Polite reminder that it is possible to change the search engines your browser uses. I recommend Mozilla Firefox with No AI DuckDuckGo. I want to write down tips, because this was not so easy for me the first time I did it…
So anyone can do this by following these steps;
- Click the three vertical stripes and go to “Settings”
- Click “Search”
- Scroll until you see “Additional search engines”
- Click the “+ Add search engine”
- Write down a name and add this link (without 25) in the URL bar =
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s - Add the engine
- Go back up to “Default search engine” and change it to the one you just created
- Enjoy slightly better internet (optional)
// FUQ I can’t edit this right no matter what I do, but remove the 25 from the link manually!
And there’s
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ac/?q=%25s&type=listfor the suggestions URL.Edit: same deal with the %25 lol
Yeah I have seen the 25 thingie before too when reading comments recommending these :D
AI often gives unnecessarily verbose definitions of words. if it can’t handle that small task, then what else is it failing at?
Everything in the world requires more than just pattern recognition unless you want the worst possible experience.
The current incarnation of AI is just like a super neurodivergent person. Not sure what we need it for other than to take over jobs. But I’m sure it’ll go sentient any day now lol.
The weird thing about AI is that if some computer was a god and had all of human knowledge and history yet could think like a human, wouldn’t its first order of business be to not destroy humanity as a whole but the wealthy?
Even a high school dropout can figure out that Mexican laborers are more essential than [name of billionaire.]
Neverslop gang!
That is true for me. I enjoy using my brain and I love to read. Ai summaries are like when kids would read the cliff notes instead of the book.
I mean if I have to read the slop, I’ll still need to read Wikipedia to verify the accuracy. Just take me to the real info.
I love how Wikipedia has now become the source of accurate information. Such a strange timeline.
Wikipedia isn’t a source, but Wikipedia’s source might be worth checking. Any line on Wikipedia that doesn’t have a citation is as good as making it up yourself, and some of their citations aren’t much better.
But checking sources am is hard, so just make shit up and feign superiority like John Internet intended when he made the internet.
I think it was before 2010, I saw an article that said Wikipedia was already more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.
I suppose you don’t need to buy a whole 5 kg of Wikipedia each year to keep up with the latest updates.
It pretty much always was?
It’s a tertiary source, so not appropriate for citing in your essays, but that isn’t a comment on the accuracy.
There’s a wide number of critiques in how Wikipedia aggregates, edits, and presents information that isn’t worth going into here.
But I think what has become remarkable is the number of failed attempts to outcompete Wikipedia, corrupt it’s contents, or poison people into not using/trusting it.
Like, it’s less that Jimmy Wales landed on the secret sauce his first try and more that nobody (in any Western nation anyway) seems capable of marshalling the resources or labor necessary to cobble together a project that’s functioned half as well over as long a time period.
Especially considering the sources are always listed at the end of the article and most include internet archive links.
Are supposed to, and generally are, but there is a risk of somebody making unsourced changes and you seeing the article before it’s caught. Not a big deal for popular articles, but there are a lot of niche topics.
I mean, you have an unlimited amount of contributors from academic and hyper-fixated autistic backgrounds, so at some point it has to be accurate from just the massive number of eyes looking over it
“anyone can write anything they want, so you know you’re getting the best possible information” - Michael “World’s best boss” Scott
The hypothetical issue is that those eyes cannot be on every single update at all times. Pages tend to get fixed quickly, but it’s not perfect. At any point that you go to read an article, there is a chance that the article had been defaced recently with misinformation and one of those benevolent eyes has just not gotten around to fixing it yet. Nowadays, with all the automated systems in place, it is a fairly rare likelihood that something like that would happen, but it’s still possible.
Wikipedians are terrifyingly fast at getting out some updates. If someone dies, their article moves to the past tense often within 10 minutes of their death being known, assuming they were at all prominent.
You should always be a bit skeptical, sometimes really arcane subjects’ articles are written by one of the handful of people who understand them, sometimes they’re very subtly wrong but not prominent enough to get the right attention. If something seems off, Wikipedia has tools like the Talk page, and looking at Edit history, that can allow you to glean information in-platform about what might be happening. Edit wars, vandalism, disagreements among editors, maybe a negotiated agreement about a way to represent something controversial, all can become clearer by looking at those resources. You can also check its sources, to see if they agree with what felt off to you, or if there isn’t a good source on that claim.
It’s not perfect, any system can fail, but at least it has reasonable tools to figure out why it says what it says, and dig further.
There are people at google, people with names and addresses, who have collectively made the world incalculably shittier. I hope they get what they deserve.
Ed Zitron wrote a long post about some asshole in particular who shit it all up: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Fuck Prabhakar Raghavan and fuck the capital class whose search for eternal growth has completely wrecked every part of our society.
Prabhakar Raghavan
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn?”
Are you just making fun of someone’s name because it sounds unfamiliar to you? Is there some other joke I’m missing here?
Fuck that guy in particular, but there’s really no need to be xenophobic about it.
I didn’t think I was being xenophobic, I thought it was funny. I have absolutely no clue who that person is. Like stupid humor, like when someone has the name Dick Hurtz or Mike Rotch.
I am sorry if I came off as xenophobic.
Well now that I know he’s the Chief technologist of Google, I guess maybe it’s slightly funnier because Google is evil and is basically becoming its own hellish nightmare planet where people get sucked in and trapped in an inescapable hellscape where you’re ruled by a foul being that can not die.
Gotcha. Just taking someone’s not traditionally western name and making it “weirder”/“more alien” and that being the joke just struck me as weird. Not sure if it would’ve been done had his name been John Smith. Plus if you consider Cthulhu mythos was written by a racist about his fear of the unknown/other it just looks bad to me. Glad to know it was meant to be that. Sometimes intent is difficult to discern via the internet.
Wow. I feel like a piece of shit now because I had no idea the person was a racist or any of that. I know as much about cthulhu as southpark portrayed and that’s about it.
I wasn’t even putting anything really about it I thought it was funny that it rhymed and I thought it was like edgy that it rhymed and I was in tears laughing at it.
I wasn’t really thinking about race or anything I was just thinking it rhymes and it’s funny.
And yeah John Smith can have some funny rhymes.
Especially when you can see its sourcing information from what a deleted account said on a reddit post
goes to Google
searches Google
gets the results from Google
becomes angry at the results in Google
Why do you not simply go to Wikipedia and search directly on Wikipedia?
your silly. you read so you use books people used to sit and tell storys around campfires when books came they resisted if not for books there been no internet for you to post this nonsense
Besides https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ there is also https://mojeek.com/ & https://marginalia-search.com/ that can provide this
deleted by creator
In Google search you can append -ai to only return links. Like the Google of the golden age. Real links.
Or just skip Google altogether:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/I have them set as feedback search engine, I used to add !g when I couldn’t find an answer.
I noticed that for some time Google doesn’t provide any better answers. If DDG doesn’t help neither will Google. I still do it out of habit sometimes though with the hope this time will be different.
Unfortunately, a lot of the links I turn up are usually AI-written anyway
Big if true
Edit: holy shit it’s true
Use an LLM to do essentially what google used to do before it was shitty but while using 10 times (probably more) the resources. Fucking pathetic. I think old people, the ones who built internet have the right to be ashamed of the next gen. We are absolutely pathetic.
Worse, more expensive, less accessible products are the way of the future!
I actually find it funny that using a llm with the insurrections to not summarize anything results in better search then just using Google even with the -ai tag.
Google is still run by the same people. With Sergey mostly working with AI focused shit I thought. So you are just telling him to be ashamed of himself.
The use startpage instead of google
start page has started verifying every search I make and it takes like a solid 30+ seconds, starting to get annoyed with it.
Verifying a search list means it’s being run through the LLM, doesn’t it?
I have no idea, it just started randomly doing it on just my phone like a month ago.
That’s about when an update added ‘features’ to a lot of phones, you on Apple?
