Is there any good, free search engine left?
Is there any good, free search engine left?
Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing now all return the same shitty LLM-generated nonsense sites to most of my searches, and don't respect my literal search terms even when I put them in quotes.
I'm not ready to pay for search, yet.
Is there any alternative?
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What are you talking about? I just tried two test queries on DDG, and neither one had LLM-generated nonsense, and the one that was in double-quotes returned only five results, all of which had the double-quoted phrase and one of which was the thing I was challenging it to find.
Can you give an example of a query where DDG returns LLM results or doesn't respect your double-quotes?
I think they are referring to the search engines returning LLM content farm websites.
Maybe I’m a little out of the loop, what are llm content farm websites?
Low effort websites made easier by LLM generated text. It’s not new, just made easier with the ubiquity of LLM tools. Think of it as the latest generation of spam websites 🙃
Ah I see. Junk ‘news’ and other regurgitated blah. Yeah, I’d guess any free search engine will probably be bloated with that. Not to mention that it’s google, bing, and orange bing. Not a ton of crawlers out there indexing everything is there?
The only other (not absolutely tiny) one I'm aware of is brave, but it has its own issues
Ironically one of DDG's early selling points, before they fully jumped on the privacy bandwagon, was that they would filter out results for low-effort content farms (this was pre-LLM stuff).
I had used DDG since almost the beginning and it was one of the things I was originally sold on. It's difficult to find a source for it now but I did find this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110608072253/https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=377&bpid=25532
Forbes for example
Think recipe websites that take forever to get to the recipe but it's for other topics. Like a simple question, "what is the release date for X new game?" And then there will be like 5+ paragraphs of jibber jabber about the game and then finally the last article will say when it releases.
This sort of site has been around for a while but supposedly they're more common nowadays. Personally I think people just have a better eye for things not written entirely by humans. Either way it's annoying to deal with them.
Ugh I feel like I have been seeing more of that. Asked how many ml in a wine pour and got like 5 sites that wouldn’t just come out and say it. All kinds of gobbledegook dancing around the topic but no one would just freaking say it. 140ml in case you needed it
Sites that mass-generate garbage using llms
They're clearly not.