Searching for better searches

The arrival of AI in search engines has been driving me around the bend… I did abandon Google a long, long time ago for it’s sneeky tactics of tracking searches and posting ads above the actual results. I had switched to DuckDuckGo which I really love ~ and now it seems that they’re interlinking with Bing or other tools too, it went down today and there’s no info published (initially, the only notification was put up on X/Twitter, only accessible when logged in, of course, and which I no longer use)… bad news ~ and what a shame…

This post is prompted by DuckDuckGo going down, followed by conversations on Mastodon which discussed different options to search. Set up by open, independent and privacy-respecting people as alternatives, most of these are new to me and will be worth trying out.

alternative search options

And then there’s this great work-around for AI-free Google (if you must) searching by Ernie Smith, creator of Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet: udm14.com ~ these results feel quite retro now ツ
The blog post triggering the setup of this new little site is well worth a a read: Does One Line Fix Google?

Footnote

Personally, I don’t understand the underlying technologies and scripts in depth. But I do follow some clever people via Mastodon and use their expertise to inform my learning more. There’s people like Simon Willison (fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon) whose posts are way to advanced for my little brain. Simon is posting much about his findigs in looking at LLMs and related aspects and while I cannot say I understand much, I still learn lots about the intricacies which I would otherwise not even know about.

Then there’s Aral Balkan (mastodon.ar.al/@aral) who I’ve known since the days of Flash and who works tiredlessly at trying to make the web a better place. Again, I wish I was able to understand all of his work yet the complexities of backend mean I do not have enough knowledge or the skills to use the great Kitten setup he is currently developing. Aral posts much about the state of the world and aims to promote the free open web. By reading what he posts, I learn about the good, the bad and the ugly and hence have been guided towards some of the options listed here.