Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
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@mcc I will say it isn't as good as Google, but I've been using startpage as my search engine, because it doesn't bother me to do AI stuff and as far as I can tell it doesn't have any AI stuff (yet)- I was on another small search engine (Qwant) for a while until it started adding AI features.
Weirdly enough the best results I get are from lycos, but it only actually will do a search about half the time...
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@luxliquida @mcc Dammit, that took less time then I expected.
I guess I'll go back to using Google with the no AI parameter added when it finally gives up the ghost or starts pushing AI at me. at least until that stops working.
Edit: I was literally responding to this while my work computer installed updates and restarted, and when it booted back up, it installed a waterfox update with this in the changelog for that update
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@luxliquida @mcc Dammit, that took less time then I expected.
I guess I'll go back to using Google with the no AI parameter added when it finally gives up the ghost or starts pushing AI at me. at least until that stops working.
Edit: I was literally responding to this while my work computer installed updates and restarted, and when it booted back up, it installed a waterfox update with this in the changelog for that update
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@luxliquida @Canageek i went onto their feedback forum and asked for this and wound up in a heated personal argument with the CEO, who although i was coming in as a paying customer was invested in saying i should not want the thing i want. it was a deeply weird and unpleasant experience.
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc Absolutely nobody should be pointing users at Kagi. It's not secure or private, it's sources are suspect, the technical lead harasses critics and it appears to be operating illegally in the EU.
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I really do believe people have a moral obligation to not expose themselves to GenAI outputs. We built a machine for making sentencelike blobs that look convincing but are peppered with lies. That is brain poison! Why assume you can soak your brain in poison without consequences?
Like, if you're here, you left Twitter/"X", right? Would you tolerate it if the whole time you were talking to your friends, fascist propaganda were being inserted in the margins? So why tolerate the Gemini banner?
@mcc I am actively avoiding it as much as I am able.
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@luxliquida @Canageek i went onto their feedback forum and asked for this and wound up in a heated personal argument with the CEO, who although i was coming in as a paying customer was invested in saying i should not want the thing i want. it was a deeply weird and unpleasant experience.
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(From a followers-only subthread. Response to an example of a way Google got worse since I ditched it a year ago.)
These days I am primarily using https://www.ecosia.org/ for searches. Occasionally I still use Google when Ecosia doesn’t give me the right results.
The main problem I have with search engines these days is results getting polluted with pages that don’t match my search terms. When most of the results don’t contain the terms I searched for it gets really hard to find the page I am actually looking for.
If I quote the search terms Google will usually respect it. But even Google is getting worse in that area. Allegedly Google realized that by making it harder to find what you are looking for they get to show more ads.
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These days I am primarily using https://www.ecosia.org/ for searches. Occasionally I still use Google when Ecosia doesn’t give me the right results.
The main problem I have with search engines these days is results getting polluted with pages that don’t match my search terms. When most of the results don’t contain the terms I searched for it gets really hard to find the page I am actually looking for.
If I quote the search terms Google will usually respect it. But even Google is getting worse in that area. Allegedly Google realized that by making it harder to find what you are looking for they get to show more ads.
@kasperd i also have to do the quoting-single-words thing on kagi, yeah
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc I fear that Google and Microsoft will eventually cut access to their indexes in order to force people into their "AI", and IIRC both Kagi and DDG are not doing their own indexing. (Again, IIRC; Kagi usess Google's index and DDG uses Microsoft's.)
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc You know that thing where you think there is a good reason you should switch away from thing A, but the option is thing B and it is just worse in practice, and you want to switch but it just isn't as good, so you put it off and put it off, and then A keeps getting worse and worse and meanwhile B stays they same and doesn't get any better, and at some point you B is no longer worse even though it hasn't changed at all.
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
I've just switched my default search engines to DuckDuckGo - very easy to find and turn off the AI options.
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(From a followers-only subthread. Response to an example of a way Google got worse since I ditched it a year ago.)
@mcc I just want somewhere that isn't pushing AI onto me, and Kagi/Ecosia/DDG all do that. Sure I can adapt, but I'm uneasy because I don't want the technique to pour our the pre mixed piss from my tea, I just don't want to come back to that tea house ever again.
And deGoogle is something I'm trying and not doing well yet. Mostly the phones I don't have a viable alternative. And using Microsoft at home because of work kills me.
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc literally just echoing your own sentiment back at you but boy do I wish I could ever run towards a new technology rather than away from an old one
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Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
@mcc I wish I could, but I can't afford subscription-based search engines, and none of the free ones have the features Google still has (robust date search and finding images with transparent backgrounds).
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@mcc literally just echoing your own sentiment back at you but boy do I wish I could ever run towards a new technology rather than away from an old one
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My steps to configure Kagi as a genAI-free search engine:
In settings
- Disable General->"Keyboard Shortcuts"
- Click Appearance->"Custom CSS" and paste in the text from https://codeberg.org/zerodogg/kagi-no-ai/src/branch/main/kagi-no-ai.css
- Disable Search->AI->"Auto Quick Answer"What's nice about this is it's bound to your account, so it "works everywhere". You don't have to use a particular browser, you don't have to set up plugins on all your machines.
I've been using Kagi this way for about a year—results seem just as good as Google
Does this get rid of the AI interpretation of your search query and force a search on your actual search terms?
Because No AI duck duck go is garbage in this way. It avoids posting stupid AI summaries, but it still reinterprets whatever you type into the search box, and runs a search based on what it thinks you are looking for, rather than what you actually asked for
I use it more often than anything else, but that doesn't mean it isn't complete crap. Everything else is just even worse right now
Lycos is the only search engine I know that actually searches on what you type in. But it's clearly deprioritized by its owning company, and is down about 50% of the time
The whole search industry is now back to where it was at before Teoma -- and then Google which stole its logo and concept
Everything on the market is garbage, and whoever can produce something that actually works will win all the customers
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Does this get rid of the AI interpretation of your search query and force a search on your actual search terms?
Because No AI duck duck go is garbage in this way. It avoids posting stupid AI summaries, but it still reinterprets whatever you type into the search box, and runs a search based on what it thinks you are looking for, rather than what you actually asked for
I use it more often than anything else, but that doesn't mean it isn't complete crap. Everything else is just even worse right now
Lycos is the only search engine I know that actually searches on what you type in. But it's clearly deprioritized by its owning company, and is down about 50% of the time
The whole search industry is now back to where it was at before Teoma -- and then Google which stole its logo and concept
Everything on the market is garbage, and whoever can produce something that actually works will win all the customers
@NilaJones when i want kagi to find exact matches and not synonyms i put quotation marks around the words, such as turning
rust curses library
into
"rust" "curses" "library"
I would have preferred functionality like old google where if it decides to deliver an approximate search it tells you and asks if you want to search exactly. But I'm told google doesn't work like that anymore anyway.
