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/
My steps to configure Kagi as a genAI-free search engine:
In settings
- Disable General->"Keyboard Shortcuts"
- Click Appearance->"Custom CSS" and paste in the text from https://codeberg.org/zerodogg/kagi-no-ai/src/branch/main/kagi-no-ai.css
- Disable Search->AI->"Auto Quick Answer"
What's nice about this is it's bound to your account, so it "works everywhere". You don't have to use a particular browser, you don't have to set up plugins on all your machines.
I've been using Kagi this way for about a year—results seem just as good as Google
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?
Okay one more "search without the AI" option I've just learned about, and unlike Kagi/DDG this one's even from a no-AI company:
Similar to how Waterfox repackages Firefox without the genAI, this takes Google and repackages it without the genAI. It costs money, but the money supports Waterfox, so that's… good?
Also since this is Mastodon I should probably mention SearXNG and https://marginalia-search.com/ ( here as @marginalia ), both open source. Marginalia looks promising.
@amy @mcc @marginalia https://noai.duckduckgo.com is my current default. They're trying to remove slop from the search results, which is not perfect, but better than nothing.
For a long time, I thought DDG to be crap compared to Google or https://www.startpage.com (worth checking out, too), but Google deteriorated enough that I've switched. Startpage chased me away with their stupid captchas and no slop filter, DDG is much more VPN-friendly. Both of these have Tor hidden services, too.
@mcc True, and its part of the reason Kagi is a non-starter (that and the AI). At least Google you could use logged-out, though...
I guess if StartPage really is kicking the bucket, this may be the only alternative to DuckDuckGo that makes any sense, but I really want then to elaborate on the privacy part a bit more
@mcc https://search.waterfox.com/privacy their privacy policy isn't awful. They're at least not selling your data outright, but they are nebulous about what companies have access to it and what amount of PII is included.
Absolutely better than google.
Also a UK company, which is also marginally better than a US company.
good find friend!
@mcc yup absolutely. I enjoy kagi and use it for professional / work and research type stuff for this reason.
even just memes and nonsense i keep to ddg for it not being as immediately easy to correlate (even theoretically) with my identity. Even if i pay in crypto and use a not tied to me email address.
Waterfox also defaults to "startpage" for non logged in privacy search. The ads served on it help fund Waterfox as well.
These days I am primarily using https://www.ecosia.org/ for searches. Occasionally I still use Google when Ecosia doesn’t give me the right results.
The main problem I have with search engines these days is results getting polluted with pages that don’t match my search terms. When most of the results don’t contain the terms I searched for it gets really hard to find the page I am actually looking for.
If I quote the search terms Google will usually respect it. But even Google is getting worse in that area. Allegedly Google realized that by making it harder to find what you are looking for they get to show more ads.
Re "allegedly Google made search worse to drive users to the ads"...
I worked at Google while this was happening and I would characterize it as something more than an allegation, more like a statement of reality.
No individual wrote it down as a policy, but all the incentive structures were set up to ensure it happened.
@mcc I just want somewhere that isn't pushing AI onto me, and Kagi/Ecosia/DDG all do that. Sure I can adapt, but I'm uneasy because I don't want the technique to pour our the pre mixed piss from my tea, I just don't want to come back to that tea house ever again.
And deGoogle is something I'm trying and not doing well yet. Mostly the phones I don't have a viable alternative. And using Microsoft at home because of work kills me.
I started planning my emigration from the US the day after the election when everybody told me I was a coward and catastrophizing.
I was on the train out of the country when the first murders in the siege of Minneapolis started.
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.”"
Cornell Tech researchers found that writers who used biased AI auto-suggestions saw their views gravitate toward the AI’s positions without their realizing it — even when they were made aware of the biased AI.
@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:
@mcc you know how good technical writing involves the author picking which concepts they're going to convey, taking a stance on what those concepts mean in this context, drawing clear lines, presenting the material in a clear order and all that?
generated text from these models does the opposite of all those things, it turns even simple obvious ideas into something vague and confusing by using them in conflicting ways within the same piece
Does this get rid of the AI interpretation of your search query and force a search on your actual search terms?
Because No AI duck duck go is garbage in this way. It avoids posting stupid AI summaries, but it still reinterprets whatever you type into the search box, and runs a search based on what it thinks you are looking for, rather than what you actually asked for
I use it more often than anything else, but that doesn't mean it isn't complete crap. Everything else is just even worse right now
Lycos is the only search engine I know that actually searches on what you type in. But it's clearly deprioritized by its owning company, and is down about 50% of the time
The whole search industry is now back to where it was at before Teoma -- and then Google which stole its logo and concept
Everything on the market is garbage, and whoever can produce something that actually works will win all the customers
@NilaJones when i want kagi to find exact matches and not synonyms i put quotation marks around the words, such as turning
rust curses library
into
"rust" "curses" "library"
I would have preferred functionality like old google where if it decides to deliver an approximate search it tells you and asks if you want to search exactly. But I'm told google doesn't work like that anymore anyway.
I tried that with a longer phrase, on kagi, but no luck
It still gave me a bunch of unrelated web pages that did not include the (very public, but non-commercial) one that had my phrase on it
I did not see that, no! Thanks very much. Now if only it could be the default...
mcc
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