    by verdverm
  • The problem and what the article is pointing out is that original content is slowly and progressively being replaced by AI content. And since AI gets trained on this content as well it will eventually train itself on previous gen. content that was also AI generated. It is slowly eating the web. Eventually you won't even be able to evade it because it'll be everywhere. Before AI became this expressive I could at least expect someone writing articles, FAQs, blog posts to have some backbone. Now I frequently run into content that obviously was never even checked by a human.
    by crnkofe
  • Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.
    by 8organicbits
  • Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.
    by sgt