Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
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@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.)
@BoydStephenSmithJr @mcc Mojeek indexes independently. Haven't tried it though.
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@jdp23 @mcc @ireneista IIRC this is in line with findings on misinformation in general, that you don't generally remember where you learned a thing, and it is easier to accept than reject claims, so just being exposed to misinformation makes one more inclined to inadvertently internalize it
edit:
- this Vox article summarizes and links to several studies
- more explanations (and examples) in this article at The Conversation
- this Conversation article notes that "the fine details needed to debunk a myth are generally more complicated than the myth itself" and therefore harder to remember
- see e. g. this 2009 paper arguing, basically, that easier-to-remember things are perceived as truer; this 2019 study on inducing false memories about Ireland's 2018 abortion referendum; or this 2024 study on repetition and climate-skeptic claims
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@ireneista @jdp23 @mcc caveat that i am not very knowledgeable about psychology and did not do a proper Review of the Literature, this is just the kind of stuff i've seen reported on in media
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@BoydStephenSmithJr @mcc Mojeek indexes independently. Haven't tried it though.
@RuchiraSDatta @BoydStephenSmithJr tried mojeek, it was the best of the "small" search engines I audited. Not quite on par with Google/kagi though and there was a box advertising its "AI" on every page
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@ireneista @jdp23 @mcc caveat that i am not very knowledgeable about psychology and did not do a proper Review of the Literature, this is just the kind of stuff i've seen reported on in media
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@NilaJones it says here you can set it as the default https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/search.html
Thank you very much for all of this, this makes me willing to give it another try
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@RuchiraSDatta @BoydStephenSmithJr tried mojeek, it was the best of the "small" search engines I audited. Not quite on par with Google/kagi though and there was a box advertising its "AI" on every page
@mcc @BoydStephenSmithJr Thank you
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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 A decentrilsed search engine. No AI, no tracking. No advertising. No javascript of any kind. Never pay for it. Anyone can setup their own "branch" and contribute. Why does this sound so much like the #Fediverse? I could use some help with the system I've building for over a year and with corporations selling us out, we can band together to take the internet back.
This is what the internet was BEFORE the corprite take over.
This is #TidySearch https://search.mpaq.org -
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 Seirdy has a good list of independent search engines. I don't know whether Kagi is fully independent at the moment or just wraps Google and Bing results like DDG. https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
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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 So, I did something recently that I've been exceptionally happy with... I set up a local, self-hosted instance of SearXNG. This lets me:
- Choose the engine that I want
- Aggregates answers from the search engines that I've chosen
- Avoids the AI BS
- Keeps me from being actively tracked by Google/Meta/etc.
- Avoids the issue that public SearXNG instances have with using too many API calls.
- Provides a boat load of additional options that I won't even start to talk about
And, it wasn't difficult to set up. All I had to do was map a port to my local system, and I have everything working. It's amazing.
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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/
Kagi is a paid service though, isn't it?
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Kagi is a paid service though, isn't it?
@RVLara23 Yes
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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 There are also other search engines that are popping up that are not AI-focused:
swisscows.com
mojeek.com
startpage.comWorth checking those out if you're looking for google alternatives.
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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 know lots of people here who also use twitter...
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@mcc i know lots of people here who also use twitter...
@whitequark @mcc and, I, for one, judge the shit out of them
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@f4grx What do you think of Startpage?
@mcc My turn, what do you think of Waterfox private search?
this one is not free.
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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 The both of those are AI companies
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@whitequark @mcc and, I, for one, judge the shit out of them
@ryanc @whitequark The non-English-speaking communities stayed on X to a much larger extent for various reasons.
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Totally agree. Everybody thinks they personally are immune (just as so many people on Xitter or watching Fox News think they're immune to the cognitive impact of continually floating in the sea propaganda and disinfo) ... but I was really struck by the comment from a researcher in the study about AI autocorrect suggestions swaying people's attitudes:
"In every experiment, the researchers found that participants’ views shifted in the direction of the AI bias. The biggest surprise, Naaman said, was that mitigation measures did not work.
“We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,” Naaman said. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”"
@jdp23 @mcc @ireneista As a translator, I've found the same thing. The effort required to turn AI output into your own voice is greater than the effort of just using your own voice in the first place. You either pass off AI as your own work, which is disingenuous and risky, or you actually do the work.
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@mcc The both of those are AI companies
@ariarhythmic My immediate goal is to put myself and others in a situation where they aren't exposed to genAI. Obviously not patronizing companies with genAI in their lineup at all would be better, but the only zero genAI developers I know of with search engines are marginalia and searxng. Those are cool projects, but I don't think they're in complete enough states that if someone recommends them as Google alternatives people will stop using Google. Even mojeek and startpage have genAI products.
