alt Hacker NewsAs much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittification
I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites.
There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse.
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> For actual web search I actually like using Yandex
You might want to reconsider this.
https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view
Don't forget cached pages.
Just tried Yandex again, after a long time, and indeed it was a blast from the past, in a positive sense! So many real search results, which transports the feel of an authentic mirror of the web contents. Default search engine from now on! Thanks for the hint.
This is interesting. Do you consider Yandex absolutely safe to use (wrt their possible connections with the Russian government, and current war in Ukraine)?
Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days.
(For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)
>I do enjoy using their free AI
It's really not free. You're paying with your data.
Sometimes I use my own index of domains and channels
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I hate the very idea that destination location is opaque, and user can't verify if you are funneled toward malvertizing.
I hate even base64 encoded links in the results.
anyone from Ecosia gang?
> There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google
This is such a strange position to take. Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming". Google is simply not showing the results. They are not taking down, or banning, or doing anything to the websites.
> I do enjoy using their free AI.
So how is that AI slop garbage useful? It often lies, aka "hallucinates". And I operate within this Google-controlled auto-spammed text of lies when I use its horrible AI. The last thing I want to do is make Google even more powerful; at the least now with Google search being so crap, alternatives would be well desired, but oddly enough I also get crap results using e. g. DDG, so I think in part the whole www stack must have become more crap too, quality-wise.
I actually don't see it as there are extensions that eliminate this slop spam, but I never found it useful for anything. Other than waste my time, back when I still saw it. Thankfully I no longer see that AI slop spam due to these extensions.
Have you tried Kagi?
> Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters".
As long as you don't search anything related to Russia itself, or to Russian interests elsewhere (like their invasion of Ukraine). Then it's very heavily biased, priority is given to state ran propaganda mills, independent media is hidden from results, etc.
And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate. It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.
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How is this comment relevant to the post (and be so upvoted?)
Google is making it harder for people to game the index, working in your favor.
> For actual web search I actually like using Yandex
These periodic astroturfing campaigns for a Russian product on HN are annoying, and appaling if you have any morals.
The real "old-school Google, but modern" is Kagi, with the caveat of being paid. (Worth the $5 for me.)
But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias for invoking the spirit of old Gog=ogle from within the new, AI-based Google:
https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20fr...
(Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')