> But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place.
Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products.
Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.
Their inability to adapt to fix the problems caused by AI and SEO have caused the product to fall apart and users went somewhere else. I do think however their decision to make search tedious for users by moving the correct answer deep into the page (or at least favouring pages that did that) was a brilliant play for advertising but has killed a lot of their core use, making it easier to leave.
Making a product worse for consumers and better for the provider by dropping quality is everywhere even in physical world companies. It's not even just a matter of h to e product, but support. Two decades ago, Home Depot had a push to save on labor at the store that led to having nobody there that understood what they were selling, or could help anyone with any project. Lowes ate them alive for a while, and it took them years to regain enough expertise to just not lose in the market straight up. We also see this happening to restaurants all the time.
The issue with someone like Google, or Microsoft, is that they have a larger moat in many products, so the amount of degradation that internal actors will be happy to push in search for profit is much deeper.
Of course Google is disincentivized from fixing the SEO spam problem because those sites are usually full of ads from Google's ad network. Changing the algorithm to favor noncommercial sites with no ads would hurt their revenue, so they don't do it.
> when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.
This is the reverse of my desires. Most pages on the current web contain a few useful nuggets buried in a shit sandwich of overly verbose text and aggressive advertising. AI extraction and summarization distills the mess to concentrate the useful bits.
I want the small web back. I want more people to produce quality ad-free content for the love of doing so and the desire to make the world a better place. And then I want a classic search engine to find stuff; one that heavily downranks content with ads.
I havent made the leap yet, but it's pushing me closer and closer to a paid service like kagi. The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent but it might be the only option for sanity.
I use Kagi and have considered moving to Fastmail.
Aside from the obvious larger issues with Gmail (privacy, trusting that Google won't just deactivate your account, etc), is there anything in the day-to-day usage of Fastmail that you find to be an improvement over Gmail, in the same way that Kagi is an improvement over Google search?
I recently switched to Kagi after years of using ddg and have been very happy with it. You get 100 free searches. Before I made the leap, I spent a period of time with Firefox set up to use kagi if I typed `k <query>`. I found myself using kagi for the vast majority of my searches pretty quickly, the signal:noise ratio is substancially better, especially for technical subjects.
> The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent
I've found myself paying for more and more products that I used to get for free. Given how expensive running a search engine is ad revenue is necessary for a free product. Advertisers pay more if they are getting clicks and conversions... Obviously this ends up impacting search results. Additionally, the tradition SEO model went from bad to worse with LLMs.
Anyways, up until very recently I would've agreed with you, but ultimately this was a pretty easy expense to justify after a short trial.
While I'm no longer a customer, using Kagi showed me just how much the Google experience can be improved. The $10/month is tiny for the quality of life improvement.
I ended up building my own search instead - whoever controls your search results also controls how you find information and what you see, so I felt I needed to start building my own index. If you don't want to go down that rabbit hole and don't mind Kagi's politics, $10/month is a small price to pay to get a better search experience.
I don't see why it's "abhorrent". In fact, paying for a useful service that somebody else provides is common sense.
I've been a happy customer of Kagi since 2022, and for me it's well worth the money. It gets better results than Google or DuckDuckGo, and I trust the results more because they're not pay-to-play like Google.
Just as a counter, I tried Kagi and was unimpressed. I didn’t get any better results than normal google stuff, I couldn’t see what would be worth paying for.
AI web search is really only as good as the index it is relying on. Maybe it can generate stuff without needing to search but...
Just hope that the index quality does not get further deprioritized... It might make sense to make a public indexes if corporations aren't interested in maintaining them...
Google brought this situation on themselves by making their product worse in order to pump up ad revenue. Many of their users were already looking for an excuse to jump ship. I would have done the same myself, but my clients aren’t exactly looking for help ranking on Kagi, and I need to be where their customers are.
The thing about it is before Google killed search from a Product standpoint, they were killing search from a policy standpoint by rewarding SEO hackers and other junk behavior. It's been over 10 years now that most content returned from a google search is gigantic catch-all pages with sections like:
"What time is the football game on tonight? People often ask what time the football game is on tonight, and to find out what time the football game is on tonight. Tonight the football game is on at a time when the football game is on tonight".
People started to use LLMs for search because they actually return the desired content in a form the user wants to read. I unfortunately actually like AI mode because of this even if i recognize relying on AI summaries for search has its problems.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket"
- Eric Hoffer
I've been playing the Ocarina of Time remake and whenever I get stuck trying to get a certain item or progress on a quest, I'll fire up Claude voice chat and ask it for guidance, and it regularly gets confused and gives me wrong answers (somewhere around ~30% of the time).
Given how long these models have been out and that it's a highly constrained game world from almost 30 years ago which is documented top to bottom, I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad at straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This was a solved problem (albeit with a less modern UX) in the legacy internet and it doesn't actually feel like getting the right answer is necessarily easier.
> I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad
Claude is absolutely killing it for me. Man-years and man-years of backlog work, hobby projects, optimizations, research, experiments, finally implemented. Bloated apps finally optimized to fit on micro instances, slashing my infra costs. Recovery from operations incidents in a third of the time.
If I could make Claude forget everything it every knew about Ocarina of Time to make it 1% better at what it already does so well, I'd press that button in a heartbeat.
This feels like a very odd use for Claude as opposed to any LLM focused on web search, but more to the point 30 years ago you could hit up Gamefaqs and get a plain-text document to download and manually search it locally to your heart's content in milliseconds. A lot of LLMs are hitting the mountains of garbage in, tiny pile of garbage out problem more than being bad LLMs.
Google used to return these documents, or at least forums and communities who knew where these guides were. Google no longer connects communities together however.
LLMs don't either but the hope was that they at least read all of the old internet and have it somewhat memorized.
Haven’t we moved past an assumption/need that these (frontier) llm (-backed services) have memorized their training data now that tool calling has proven to be so effective? The model knows enough about the question to be able to search for sources that contain the answer and then summarize the findings back? I’m shocked Claude voice ever makes a mistake on this, does it not have agentic capabilities backing its responses?
I remember in around 2011 realizing that ~85% of the first page of Google search results was ads. I haven’t used Google search much in the last 5 years, mostly due to this but also because of how they rewarded blog spam.
Google's non US/EN results MUST be absolute shit. That's the only take-away I've ever been able to get out of comments like this.
I don't know if it's the language piece, the geography and routing, maybe something else in the backend user profile... Idk
There is no other search engine that seems to come remotely close for me for actually showing me what I'm looking for, and on the first page. I've tried dozens probably over the years based on random comments from people, but never find anything else close to the results quality Google search gives me.
I wish I knew for sure what the difference is! Maybe query verbage, search modifiers, etc?
Maybe Google search is like an LLM - if you’re asking for a code reference it works, but if you’re asking for something else (music theory?) it just doesn’t?
Point is maybe it depends on topic maybe?
These days I use a couple different search sources both paid and free and it’s been that way for a couple years.
I am wondering if something in their user profile or identifier is tainting the results.
I've had people on this very website tell me they searched for XYZ and couldn't find it, so then out of curiosity I will try and replicate it.
I have flipped on a vpn, in incognito mode with tons of anti-fingerprinting tools, and the XYZ thing will be the first or second result on the page.
IDK, I just find it weird as hell and would love to know why.
> Maybe Google search is like an LLM - if you’re asking for a code reference it works, but if you’re asking for something else (music theory?) it just doesn’t?
Possibly.
Maybe it is the way they structure their query? I've been using it since release and the death of altavista and others, so I may not even be aware of how the two may differ. I have heard some say that natural language search was what they always /expected/ from google search, so maybe there is something to that.
I think that primary thing that wont survive is people writing stuff for public - exactly what was found on blogs, web pages, when institutions and companies gave out.
Since no one will find that, you might as well write for yourself. And if you are wroting for just yourself, you will keep it for yourself or just wont bother.
> But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place.
Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products.
Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.
Their inability to adapt to fix the problems caused by AI and SEO have caused the product to fall apart and users went somewhere else. I do think however their decision to make search tedious for users by moving the correct answer deep into the page (or at least favouring pages that did that) was a brilliant play for advertising but has killed a lot of their core use, making it easier to leave.
Making a product worse for consumers and better for the provider by dropping quality is everywhere even in physical world companies. It's not even just a matter of h to e product, but support. Two decades ago, Home Depot had a push to save on labor at the store that led to having nobody there that understood what they were selling, or could help anyone with any project. Lowes ate them alive for a while, and it took them years to regain enough expertise to just not lose in the market straight up. We also see this happening to restaurants all the time.
The issue with someone like Google, or Microsoft, is that they have a larger moat in many products, so the amount of degradation that internal actors will be happy to push in search for profit is much deeper.
Of course Google is disincentivized from fixing the SEO spam problem because those sites are usually full of ads from Google's ad network. Changing the algorithm to favor noncommercial sites with no ads would hurt their revenue, so they don't do it.
> when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.
This is the reverse of my desires. Most pages on the current web contain a few useful nuggets buried in a shit sandwich of overly verbose text and aggressive advertising. AI extraction and summarization distills the mess to concentrate the useful bits.
I want the small web back. I want more people to produce quality ad-free content for the love of doing so and the desire to make the world a better place. And then I want a classic search engine to find stuff; one that heavily downranks content with ads.
100% agree, but I don't know how to turn back the clock to browsing weird little sites of back text on gray background in NCSA Mosaic.
There is https://marginalia-search.com/
"Siri, please spell out those URLs for me?”
I havent made the leap yet, but it's pushing me closer and closer to a paid service like kagi. The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent but it might be the only option for sanity.
I switched to Kagi about 6 months ago. Can't see myself ever going back to Google/DDG. Feels like what I remember Google being 15 years ago.
Fastmail and Kagi. You won't look back.
I use Kagi and have considered moving to Fastmail.
Aside from the obvious larger issues with Gmail (privacy, trusting that Google won't just deactivate your account, etc), is there anything in the day-to-day usage of Fastmail that you find to be an improvement over Gmail, in the same way that Kagi is an improvement over Google search?
I recently switched to Kagi after years of using ddg and have been very happy with it. You get 100 free searches. Before I made the leap, I spent a period of time with Firefox set up to use kagi if I typed `k <query>`. I found myself using kagi for the vast majority of my searches pretty quickly, the signal:noise ratio is substancially better, especially for technical subjects.
> The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent
I've found myself paying for more and more products that I used to get for free. Given how expensive running a search engine is ad revenue is necessary for a free product. Advertisers pay more if they are getting clicks and conversions... Obviously this ends up impacting search results. Additionally, the tradition SEO model went from bad to worse with LLMs.
Anyways, up until very recently I would've agreed with you, but ultimately this was a pretty easy expense to justify after a short trial.
While I'm no longer a customer, using Kagi showed me just how much the Google experience can be improved. The $10/month is tiny for the quality of life improvement.
I ended up building my own search instead - whoever controls your search results also controls how you find information and what you see, so I felt I needed to start building my own index. If you don't want to go down that rabbit hole and don't mind Kagi's politics, $10/month is a small price to pay to get a better search experience.
You made your own index, or just your own frontend? Do you have an advice on methodology?
Kagi is great. My first search felt just like when google was new and SEO didn't exist.
I don't see why it's "abhorrent". In fact, paying for a useful service that somebody else provides is common sense.
I've been a happy customer of Kagi since 2022, and for me it's well worth the money. It gets better results than Google or DuckDuckGo, and I trust the results more because they're not pay-to-play like Google.
I have used Kagi for a few years now, worth the cash
Just as a counter, I tried Kagi and was unimpressed. I didn’t get any better results than normal google stuff, I couldn’t see what would be worth paying for.
AI web search is really only as good as the index it is relying on. Maybe it can generate stuff without needing to search but...
Just hope that the index quality does not get further deprioritized... It might make sense to make a public indexes if corporations aren't interested in maintaining them...
https://kagi.com
have been a paying user for years, very happy with the service.
Google brought this situation on themselves by making their product worse in order to pump up ad revenue. Many of their users were already looking for an excuse to jump ship. I would have done the same myself, but my clients aren’t exactly looking for help ranking on Kagi, and I need to be where their customers are.
https://archive.ph/6dZS9
The thing about it is before Google killed search from a Product standpoint, they were killing search from a policy standpoint by rewarding SEO hackers and other junk behavior. It's been over 10 years now that most content returned from a google search is gigantic catch-all pages with sections like:
"What time is the football game on tonight? People often ask what time the football game is on tonight, and to find out what time the football game is on tonight. Tonight the football game is on at a time when the football game is on tonight".
People started to use LLMs for search because they actually return the desired content in a form the user wants to read. I unfortunately actually like AI mode because of this even if i recognize relying on AI summaries for search has its problems.
> Not to be left behind, Reddit is introducing [...] A.I.-generated short-form videos based on its content.
Is this truly a value-add? Like will Reddit make more money doing this? If so, I weep for the future.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket"
- Eric Hoffer
I've been playing the Ocarina of Time remake and whenever I get stuck trying to get a certain item or progress on a quest, I'll fire up Claude voice chat and ask it for guidance, and it regularly gets confused and gives me wrong answers (somewhere around ~30% of the time).
Given how long these models have been out and that it's a highly constrained game world from almost 30 years ago which is documented top to bottom, I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad at straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This was a solved problem (albeit with a less modern UX) in the legacy internet and it doesn't actually feel like getting the right answer is necessarily easier.
> I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad
Claude is absolutely killing it for me. Man-years and man-years of backlog work, hobby projects, optimizations, research, experiments, finally implemented. Bloated apps finally optimized to fit on micro instances, slashing my infra costs. Recovery from operations incidents in a third of the time.
If I could make Claude forget everything it every knew about Ocarina of Time to make it 1% better at what it already does so well, I'd press that button in a heartbeat.
This feels like a very odd use for Claude as opposed to any LLM focused on web search, but more to the point 30 years ago you could hit up Gamefaqs and get a plain-text document to download and manually search it locally to your heart's content in milliseconds. A lot of LLMs are hitting the mountains of garbage in, tiny pile of garbage out problem more than being bad LLMs.
Why would an LLM be good at giving you answers about specifically the ocarina of time remake? it seems like the worst case scenario for confusion
Because documents like this exist and it's an implicit assumption that LLMs have read them
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197771-the-legend-of-zelda...
Google used to return these documents, or at least forums and communities who knew where these guides were. Google no longer connects communities together however.
LLMs don't either but the hope was that they at least read all of the old internet and have it somewhat memorized.
Haven’t we moved past an assumption/need that these (frontier) llm (-backed services) have memorized their training data now that tool calling has proven to be so effective? The model knows enough about the question to be able to search for sources that contain the answer and then summarize the findings back? I’m shocked Claude voice ever makes a mistake on this, does it not have agentic capabilities backing its responses?
God I hope all that lot is backed up somewhere. Maybe I need to take my own backup, all that ascii should be cheap.
llms seem really bad at giving information about existing video game for whatever reason. it just makes shit up half the time.
I remember in around 2011 realizing that ~85% of the first page of Google search results was ads. I haven’t used Google search much in the last 5 years, mostly due to this but also because of how they rewarded blog spam.
Google's non US/EN results MUST be absolute shit. That's the only take-away I've ever been able to get out of comments like this.
I don't know if it's the language piece, the geography and routing, maybe something else in the backend user profile... Idk
There is no other search engine that seems to come remotely close for me for actually showing me what I'm looking for, and on the first page. I've tried dozens probably over the years based on random comments from people, but never find anything else close to the results quality Google search gives me.
I wish I knew for sure what the difference is! Maybe query verbage, search modifiers, etc?
Maybe Google search is like an LLM - if you’re asking for a code reference it works, but if you’re asking for something else (music theory?) it just doesn’t?
Point is maybe it depends on topic maybe?
These days I use a couple different search sources both paid and free and it’s been that way for a couple years.
> Point is maybe it depends on topic maybe?
I am wondering if something in their user profile or identifier is tainting the results.
I've had people on this very website tell me they searched for XYZ and couldn't find it, so then out of curiosity I will try and replicate it.
I have flipped on a vpn, in incognito mode with tons of anti-fingerprinting tools, and the XYZ thing will be the first or second result on the page.
IDK, I just find it weird as hell and would love to know why.
> Maybe Google search is like an LLM - if you’re asking for a code reference it works, but if you’re asking for something else (music theory?) it just doesn’t?
Possibly.
Maybe it is the way they structure their query? I've been using it since release and the death of altavista and others, so I may not even be aware of how the two may differ. I have heard some say that natural language search was what they always /expected/ from google search, so maybe there is something to that.
I think that primary thing that wont survive is people writing stuff for public - exactly what was found on blogs, web pages, when institutions and companies gave out.
Since no one will find that, you might as well write for yourself. And if you are wroting for just yourself, you will keep it for yourself or just wont bother.