| ▲ | OutOfHere 3 days ago |
| The actual underlying problem has changed altogether. Pagerank is easily gamed by SEO. Search candidates and rankings now require assessment by LLM. Moreover, as a default, users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results. Crawling too requires innovative approaches to bypass server filters. I doubt any independent person can afford to run a vector database or LLMs at immense scale. |
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| ▲ | kcbanner 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results. The reason I pay for Kagi is that I specifically don't want this to occur. |
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| ▲ | OutOfHere 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you pay for a service (web search) that 99.9% use for free, you're an extreme outlier, and not necessarily a justifiable one either. After all, DDG, Google and various others still have raw results for free. | |
| ▲ | Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | How much do you technologically relate to the average person on the street though? Every person I have seen (outside the tiny tech bubble) google something has just read the AI overview without skipping a beat. | | |
| ▲ | yepitwas 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's worrisome since I've seen those be for-sure wrong a pretty high percentage of the time. [EDIT] Incidentally, are there any sites that do actual web search any more, better than Yandex? I'd rather avoid a Russian site if I can, but there are whole topics where it's impossible to find anything useful on heavily "massaged" allegedly-Web-search-but-not-really sites like Google and DDG (Bing), but I can find what I want on page 1 or 2 of a Yandex search. Is Kagi as good as that, or is their index simply ignoring a whole bunch of the Web like so many others? I don't mind paying. | | |
| ▲ | degamad 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Google "Web" results (not the default results you get when you search) still seem okay for me. You can force them with the udm=14 url trick, or select the "Web" tab in the results. No AI, no images or shopping results, and slightly better text results. | |
| ▲ | franktankbank 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep, same here. Ask it "should I wash venison tenderloin" and you get an initial "No, because" followed by a generally "yes its important to clean including with water" in the longer description. Wow a self contradictory answer! Good job! |
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| ▲ | jkestner 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We’re being force fed them. I’m an AI hater and I catch myself reading those sometimes. Yes, people want the answer directly. Google wants you to stay on their site to read some mishmash. I think the ideal would be to immediately go to the source’s site. | |
| ▲ | throwmeaway222 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | At this point the web is also so centralized you only need 3 bookmarks these days (your news, youtube and Amazon) A search is just learning what you don't know and AI does a better job than search has ever done for me - and I'm in tech. |
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| ▲ | ricardo81 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Pagerank Also a lot of site owners are reluctant to link out. So much so that 'nofollow' had been reduced to a hint rather than a directive. |
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| ▲ | freeopinion 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results This leads directly to another big change. People used to submit their sites to search engines and now they might actively block search engines. So a search engine author might have to spend a lot of effort in adversarial games. |
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| ▲ | iamacyborg 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Moreover, as a default, users want the results intelligently synthesized into a text response with references rather than as raw results. Citation needed |
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| ▲ | OutOfHere 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You mean all the users of chat services aren't evidence? Chat services increasingly incorporate web links for references in their responses, and this is as the users seek. The tide continues to shift from traditional search to LLM synthesis. | | |
| ▲ | iamacyborg 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I suspect there are more users of traditional search than there are of llm chat apps. | | |
| ▲ | freeopinion 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I suspect that chat apps dominate (80+%?) the under-20 demographic, and have a sizable chunk of the under-30 demographic. Within the next five years it will probably represent 50+% of total search traffic. Maybe it already does. It makes sense that any search site that wants to be in the game tomorrow would keep racing down the AI chat path. |
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