Cactus_HeadFeb 5

What are alternative to searching using web search engines?

https://programming.dev/post/45252725

What are alternative to searching using web search engines? - programming.dev

For most use cases, web search engines are fine. But I am wondering if there are alternative ways to finding information. There is also the enshittification of google and tbh most(free) search engines just give google search result Obviously, the straight is just asking other people, can be in person or online, in general forums or specialised communities Libraries are good source but for those that don’t have access to physical libraries, there free online public libraries(I will post the links for those that I found below) Books in general, a lot of them have reference to outside materials. So, I been experimenting with an AI chat bot(Le chat), partially as life coach of sorts and partially as a fine tuned web search engine. To cut to the chase, its bad. I when its not just listing google top results it list tools that long gone or just makes shit up. I was hoping it to be fine tuned search engine, cuz the google works, if what you want is not the top 10 websites, your on your own. So yeah, that all I can think. Those are all the routes I can think of for finding information and probably all there is but maybe I miss another route.

Show threadDenjinFeb 5
Complains about the enshittification of search engines, uses an AI chat bot to search things instead. What?
Show threadRiskableFeb 5

Have you tried using an LLM configured to search the Internet for you? It’s amazing!

Normal search: Loads of useless results, ads, links that are hidden ads, scams, and maybe on like the 3rd page you’ll find what you’re looking for.

AI search: It makes calls out to Google and DDG (or any other search engines you want) simultaneously, checks the content on each page to verify relevancy, then returns a list of URLs that are precisely what you want with summaries of each that it just generated on the fly (meaning: They’re up to date).

You can even do advanced stuff like, “find me ten songs on YouTube related to breakups and use this other site to convert those URLs to .ogg files and put them in my downloads folder.”

Local, FOSS AI running on your own damned PC is fucking awesome. I seriously don’t understand all the hate. It’s the technology everyone’s always wanted and it gets better every day.

Show threadTheOneCurlyFeb 5

checks the content on each page to verify relevancy, No it can’t do that. It’s an LLM, it can only generate the next word in a sequence.

Also this doesn’t solve OPs problem at all. If it’s in the top 10 results on a major search engine then anyone can find it in minimal time.

Show threadRiskable

No it can’t do that. It’s an LLM, it can only generate the next word in a sequence.

Your knowledge is out of date, friend. These days you can configure an LLM to run tools like curl, nmap, ping, or even write then execute shell scripts and Python (though, in a sandbox for security).

Some tools that help you manage the models are preconfigured to make it easy for them to search the web on your behalf. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a whole ecosystem of AI tools just for searching the web that will emerge soon.

What Mozilla is implementing in Firefox will likely start with cloud-based services but eventually it’ll just be using local models, running on your PC. Then all those specialized AI search tools will become less popular as Firefox’s built-in features end up being “good enough”.

Feb 5 at 3:29pmWeb
Show threadTheOneCurlyFeb 5
I understand how agents work. I’m just saying it cannot “verify relevancy”. That’s a qualitative assessment that an LLM is incapable of doing. The scripts and regex that form the backbone of the “agent” can absolutely download a webpage and add the text contents to the context. But after that it’s just random bullshit.