I think there's actually a pretty good solution to this that I've been looking forward to for years, and that I think the technology is now ready to support. Unfortunately, I'm too busy worrying about, I mean, working on AGI alignment to spend time on this currently. The idea is simple: an open source decentralized recommender/search engine that you keep a local copy of and shared your recommendations of search results over a decentralized social network like Mastodon. Like a combination of Google Search, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Search results get upvoted or downvoted, and ones that were actually helpful to friends of your friends will be higher ranked for you, and even more so for friends of friends who fit a similar pattern of web usage. There's been a variety of specific implementations for this suggested. Here's an example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260652116_A_Collaborative_Decentralized_Approach_to_Web_Search

This is along the general theme of 'we ought to take back ownership of our data and our internet rather than leaving it in the hands of corporate giants to mediate for us'.

Reply

[-]the gears to ascension3y10

kagi is way, way better than Google and Bing at finding the human web

Reply

[-]Shmi3y40

Tried it. Gives the same actively useless results as google search. Thumbs down.

Reply

[-]the gears to ascension3y10

next levels of spicy above kagi, besides millionshort, are https://teclis.com/ and https://search.marginalia.nu/. there are some other interesting related engines on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783037 and even more on https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/, notable indieweb mentions include https://wiby.me/ and https://searchmysite.net/ but I tend to prefer teclis and marginalia. kagi is apparently google+teclis, which I didn't realize until just now, and means I probably should have just recommended teclis to begin with.

of course, it's not perfect. there are still SEO groups trying to target these engines. but they're more explicitly focused on anti-seo design.

Reply

[-]Shmi3y20

The issue is not SEO, it is google deciding that it knows better than I do what I want to search for and pushing useless irrelevant results to the top 10 pages.

Reply

[-]the gears to ascension3y10

huh update: another interesting semantic search engine, this one works like a language model but with a live index of urls and embeddings of them. seems to be a more direct style of prediction than some of the research retrieval engines I've tried: https://metaphor.systems/

Reply

[-]the gears to ascension3y10

oh I just use ddg to evade that problem. that and more playing with Google. I still like Google best for question resolution searches, but it's true that you have to be more specific with Google's current shitty English encoder.

Reply

[-]kent3183y-20

Ok I hate DDG and every other search engine out there is done zip for me with this except fairly often a place called Yousearch. I found mentioned in an online article. While far from perfect and sometimes giving sadly similar to google results I have had much luck with it around 67%of the time I think to check it. I wish I wrote code and could work on a search replacement but I love the idea of the open source one here.

Reply

Moderation Log

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

20

Google Search as a Washed Up Service Dog: "I HALP!"

20

20