I’ve replaced search engines with Wikipedia as the first step in looking for information. skimming an article is much faster than opening and closing a dozen sloppy s.e.o. 'd websites :p
That’s right. I didn’t put the question in the search bar for you to tell me the answer. That question was the first shoveling of dirt in a 6 hour rabbit hole that I was fixing to explore.
May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.
They even have a direct URL for it if you don’t want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
They also give you the option to (do their best at) blocking AI-generated search results. (Not perfect, of course, but it does a decent job of reducing how much AI slop you get in your search results.)
Or Qwant. It’s Euroopan and doesn’t even have the AI option.
Better yet:
and you can add it as a custom search for firefox/waterfox as:
This is nice but I never figured out the search suggestions query string.
join the elite: kagi.com
A search engine you have to sign up for?
Edit: its a paid for service hence the login required. Looks like its starts at $5/mo for 300 searches per month. How many search do you all average per month?
And pay, i’d not mind a sign up but i’d rather not pay, especially if i cannot even have the option to self host
Join the elite: create an account and pay $120/year to a private American company for search results.
Don’t worry, they’re also super AI-pilled and known for randomly cancelling projects. But I’m sure the search is great or whatever
That’s still full of AI, the filter quality you can see for yourself without an account for a limited amount of searches. If I search an image and the URLs on slop I see in the results with the slop filter enabled that literally contains keywords related to AI slop and KAGI doesn’t filter them out…well, I draw conclusions.
There’s a site for that…let me remember the name… Wikipedia! There it is.
This is the way
I like the old ways because I also see/learn about unexpected things.
AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.
It’s absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It’s like we’re collectively pushing for a mass extinction.
What’s even crazier is for a lot of things we already had a quick result overview. Like if you wanted the definition of a word. For a long time it was the case that you could just “define socks” and you’d get a widget at the top with the definition. Why would you replace that with AI, and have an AI process that request every single time someone wants to define socks instead of just keeping the old widget!?
Indeed.
I’m pretty sure a good percentage of the searches are also just people typing the name of the website they want to access in the search bar. They don’t want any information, just a link. All these searches now consume a massive amout of energy for basically nothing.
“Innovation” lol
I sure would hope that those AI overviews are cached. Querying an LLMs for every repeated search sounds very wasteful
If it didn’t do the AInsearch repeatedly they couldn’t use the billions of daily searches to artificially boost their AI engagement metrics and further inflate this bubble.
But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026… (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)
Ooo, they’re cramming in the ads now eh?
Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.
Fucking hell, lol
I hate it when i need to google programming stuff because Google Gemini LOVES to make stuff up and takes up half a page trying to answer
I know the rankings change like every month, but isn’t Gemini one of the “dumber” ones? I’ve only tried it a few times and got annoyed, but it’s been a while.
Oh it is, it has the same issues as the first few iterations of Chat GPT if you ever used AI in the early days
It’s certainly no leader for software engineering tasks.
stop googling, start ducking.
is “ducking” an actual term now? Come to think of it, ducking doesn’t sound any sillier than googling
All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.
If you need nuance and background, wikipedia is NOT the place to get that. Maybe you can get some good links at the bottom of the page to real information, but that can be hit or miss also.
for any question worth asking
Do you really mean questions about things people might not know that yet have simple answers that don’t need pages of context, are not worth asking?
Okay so how much glue to keep the cheese on my pizza?
4 seems like a good amount.
This question certainly wasn’t worth asking.
I would say that even simple answers at least deserve a source or citation. This is my biggest complaint with AI search, you get an “answer” with no qualification. The citations listed in the AI summary often don’t contain the actual info being presented.
It’s like getting the info from some rando at some party. It’s to be lightly penciled in.
You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.
THIS! I recall somebody doing contract review and having AI summarize the contracts just to see how well they did… The AI left out some really important stuff and also occasionally hallucinated stuff that wasn’t there. Summarizing a contract should be pretty black-n-white – if AI can’t handle that properly, I’m not going to trust its summary of something more complex.
That and TVTropes of course
That website was such a timesink. Amazing.
6? That’s rookie numbers man, you gotta pump those numbers up.
The Wikipedia marathon doesn’t stop til you get to Hitler.
Wikipedia has an app. It’s half of why I Google stuff. Usually a good place for quick answers, and an ok place to start digging in.
I’m half amazed at how bad Google has gotten, but that’s probably just me remembering the early days of web searches.
