How do you go about researching online given search engine commercialization and "AI" hallucinations? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Do you have some methods to mitigate the downsides of search engines and "AI" summarizers? Besides talking to folks online, what other methods might one use to sift through the internet's vast expanses?

Not that I mind the last option, but for any of us to be able to provide each other novel information that we couldn't otherwise search, it seems like there must be some other way to find info that one hasn't produced or compiled themselves.

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[-] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

I use SearXNG (specifically search.cronobox.one at the moment, although I've had to switch instances a couple times over the summer), and DuckDuckGo (DDG) Lite in the intermittent periods between when I switch.

SearXNG is a metasearch engine, e.g. it pools together the results from a bunch of sites without giving them your info. You can choose which sites you trust. I usually use DDG, Startpage, Bing, and Qwant, and I block Google (at least directly).

The problem is that once your instance grows too large, the search provider will block it from searching on their site. What ends up happening when all the "big players" catch on is that your results...kinda have a stroke. You start to get random Wikibooks, Wikiquote, and other "weird" results for reasonable queries. This means that it's time to switch.

IMO, this is a reasonable tradeoff for no ads and not giving my info to search providers, save for the initial 24 hours where I haven't overcome the "inertia" to go change my browser to use a different instance and I just end up using DDG Lite for that session. DDG Lite is DDG but without JavaScript.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Isn't including both bing and DDG double-counting? DDG uses Bing for results right?

this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023

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