I can’t remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.
Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
The reason I mention it is because we’re sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you’d have something like what Google was at its peak before “do no evil” got painted over.
Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines’ databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.
No, I don’t see mention of it being an application but like Dogpile is a web-based collector.
I did a search myself, but (given how searching sucks now) couldn’t find anything. Lots of hits for search engines themselves, but getting past that to other methods back then is difficult.
It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
I thought it was Autonomy. You installed a program, instructed puppies agents, logged out, and while you were offline the puppies searched through several engines. Next time you logged in the findings waited for you. That was the time of 56k modems and metered connections.
Search used to be so good. I had an old Honda civic that suddenly wouldn’t start. It wasn’t the starter, alternator, or battery. I managed to find a forum post with my exact issue, which was that a small rubber piece on the clutch pressed a button to “tell” the starter it was okay to start. Twenty minutes later I had zip tied a piece of plastic into place and had a working car again.
If I tried to diagnose that same issue today, it’d be dozens of SEO garbage slop sites without any actual useful information.
I was thinking the same thing recently. It’s not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it’s not just AI.
All sorts of paywalls especially in news sites.
Everything is getting centralized into a few sites and they’re usually either not poorly indexable or not at all (Discord, facebook, X, Instagram and so on)
Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon) also struggles with search engines.
People trying to sell you shit, create a brand even more than before. Because of this all sorts of SEO optimization crap is done like writing BS articles nobody cares about.
AI slop.
Search engines have gotten better of getting rid of “illegal stuff”.
A lot of sites are just presentational bloat with no substance. Very cool looking landing pages with all sorts of cool animations but when you need to actually find the information that you need… the same UI usually gets in the way.
Oh and now we’re getting into age verification crap also yay
An example of number 4, there’s a poster I’ve seen on reddit that’s posting very relevant content, but then every post ends with “@xxxxxxxx on all socials”. It just takes the whole thing from content I might want to engage with to the exact opposite.
I tried giving minimal information and still got similar results.
When I think about what got worse about the internet, it’s mostly the life stories before recipes, the novel length pages to maybe answer a simple question, and pretty much anything else related to SEO.
5-10 years ago, you could be pretty sure this was a thing that actually needed checked, since the post about the clutch safety switch was posted by a real person who presumably had the same problem as you and fixed it with this method.
Now, there’s no way to know if that’s actually the case, or if “clutch safety switch” is just a likely string of words to feed someone who is having car trouble. You might get lucky, or you might get sent on eight consecutive goose chases because an LLM fundamentally doesn’t know what factual knowledge is, it only knows how to reorder and regurgitate things that other people have said in other contexts.
Ecosia have planted 250,000+ trees so far and publish their accounts every month. I can’t think of a better option, unless there is a niche requirement.
Isn’t that hyperbole rather than truth? They’re still carbon negative.
They don’t provide AI by default (at least, I don’t get it). So people like us can continue to not use AI and the hundreds of million who use it every day can still support tree planting.
I don’t like AI, but if they don’t add it they could risk limiting their reach and environmental goals.
AI companies do not release any numbers themselves for carbon emissions. Therefore, companies that use AI cannot in any certainty claim to be carbon negative or neutral, because they have to count the supply chain emissions as well.
not adding AI does not stifle environmental goals, in fact you can only truthfully claim to strive for carbon goals if you do not use AI. After all, there is a reason that Microsoft abandoned their emission goals with AI as the cited reason first and foremost, which shows how incredibly dirty AI can be, even if no one releases any sensible metrics.
AI companies do not release any numbers themselves for carbon emissions.
I think the EU is even helping them keep that “operationally sensitive information” private, which is a shame.
not adding AI does not stifle environmental goals
I can’t agree or disagree here. I know the demand for AI is huge: hundreds of millions of users per day and at least a billion per week. If Ecosia is seen not to have this feature, I would consider it possible that it hurts their adoption and therefore their goals.
which shows how incredibly dirty AI can be, even if no one releases any sensible metrics.
Yes. I’m not sure how much solace the “world greenest AI” slogan can really offer in that context. https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-ai/ - but when I’m recommending search to someone, I recommend Ecosia over Google, Bing, DDG, Qwant, Mojeek, etc. simply because I think they are more of a net positive than the other options.
Who knows, maybe in a year or twos time I’ll look back and regret it when more information surfaces. But they’ve been sensible enough until now with their operational choices to reach tree-planting goals.
Go to https://ecosia.org in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.
I use them with AI disabled, but it should be the default setting.
Edit: I just did a couple test searches and didn’t get the AI overview. Don’t know what triggers it.
Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.
For what it’s worth i’ve been using them for like a year and I clear my cookies often and never got this AI overview thingy you’re talking about. I actually have no clue how it even looks like.
It’s not me downvoting you, by the way. Anyway, AI is the antithesis of eco-friendly so I share the criticism. But given their success to date I defer to their sense for pragmatism and results.
Friends don’t let friends use Google.
I can’t remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.
Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
The reason I mention it is because we’re sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you’d have something like what Google was at its peak before “do no evil” got painted over.
Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines’ databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.
Was it MetaCrawler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
SearXNG is the spiritual successor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG
No, I don’t see mention of it being an application but like Dogpile is a web-based collector.
I did a search myself, but (given how searching sucks now) couldn’t find anything. Lots of hits for search engines themselves, but getting past that to other methods back then is difficult.
It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
I thought it was Autonomy. You installed a program, instructed puppies agents, logged out, and while you were offline the puppies searched through several engines. Next time you logged in the findings waited for you. That was the time of 56k modems and metered connections.
Search used to be so good. I had an old Honda civic that suddenly wouldn’t start. It wasn’t the starter, alternator, or battery. I managed to find a forum post with my exact issue, which was that a small rubber piece on the clutch pressed a button to “tell” the starter it was okay to start. Twenty minutes later I had zip tied a piece of plastic into place and had a working car again.
If I tried to diagnose that same issue today, it’d be dozens of SEO garbage slop sites without any actual useful information.
I was thinking the same thing recently. It’s not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it’s not just AI.
Oh and now we’re getting into age verification crap also yay
An example of number 4, there’s a poster I’ve seen on reddit that’s posting very relevant content, but then every post ends with “@xxxxxxxx on all socials”. It just takes the whole thing from content I might want to engage with to the exact opposite.
I asked gpt5 and it told me to check the clutch safety switch. The thing you fixed.
I tried giving minimal information and still got similar results.
When I think about what got worse about the internet, it’s mostly the life stories before recipes, the novel length pages to maybe answer a simple question, and pretty much anything else related to SEO.
5-10 years ago, you could be pretty sure this was a thing that actually needed checked, since the post about the clutch safety switch was posted by a real person who presumably had the same problem as you and fixed it with this method.
Now, there’s no way to know if that’s actually the case, or if “clutch safety switch” is just a likely string of words to feed someone who is having car trouble. You might get lucky, or you might get sent on eight consecutive goose chases because an LLM fundamentally doesn’t know what factual knowledge is, it only knows how to reorder and regurgitate things that other people have said in other contexts.
I agree with the larger point you’re making, but chatbots are getting better at referencing posts / websites from which they’re taking a solution.
That’s if and only if of course they used a web search tool to answer, and if that website is still alive — made less likely due to AI.
But for debugging something like this, it is actually helpful for now with citations enabled.
I think the old aggregator you were thinking of was dogpile.com
I know the name, but no, it was an actual program on the computer.
Hmm…interesting but I got no clue then
DuckDuckGo and Ecosia?
Ecosia have planted 250,000+ trees so far and publish their accounts every month. I can’t think of a better option, unless there is a niche requirement.
they burn all their efforts by pushing genAI tech on their platform
Isn’t that hyperbole rather than truth? They’re still carbon negative.
They don’t provide AI by default (at least, I don’t get it). So people like us can continue to not use AI and the hundreds of million who use it every day can still support tree planting.
I don’t like AI, but if they don’t add it they could risk limiting their reach and environmental goals.
AI companies do not release any numbers themselves for carbon emissions. Therefore, companies that use AI cannot in any certainty claim to be carbon negative or neutral, because they have to count the supply chain emissions as well.
not adding AI does not stifle environmental goals, in fact you can only truthfully claim to strive for carbon goals if you do not use AI. After all, there is a reason that Microsoft abandoned their emission goals with AI as the cited reason first and foremost, which shows how incredibly dirty AI can be, even if no one releases any sensible metrics.
Who knows, maybe in a year or twos time I’ll look back and regret it when more information surfaces. But they’ve been sensible enough until now with their operational choices to reach tree-planting goals.
Go to https://ecosia.org in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.
I use them with AI disabled, but it should be the default setting.
Edit: I just did a couple test searches and didn’t get the AI overview. Don’t know what triggers it.
For what it’s worth i’ve been using them for like a year and I clear my cookies often and never got this AI overview thingy you’re talking about. I actually have no clue how it even looks like.
It’s not me downvoting you, by the way. Anyway, AI is the antithesis of eco-friendly so I share the criticism. But given their success to date I defer to their sense for pragmatism and results.
Startpage and Mojeek.
DDG has contracts w Microslop.
Startpage uses google btw, Mojeek is decent. (I like Mojeek backend with SearXNG.)
That’s disappointing. But Mojeek is kind of unusable tbh.
true