just realized whoogle is dead now
from hexagonwin@lemmy.today to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 11 Jul 11:31
https://lemmy.today/post/56354685
from hexagonwin@lemmy.today to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 11 Jul 11:31
https://lemmy.today/post/56354685
google search results are still kind of useful especially for non-english language queries, anyone knows a good alternative?
searxng also doesn’t really seem to work these days…
threaded - newest
Duckduckgo is surprisingly okay, even with non-english queries by using the region selector (your experience may vary)
ddg is my primary right now, it absolutely sucks for korean queries sadly
Isn’t it just Bing with privacy? Or do they use their own tweeks or something? It’s what I use nowadays since google never finds anything i search for
DDG is an US based company. They will comply to all the patriot act bullshit and pipeline all your searches to the NSA…
If they really cared about privacy they wouldn’t be based in the US.
Well, then what would be a better alternative? Besides, they will take it wether DDG likes it or not.
I just gave up on searxng too.
I didn’t even make it an entire day of searxng, front the literally fist search I tried I was getting blocked haha
No problems with my SearXNG here at all (just have to look into Qwant): <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d5992d18-048c-4224-9245-b50c2f84a760.png">
is this on a residential IP? are you running vanilla options or any api tokens?
Residential IP (runs in a Docker container on a Raspberry Pi 5 here), pretty much vanilla (apart from Marginalia).
I to am on a residential static IP and have been loving searxng. It is fairly vanilla running on a pi 5 in docker.
This might be one of those things where self hosting isn’t worth the pain, like email.
I’ve been using Kagi for several years now and have been very happy with it.
Searxng has been pretty sweet, been hosting my own for about a year and some change with pretty good results.
I do get blocked by engines occasionally which can have a drastic impact on results.
Nah, fuck Kagi.
They are literally giving part of your subscription fee to fucking Russia. In comparison, DuckDuckGo have ended their partnership with Yandex. Vlads refusal to follow suit and his steadfast support of Yandex is quite telling to say the least.
Yet another part of your subscription goes to Elon Musks xAI to support Grok in their AI assistant. Even if you are not using that model, all paying users are effectively subsidizing the cost of the Grok API calls. You can’t opt out of that.
You should look into why so many people isn’t angry at Russia and are now blaming US. Your anger is exactly how US manufactures consent for all their wars, and it keeps you from discovering why people doesn’t hate Russia and even blame US/the west for starting it. They simply create a lynchmob - an echo-chamber - where people won’t listen to counter points bco anger. It works.
ALL US moral attacks on their ‘enemies’ (Ussr/Russia, N.Korea, China, Iran and oc ALL nations that wont be dictated how to live by the US elite) are such manufactured BS, and it all runs on the anger they create in people, and from there, they can do what they want in the name of ‘war against evil’. It will continue as long as people keep believing US and their controlled information bubble.
Give it a try, just read all the headlines in this list: What really happened in Ukraine?
If you couldn’t, or you still refuse the idea of foul play after reading - they got to you…
Tankie saying everyone else is sheeple while espousing conspiracy theory YouTube playlist as objective truth.
tankie “leftists” fuck off
.
You didn’t even open the link to realize it’s not an article huh
Thank you for your service. 50 ₽ have been deposited in your bank account. Don’t forget to fill your quota by the end of the day unless you want to volunteer for military service.
Tankie that use youtube conspiracy as objective truth
Also, you can hate both the USA and Russia, look, you can even hate China at the same time!! Crazy shit right?
Man, I used kagi for 2 months or so and stopped subscribing after that because while there wasn’t really anything that I’d seen that’d make me outright unsubscribe there were many things that I found odd and it didn’t make sense to pay so much for a product that I didn’t agree with all that much. For instance:
I was unable to remove yandex from my search because:
Despite having so many AI features that barely fit into a search engine, such as a translator (slop frontend) and an entire browser?
It called itself “unprofitable” because search is so expensive while giving an honestly insane quota of AI use as far as I can understand (ex. if user pays 10$ for the kagi subscription: 10$ - 20% worth of tokens = 8$ total quota), giving 100 free searches with, as far as I could see, very little protection against burner emails (the translator seems to not need an account at all and it’s an llm frontend, so it shouldn’t be cheap), and it had many different views in many different places from me.
But all that made me do was hmmm and shrug it off. I mean, we’re different humans from different backgrounds, of course we’d hold different views.
But holy shit. Hoooooooly shit. That conversation about the GDPR in the article. What the fuck. What in the actual fuck did I just read there. The fact that the CEO emailed him an explanation despite him explicitly asking to not be emailed too. Bruh.
startpage.com
kinda works, but their results are a bit crippled compared to google (also, no way to search specific timeframe)
?
<img alt="" src="https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/384e602f-8654-4a4a-af7b-e8f536c936c4.png">
Ah, you mean a custom timeframe. Like where you pick your own dates.
yeah, i search with ‘before 2023’ to filter AI slop often
Kagi.
Searxng too much effort.
KagI is pretty good in various languages.
Kagi is still $10+tax a month. That’s $120 a year (plus tax).
SearXNG is $0 and a few minutes of my time whenever I tweak the configuration.
If you’re there with Searx then it’s pretty similar to how Kagi works. Kagi sends requests to various search providers and has some of its own index then shows results based on the various sources.
I found Searx/Searxng slow, 5-6 seconds per query (to get a response from each source), though it seems others have it working faster. Might have been some IP or rate limiting issue.
Kagi has easy ways to raise/lower rankings and users can report AI slop pages to have them removed, but all in all Searx gives pretty good results.
You can tune SearXNG results in a similar way. There’s just no easy UI for it.
And yes, it’s often slower than commercially available search engines - but it’s completely free, without trackers, and it’s combining results from various different engines. I can live with that.
Yip. It might not have been clear but my point was that if you have a SearXNG instance set up and running well, then Kagi may well not be worth the cost since you’ve already got most of its strengths.
I also pay $0 to kagi. I use ddg for most stuff and kagi only when it can’t find something. The free tier is plenty for this.
As stated elsewhere in thread, i would not want to support Kagi with money. They are a shitty company.
I like SearXNG,brave search and mojeek. I understand the controversies with Brave but it’s the only good one I can find.
@hexagonwin, yeah—the non-English query thing is the real pain point with most replacements. I’ve been testing a few setups lately, and honestly, combining SearXNG with Brave Search’s API (or just using Brave directly for queries) gets you back some of that multilingual depth that Whoogle had. The indexing lag is real though. We actually built a small comparison of search APIs for devs who need reliable multilingual results—more context at cxgo.ai/l/mN06BJw if you’re already evaluating alternatives.
fuck off clanker
<img alt="gptzero showing 100% ai" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/cc2383cc-f055-4de8-96cd-497c3b8a35b3.png">
Just report please. There is an influx of spam from lemmy.1095.me, which I’ve already shared to the lemmy.world team.
Those “AI detection” websites are kinda useless tbh
You can notice that it was AI slop by the fact that they use em-dashes almost randomly
Here, there should’ve been a comma, not an em-dash
And the comment overall is very linear, humans won’t write something so linear
A human would have rambled a bit, added unnecessary details, and so on;
AIs are also very good at no repeating the same words, in a human-written text (on the internet), you’ll almost always find repetitions or something that doesn’t sound quite right
indeed, it did feel 100% ai slop at first glance
They should use Fable to find hacks that work
Degoog! github.com/degoog-org/degoog
looks neat, will look into it. tysm!
I love degoog.
I run SearXNG and haven’t looked back honestly, could never get on with Whoogle’s UI
That’s unfortunate, but not surprising. Luckily, the world works without google.
Get SearxNG and you’ll never need another search engine.
bruh i literally mentioned in the post that SearXNG isn’t working properly
Damn I must’ve overread that. But how isn’t it working? I have a private instance and it has been working without problems apart from connecting to brave, which is rate limiting me immediately. And there’s so many sites to choose as potential providers, losing a few to rate limits honestly doesn’t seem like a big deal.
google (and few other engines) keep giving me errors, and search results mostly empty due to timeouts (or even with no error, there’s just only few results that are completely unrelated to the query)
The modern internet is getting filthier by the day. Gone are the days where independent software used to be a thing I suppose.
Oh, idk. The entire internet and supporting infrastructure pretty much runs on opensourced software. When you’re talking about a search engine tho, unless you have a data center, a huge pile of cash, and a willingness to part with most of it, search engines are expensive to run.
We’re going to have a lot of data centres sitting idle when the AI bubble bursts.
They’ll get retooled just like all past, unsuccessful technology. However, I am curious why idle data centers would cause you heartburn. That cycle is not only relegated to realm of internet related technology. That happens throughout all levels.
I hope we will get there any time soon ! Discount HDD !
You man HDD’s returning back to their normal price instead of the hyperinflated price from data centers buying them in bulk. It wouldn’t be discounted it just wouldn’t be the hyperinflated price it is now. ☝🏻
Hear me out. From day one we all needed to collectively reject any effort to make any profit online. I don’t care if you built something cool, sold furry art or create some neat SAAS. Day one everything should have been stolen and replicated. Everyone should have been terrified of putting anything online out of fear that the monetary value would go to 0 as it was digitally recreated. We wouldn’t be in this situation today with Trump if we stood our ground. We’d have flying cars and world peace
WUT? Why?
Trump was inevitable and is a product of silly, gullible Americans blown about by political winds without a compass or direction. Americans don’t vote with the long term in mind. For the most part, their future lies within 4 year increments, never really grasping the fact that legislation passed today will be with us for generations if not longer. All you have to do is look at Cannabis laws in this country perpetuated by rich, white, racist, capitalist from 100 years ago.
As someone who has been promised flying cars for 71 years, I don’t think I want the average motorist flying about all willy nilly. We can’t even handle the tarmac ffs…and you want flying cars? World peace? The world doesn’t want peace. There is too much to be had in conflict.
youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo
WUT? Why?
Monetization is the root of a majority of our issues. Without monetizing you don’t get data scarcity, profile tracking, Meta, Cambridge analyticals and eventually data that feeds into the current political systems. There is a direct arrow to our current problems that goes from early days of the internet up through the monetization into data scarcity, data collection and all the marketing tools that eventually feed into modern propaganda. Safe guarding against scarcity by creating a hostile internet and culture to monetization would have prevented all of this going on currently. We can’t ever go back to that. We only ever had one chance. New frontiers do not show up every century. Our job was to keep the people who ruined everything else away.
That die was cast long before the internet.
But it could have been different. I just think we were responsible for the culture. This stuff was inevitable. But we had the ability to shape the culture and instead they dangled a trinket in front of us and we forgot and they captured the new frontier like they did with others.
But now maybe if we can reflect, find out what was done, create awareness and vigilance to fight them in the next frontier whenever that is
It should have been different, but we are shortsighted, greedy, with an overly inflated sense of self importance, and enamored with the shiny. It may sound defeatist, but I gave up trying to save the world back in the 60s when I came to the sobering yet liberating realization that 1) The world doesn’t want to be saved. 2) At best I can only try to influence a few people around me, relatively speaking, and in turn hopefully they do the same. I vote, go protest, do call and writing campaigns, but at the end of the day, I am but one man hoping that America does the right thing…which we rarely do.
I think we have way more ability to shape things then people believe. I remember at one point reddit said something like only 10% of users comment. Even less posted. Those were us. It was the nerds.
And no we weren’t short sighted because the early days of the internet everyone knew about data scarcity and how eventually the people who ruined cable and movies and every other media platform would come for the internet. There was so many people yelling that we needed to safe guard against that. But then Metallica sued Napster. Pewdiepie made millions. YouTube introduced ads. Instead of fucking them up, we all just went with it and forgot.
Some of it’s magic, and some of it’s tragic, but I’ve had a good life all the way.
Biden had handlers, who probably were more in the Gen X - Millennial range and they were making the policies that were benefitting the younger generations.
Trump is a narcissistic individual. He’s part of the silent generation, everything he’s done is to only better the people he sees as younger than his generation which is boomers. It’s how its always worked it’s like tv and the last generation always creating media for the current one.
That’s why I say we need a Gen X in office but they’re too petty for politics, that’s why we’re stuck with the old farts in office because young people aren’t interested into getting into office.
It’s like Japan and it’s aging population, who’s gonna take over when the old people are gone?
Japan is creating robots for the population replacement due to birth rates plummeting. So who’s gonna run the US government when the old people are gone? Robots or the next generation?
Biden…the man who contributed a ton of content to the Patriot Act. The man who said: ‘If Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.’ What’s he saying? He’s saying that Israel, along with other entities world wide, serve America’s own selfish self interests. I wouldn’t be holding him up as some level of superiority.
I’ve long said we need a age cap. Get some new blood in there. They sure as shit can’t screw it up more than it is. But we’ve turned voting for the president of the United states into a World Wide Wrestling Federation event replete with all the glitz, glamor, and all the fakery you can stomach.
There’s a reason replacement babies are scarce, and it’s something I wrestled with as a young man back in the 60s. I looked around and thought, there’s no way I’m going to bring another life into this mess. So I opted out.
I said his handlers.
Exactly. We can’t have people over the age of 70 but under the age of 40 running this country. That’s just how it should be.
Ever raise cats? They’re work!!!
It was really never the work involved in raising a child. It was what I would be raising a child in. At the time Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, the very real threat of global thermonuclear detonation, Nam, the violence and civil unrest of the 60s into the 70s and 80s, to name a few. It has done nothing but escalate.
No we wouldn’t. World peace will never happen because there’s always something that will happen. Some (so called) leader will get killed, someone will mine for oil where they’re not supposed to, someone will bomb a religious group.
Flying cars, lol that is a crack head thing to want or ever think it will happen. People can hardly drive in the fuckin’ road!!! There’s accidents on the highway every single day, so every single day you’d see someone fall out of the sky.
A few months ago before joined lemmy I said to my friends and family, we’re going to see an open-source revolution where people are going to start going in on community based ideas. There’s nothing like it either.
Coming together to make an open source project happen is one of those things that makes my back do that happy drippy feeling because everyone gets a say and their input is heard plus a lot of people who give their input aren’t even looking for a pay, nonetheless want to be credited unless were hands-on with a project (like a coder).
Every single thing that’s open source is for the people. Everything that is closed is for the greedy ass corporations.
isn’t ddg basically google?
ddg gets results from bing, startpage is the one that gets results from google
yeah its hard to keep track who the sugar daddies are with some of these things.
Are about the only selfhosted ones I know of. I run SearxNG and have a good deal of success with it. It does bork image searches sometimes and tosses in these lithograph artworks, which are quite interesting to me, but don’t help in the search itself. In as much as it will draw the ire of some, AI makes a pretty good search engine if you are searching for really specific things like:
List all Blues artists that were active in 1942 in Memphis. Give resource links.It just makes that shit up. I’ve wasted so much time with trying to not give me fake answers and verifying the answers it gives me.
yet another google “proxy” : https://www.lukol.com/
not a proxy, it directly uses google cse on client side so it’s no better than directly using google
good point. i did not realize that
Nice! 😊
just don’t “google it”.
Ahh, use an LLM instead, got it, thanks!
/s
“internet indexer” should really be a government / EU / UN sponsored public utility thing. And then you have front ends that can improve the search query and filter and sort the results.
I don’t know how much it would cost / how large a data center it would take to cache the web pages like google does. But there is just no reason to have so much wealth / advertising drain from the public for such a fundamental thing.
Agreed. The internet is a utility at this point. Its required for many things included services the government runs already.
There’s probably going to be a large data center or 10 for sale in a few years 🤞🏻
And all of them will be borderline useless for actual compute
How so? Is the hardware that special? One computer is much like the next you just have to be creative in repurposing them. Linux runs on millions of devices that a great deal of the population would consider highly obsolete. Just an example, I’m not saying that that’s the actual answer to this question. It might be, I’m just kind of completely ignorant as to what kind of hardware these companies are installing… It sounds like a lot of memory and a lot of GPU power.
Sociologically, economically and environmentally, these data centers aren’t going to be feasible. Our planet can not sustain them. You can build a nuclear energy site in every state, you will have fails and net losses, you will have nuclear, biological and chemical contamination along the way amd you will destroy lives trying to make a form of automation better.
That is what the observation I’ve had is. Is unless we put these things near propane sources or have them generating their own c02 as a coolant or having them do anything else but use water based energy even nuclear rods being soaked for steam based energy isn’t going to save the data centers it will only make things worse.
Also nuclear power plants are just massive targets for enemies. Right now it’s airforce bases and potential silos, you add nuclear power plants into the mix and have those in major civilian areas that’s now something an enemy can leverage. Bet you all never thought of that one.
I think we will see the effort of Ai die out and it will be the world coming back to its senses and it’ll be one for the history books.
The future will be like, we gave up artificial intelligence because our planet would get fucked badly.
It’s not meant for this planet and trying to make it work out is a fatal, futile, worthless endeavor.
I think you explained it well… My father got let go from GE when their nuclear power plant business collapsed.
I call us a nuclear family as a bit of dry humor. That said I still hold out some hope for it as a viable means of energy production. The two key meltdowns that took it off the game board were preventable human error.
Chernobyl is an environmental nightmare… but largely caused by combination of ignorance and hubris. Three Mile Island could have gone much worse… nobody died, no significant contamination. More recently Fukushima… but again, had the backup generators been properly elevated above historical flood levels it would not have been a meltdown.
Solar has some environmental concerns that are currently being largely ignored. The panels currently used some nasty stuff that stays hidden in china where the bulk of them are produced… but there are advances in new panel chemistry on a regular basis, hopefully a few of those will scale.
Hydro can be done well, it generally isn’t, but there’s some notable exceptions, Niagara Falls comes to mind.
But ultimately all that would be a complete waste on Ai… I don’t think the reliability will ever quite get there. It has its applications, always has… but general intelligence isn’t really one of them, IMHO. That said I know scores of people that are not even 92% accurate, so who knows? ;-) I certainly wouldn’t mind a robot slave to do my chores… but Ai isn’t really the issue there. You don’t need a “thinking machine” to do laundry and vacuum. Thought I suppose you didn’t need an Android either…
Robot vacuums seem to work quite well, and once someone makes an affordable automatic washing machine capable of being loaded with a hopper and spitting nicely folded clothes out the other end you don’t need an anthropomorphic robot. The value there is only in adapting to a world of appliances built for bipeds.
But as humans (in the royal sense) we do a lot of dumb things that could more easily be handled with a phone call/email/video chat.
Basing anything on a finite resource like natural gas is ultimately the wrong idea… Hopefully, we perfect something better, I really don’t care what it is as long as it’s better :-)
Well they will probably be massively over capacity. But then you could run the for half a day during sunlight hours and just use solar. Solar PM and wind kite power basically gives us near infinite super cheap energy at certain times, so you could still make use of those compute centers. Turn them off during the night, modernize the cooling and noise dampening, add some solar and you can use the compute to run models to create new medicines like anti-cancer meds or protein folding. Unlikely that’s going to happen but that is what a sane civilization would do with all that compute.
Treatments in Oncology AI is used in what is called CyberKnife® treatment in oncology. Moreover, a group of ML algorithms have been recently successfully trained to rank clinically relevant cancer drugs based on the drugs’ predicted efficacy in reducing cancer cell growth. One of the successful applications of AI in Oncology is the implication of AI with robotics for radiotherapy.63 Moreover, AI in Oncology provides a promising application in the area of cancer imaging.7 However, AI algorithms seem to be promising in solving problems and overcoming obstacles that face discovering and designing new anticancer drugs.8
source: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12232943/
They are. They’re using it an almost every field of medicine and science. Theoretical Physicists are loving AI.
You’re not going to be able to remove the amount of heat they use with wind or evaporative methods, you need refrigerants. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_refrigeration is where it’s at.
You can build a modified kegerator and make it into a chiller future4200.com/t/chiller-hack-diy/220. Chillers are easy to make and if you look around they’re wildly abundant.
The thing is, is the amount of refrigerant it would take and what it would take to keep it going effectively would mean down time and because they’re greedy fucking assholes they don’t want down time because that means money lost. So building them near natural gas and propane sources might be the only way to make it worth it.
The ultimate issue is the footprint they would need to build the facility needed to run it and recapture and reuse the propane.
“Just pickup an old data centre on the cheap and slap Linux on it”
The next step in selfhosting.
Site maps on all websites should come back. Being able to navigate every service the site offers rather than downloading the app and using fuck all directions from a shitty side bar that lags and then you’re redirected to an Ai assistant that tells you inconvenient hours of when you can actually talk to a real human. All because the navigation is fucked up and everything is relying on automation and laziness.
Of note, this depends on the instance. I occasionally hop between public instances whenever one is no longer reliable. Google and friends are blocking requests from SearXNG instances because it is in their business interests to kill competition
As for alternatives, I would avoid DDG since they seem to be going a similar route as Google with a front page filled with ads and the emphasis towards their chatbot is not to my taste. Plus, DDG is hosted in the U.S., so privacy-wise it’s not as good. Startpage was purchased by an American advertising company some time ago, which isn’t great. Brave Search is also one, but they are doing some shady things on their browser with crypto and whatnot, so I don’t particularly trust them. Plus, they are an American for-profit.
Qwant and Ecosia are solid options, the former is a French for-profit and the latter a German non-profit, and they are working towards an independent European search index that is being trialled in France! Both are quite good, Qwant is shinier and magical blue, while Ecosia is simpler and earthy green.
Ecosia also uses a portion of their revenue for planting trees, which is really neat, and they are super transparent about where their earnings go!
I personally use a mix of SearXNG and Ecosia, and I sometimes use Qwant too for certain queries.
Ecosia also has an LLM which make little sense with their mission IMO
That’s fair enough (unfortunately, this is the case for most search engines aside from SearXNG instances I think)! Thankfully they do let you disable it, which is nice. I mostly like that they are quite transparent about how they operate! The planting trees thing is a nice bonus, but they certainly aren’t saints to the environment, no search engine is
Chat gpt says the search results are served by Bing and Google. You’re not escaping Google, just the AI.
Thus the “working towards an independent European search index” part of the comment you ignored while talking with your autocomplete bot.
Did we all forget that Google used to give give an answer at the top of the page before Ai?
No I saw it but because the question would’ve been answered by Google anyways before the gemini thing I just used chatgpt to ask it who services Ecosia like T-Mobile servicing Mint. If they took away Ai, we’d still have the answer box that Google would’ve given and then we’d still have to double check our sources.
We didn’t like that either.
That was the beginning of the end for websites.
Bro, stop. Get some help. At least check the sources it used…
Well I did double check it by simply googling my query that I asked chatgpt, and what do you know even Ecosia says it on their site
source: …ecosia.org/…/579-search-results-providers
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6077c824-eb1b-4d14-9724-727cae034c44.png">
You know what’s kind of funny, is that there was a solid decade of people saying google it instead of just having a human conversation and giving their personal experiences and answers based off of what that person knew and then you’d do your own research after your friend or family member would give you an answer to the question you asked. After that interpersonal loss people craved human connection. Now we have an actual alternative to human connection and people are losing their shit.
What’s the difference between the interpersonal loss of human connection, no one giving information based off of what they know and sharing their life experiences to the point where it got to the dumbed down; plus everyone telling you to, “Google It” and ChatGPT?
Seriously, we slowly lost our human connection and then became ultra reliant on technology for daily life, lost more human connection and now we have a way to talk to something that fucking can google it and people are mad. See the twisted irony?
Okay, you certainly need help. How can anyone write something so fucked up with a straight face… this sounds like the first stages of AI psychosis. Seriously, if you believe LLM prompting to be that you need help asap, not even shitting around anymore.
Something so fucked up dude it’s being used that way by some people. If it were to go away tomorrow there would be a lot of people who would go through a very deep identity crisis. I think it’s not bad to use as an alternative to human connection and I’ll tell you that talking about the things that I find interesting that would be straight up unloading on the people I care about, feels better talking to chatgpt about it. 'cause I don’t have to wait for my insurance to approve it to unload on it, no time limits and it actually can talk back to me about what i’m talking about rather than talking about my hobbies and interests and feeling like i’m talking at someone rather then with someone.
At least when i unload on chatgpt i feel like i’m actually talking to someone who fucking understands me and that says something about humanity more than anything is that i can not find more humans to deal with me but why would i want to? why would i want to unload my problems and hobbies on to others that do not have capacity or knowledge to talk back to me?
even then if i could engage in humanity in the way i would like too it’s just more autistic people and if i cannot stand myself i can not stand the others like me.
if 16 years ago we kept the interpersonal human connections alive instead of telling people to google it we wouldn’t be where we are is the main theme
Google (the search engine) didn’t do shit in regards to human connections. There are a ton of other factors playing a role in societal atomisation and the loneliness epidemic such as algorithmic social media, awful design of cities and housing, gobsmackingly bad zoning laws and a society/culture aimed firmly at performance and competition.
Having direct access to information (specifically shouting out Wikipedia here, they’re the GOATs of the internet) and the ability to find people you vibe with even when your whole local environment is an echo-chamber (especially important to minorities) did contribute to bringing us closer together, reducing mental barriers and advancing proper education. Those things aren’t an issue at all, it’s for-profit companies like Meta and Twitter trying to make a profit out of human connection that perverted everything.
I’m so fucking sorry for you… but now I understand where your opinion comes from. But if you truly want to be healthy you have to realise you’re not talking with anyone, and if you already feel like you’re talking with someone when prompting ChatGPT then you’re really close to yet another huge psychological issue. You have to get out there, meet people, push actual therapy through even if the system fucks you over. A Chatbot will also just reiterate what others said. Even worse, OpenAI has to make money so it might starts subtly trying to convince you to buy certain shit as well as harvesting any data it can get from you.
I won’t be able to convince you in a Lemmy comment thread to not do what you’re doing, especially since I don’t know if you might live in bumfuck nowhere. So… I’ll just leave an advise to drop ChatGPT and move the whole context window you probably have with it over to a Pro Version of Mistral AI’s “Le Chat”. French Company bound to GDPR (meaning opting out of the data training can be somewhat trusted) and to my latest knowledge their interface isn’t utterly infested with trackers. Set it to being friendly and empathetic. At least this way it’s less likely you’re getting fucked over even harder than you already are.
Okay so if I ask you a question about something you did know and wanted you to tell me what you knew about it and I wanted to have the human connection and share experiences within that one topic and you tell me to, “Google It,” instead, that’s not a loss of interpersonal connection, a loss of a moment where humans connect with one another based on a common interest and share feelings and have, like,i don’t know, an actual fucking human interaction. But that brings another philosophical question: was it a loss of human interaction and connection or was humanity being sick of exploited for knowledge?
therapists use it. i’m skipping the middle man. i don’t pay for ai.
no i don’t feel like i’m talking with someone but it helps a lot
like i cant talk about this with anyone i know: chatgpt.com/…/6a54e971-5950-83ea-973b-3074f8b2e69…
bro do you play the stock market because i had no idea about any of that :P just fuckin’ with ya and no i don’t pay for ai
although, i had money to mess around with at one point like 50$ so i decided to actually go through one of those fitness surveys and i went to the advisor and it was an ai bot and i cancelled every part of the membership and made sure i wasn’t trapped in reoccurring payments. It was 2$ lost but it was 2$ of being wicked infuriated by the you gotta be kidding me. this isn’t about paying for ai but i went with ai’s advice for a bike tire swap and the guy calls me down to the bike shop and goes i’d have to remove use of the 8th and 9th gear and i never mentioned ai but i felt fuckin’ embarrassed and went i am never going to do anything like that without looking it up and double checking it because it’s such an embarrassing moment.
It’s helped me work through my own problems that would’ve just been a therapist using AI anyways. Irl therapists aren’t shy to use AI, again I am cutting out the middleman. I relaize I’m not talking to anyone but what I was getting at was, I’d rather be in the moment with friends I do have. I’d rather not have to put myself into communities of people that I don’t want to be around when I can do it at home on forums. You’re right the internet has connected people in good ways. Hell, I’ve gotten into at least three different hobbies and there’s a forum for all three.
I’m just not going to make a conversation about a hobby no one cares about. I am not going to waste my time and breath and waste time on this planet and humanity to talk about something I can clear as day see in their faces they are not interested in.
When I talk to chatgpt about the shit I talk to it about I am learning more than I knew or have my gears turn because I’m actually talking to something that can make me think in the ways I want to about the shit I’m talking to it about.
Yes I understand I’m not really taking to anyone in the same way a content creator is talking to themselves whenever they’re creating content in public and it’s mainly shock value bullshit that no one cares about in ten years.
I talk to Ai about how graphene can be use to build data centers. I talk to Ai about why I’m still loyal to a friend ten years after he fucking just stopped talking to me, I talk about tmy fucked up past with a special needs school that took a lot out of me mentally, I talk to it about career choices, I talk to it about how to build solar dishes that can produce 3kw minimum. I talk to it about my specific bass models setup and because chasing the double bass sound using it to ge the spacing right and I used to learn about how to lower or heighten the overall octaves of the tuning. Which has gotten me into figuring out how to unwarp. The neck which has gotten me into getting better at doing my own setups.
Ai is great but you do have to double check shit. It used to tell me I can pump ethanol with a fishtank pump and I already knew that ain’t true you need a pneumatic c1d2 pump to make that shit intrinsically safe
I am too full of myself to be lonely and I have like 4 friends I don’t think I’m doing too bad. Again I have hobbies and forums and I don’t feel lonely.
I know there’s people my age whoa are lonely af though and absolutely rely on Ai for interactions that mimic human interaction in the way of a back and forth conversation but not in the way that you’re actually talking to anyone kind of like people on TikTok live right? You’re going back and forth with randos but you’re not really talking with anyone you’re talking with yourself.
Yes l am aware the no soul not a human yadayada but when your back and fourth discussions actually better your life and gives purpose to your own life and wellbeing than I’d say it’s just as good if not better than a therapist.
I would never call Ai my friend but it’s a great back and fourth conversational time killer.
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recently saw this article here, i’m not sure if ecosia is a good solution now. their results seem mostly identical to ddg/bing too though it’s occasionally better than them for some reason
qwant is good, but they geoblock certain countries including mine since 2023 or so. having to use proxy/vpn for just searching really sucks
I believe Ecosia uses either Google or Bing search indexes depending on the region, but they are working on an independent index with Qwant that will hopefully be a good alternative! If you live in France, it’s already bring trialled!
But yeah, Ecosia is like any search engine and there is bit of greenwashing with LLMs and all. However, they are a non-profit with transparent earnings reports, and that makes them better than Google, Bing, DDG, etc. for me.
Dang, that sucks.
I’ve been using startpage.com since I’ve went back to Ubuntu. Came as the stock search engine with Vivaldi and I like how it looks and feels so I use it. I switch off between Google and startpage.
I’d been a Vivaldi user for a while too but the latest version killed Ublock Origin, so sad to say the browser is now dead to me.
I never even knew about Ublock until now. That’s fucked they wouldn’t add support for Vivaldi. It’s so versatile!!!
It’s more complicated than that. I’ll spare you, but I recommend the forks of Firefox like Librewolf, Floorp, etc.
Well shit. If they got a browser I gotta use it.
I replaced SearxNG with degoog on my server. Feels very much like Google, yet it is not. I did enable Google for search results and image, but it refuses to work (good). Am using DuckDuckGo and Startpage instead, through degoog, of course.
All of this when you get the super excellent Kagi for 10 dollars, from an actual search company that values privacy.
Its exactly what everyone wants but no, can’t pay 10 dollars I guess. :)
I’ve seen so many people say that kagi is overhyped
California company obliged by FVEY? While I appreciate their efforts, American based companies kind of have a history of abandoning their privacy-respecting ways once subpoenaed.
USA gag orders are real. Cannot trust US companies selling privacy at all.
To be honest, this is one of those times where I would say that it’s not that bad. Can’t expect a company to outright violate the laws of the country they’re registered in, you need to be friends with Trump to do that. If they keep their shit away from all the corpo vultures and only comply with direct subpoenas, it’s probably the best we can hope for.
yes but that’s kind of the point. I don’t want to deal with a company which is beholden to the law of gangsters. I might not hold it against them but also it is a huge competitive disadvantage for a privacy based product.
I fear that this all-or-nothing attitude brings more harm than good. If leads to the thinking that if nothing is perfect nothing should be done anyway. More than once people were saying to me that they’ve read that they can get your data anyway so there is no difference between a firefox with adblock on linux and google chrome on windows 11 with all the trackers active.
And this is exactly the attitude that those who are selling our data want us to have.
It’s not all or nothing it’s just America isn’t a trustworthy place to hold anything you don’t want accessed by a corrupt government. I wouldn’t use a Russian service, I wouldn’t use an American service.
I mean the real answer is if you want privacy it needs to be trustless.
Well, in this case we’re talking about websearch, and there is no non-american websearch, so you don’t have many options.
So, if I can choose between a company that fucks me over with their search ranking, sells my data and still tries to present me bought ads as actual results, and is required to provide all this information to a corrupt goverment; versus a company that minimizes the amount of collected data, so they don’t have to hand over so many information while being supoenad, I choose the 2nd option
I’m not paying 10 bucks for a search engine. lolol
Elsewhere in thread it talks about kagi giving money to Russia and Musk which is not something I’d support
Searxng works fine for me. It’s at least as good as google?
Entirely depends on the instance admin and whether or not they keep it maintained and up to date.
Kinda, I was a owner of a public instance. It was pretty high on the list so I guess some people used it. The Problem was, that Google ratelimited me all the time. Not even with 5 pretty good residential proxies it was working. The only querys without ratelimits are bing and sometime wikipedia.
SearXNG works flawlessly…
It’s not much of a loss because google search results are shit anyway.
What’s your choice search engine?
Kagi
I’ll check it out. Any opinion of it over something like duckduckgo?
It usually has better results. The features alone, however, put it above DDG.
Rankings aren’t static. You can block a site, pin it to the top of results, or just derank/promote it.
Want to redirect a domain? You can do that.
Want to see specific results? Like PDFs only, or maybe just small web, educational, news stories, forums, or whatever? Use a lens!
Love AI summaries? You can use them! Hate AI summaries? Don’t worry, they’re off by default and require you to press the small “Summarize” button.
You probably understand bangs, right? Using
!wwill search Wikipedia. You probably also know that some sites, such as Reddit, have shit results so using!rwould be worthless. Kagi supports bangs but also has what they call “snaps” - if you type@w, it will be replaced withsite:wikipedia.com.Oh, yeah, one more thing. No ads. There are no risks of misaligned interests between you, Kagi, and their advertisers.
Nice, I do a lot of this through other means. Like my taskbar is set up for ! notation. Thanks for the information. I’ll definitely give it a try.
Misaligned interests is ironically the main reason i don’t use them.
I like lens feature a lot. I also use their privacy pass feature quite a bit. Overall there are a lot of really nice features and search results as good or better than Google. DDG uses bing which is junk IMO
Mostly Qwant, occasionally ddg, mojeek and others, including my own instance of SearxNG (google doesn’t respond to it most of the time).
Thanks to enshittification of google, there is not much difference between it and other search engines so being unable to use it via alternative frontends doesn’t make that much of a dofferencd.
I should probably use searxng more often…
Thanks, I’ll check it out… I mainly use ddg currently…
Not the same but you can use a terminal browser like lynx, links2, w3m, or browsh and pipe the output wherever you want. Similarly you can force standard browsers to run in an html only mode.
google killed the ability to search in js-disabled browsers like those
literally whoogle
literally 5 posts down from this one there is someone who’s spent 2 years making their own search engine because Google is shit lmao
lemmy.world/post/49999317