I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.

I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.

Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts

ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.

  • pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish
    223·
    2 months ago

    I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.

    Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for “R34 Skyline” expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.

    • ProstheticBrain@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      411·
      2 months ago

      R34 is also short for rule 34 - “if it exists, there’s porn of it on the internet”

      So if you search R34 and anything, you’ll get porn.

      • pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        It’s just that Bing/DDG seem to promote news from these sites as if they’re sponsored links… but without the disclosure.

        • Varyk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          bummer.

          I see all the labeled sponsored links on Bing, but I generally get high quality results outside of those.

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          I’m pretty sure here in the states, a site is obligated to identify ad content and sponsored content, so when a big company like Microsoft or Alphabet is doing it (Bing and Google) it makes me wonder if there’s been a recent carve-out or relaxation of the reg.

          That makes the return adversarial to the end-user, hence the point of the regulations.

      • zante@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Agree. It’s an important part of media literacy these days.

        For political news, I’m only interested in what was actually said, not what is reported to be said .

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Every search engine I’ve encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you’re looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you’re not looking for porn.

      Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there’s both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.

      I’d really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.