• maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    So I’ve been ranting lately (as have others) about how big tech is moving on from the open user-driven internet and aiming to build its own new thing as an AI interface to all the hoovered data (rather than conventional search engines) …

    which makes this (and the underlying Bing going down) feel rather eerie.

    How far away (in time or probability) is a complete collapse of the big search-engines … as in they just aren’t there any more?

    • Gamers_Mate@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      I think having all the search engines being front ends for just bing and google has just revealed an obvious weakness.

    • Gamers_Mate@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      Funny thing is the way I found out bing was down is I searched for startpage in duckduckgo to try it thinking it might be a good alternative but when DDG wasnt working I tried it on ecosia. which was also down once I finally opened start page it wasn’t working either. Its all bing all the way down.

  • HornedMeatBeast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I thought it was just me, I thought something wrong was going on in my Windows installation.

    EA app is also dead in the water for me, my library is not loading. It knows I have 4 games installed but all the names and icons are blank.

    Can’t even launch the games directly from their own exe.

  • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Okay.

    Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

    I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

    What other options are there?

    • sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        It’s a hobby as it is.

        If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.

      • Jarix@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it

        (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.

    • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back

        • jaybone@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Yeah I was confused by that choice of words. Train is for ML and AIs. Search engines used to need crawlers to run regularly because, you know, shit changes.

        • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Nope, like it used to index from google but now it doesn’t. DuckDuckGo gets all its results from bing

      • mholiv@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Brave search is run by crypto bros. I’d rather use Kagi or DDG or even Google.

        • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          I would use Kagi if it was free. It might be run by crypto bros but doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. Google and bing own 99% of the search engine market. Competition that doesn’t rely on those two is always good

            • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              Personally I don’t want to support Microsoft bing either. This website you shared doesn’t lump together all the bing using search engines (DuckDuckGo and yahoo). How is supporting Microsoft a wayyy better choice. This isn’t some pump and dump scheme. Your criticism should be of the company (they added referall links to their browser and the owner has some nasty political takes on top of running another privacy invasive company).

              • mholiv@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                2 years ago

                It does not matter if it lumps them together or not. Google still has 90% and they’re not Bing. Yandax another ~3% and they’re not Bing. That means at max Bing is 7% if you combine the rest. 3.5% vs 7% does not change the root of my argument.

                Those points you make against Brave are valid though. I just run into too many people who are in the Brave cult and it’s concerning.

          • tranceFusion@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            Well they were dishonest about the product behavior in multiple cases, such as adding referral links to search results. That makes it a bad product.

    • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      That’s a nice hobby

      I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.

      Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.

        • vale@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Take a look at Ollama.ai, just follow the installation instructions. A decent GPU is recommended, and the models are around 10GB iirc.

        • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Most of 7b-8b models run just fine in 4bits quant and won’t use more than 4 or 5 GB of VRAM.

          The only important metric is the amount of VRAM as the model must be loaded in VRAM for fast inference.

          You could use CPU and RAM but it is really painfully slow.

          If you got an Apple Silicon Mac it could be even simpler.

          • Venia Silente@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            I have an Intel Celeron Mobile laptop with iGPU and, I think, 256MB VRAM. How many bs does that get me for the LLM?

            Only half-joking. That’s my still functional old daily driver now serving as homelab

            • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              Well, I got a good news and a bad news.

              The bad news is you won’t do shit with that my dear friend.

              The good news is that you won’t need it because the duck is back.

    • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      There’s a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.

      It looks promising because they have their own index, but it’s a bit slow sometimes.

      • AeroLemming@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I only tried one example, so the sample size is pretty small, but that search engine seems pretty bad. I tried looking up “rust bevy points” in both Google and Yep. The first Google result is a library to draw points in Bevy and the rest are pretty relevant. Yep simply doesn’t have that result at all and all of their results are just generic results about Bevy.

        I tried DDG for the sake of comparison and it’s somewhere in-between. The results are mostly relevant and the “correct” result is still on the first page.

      • noodle (he/him)@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models

        ugh

    • Evehn@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.

    • Shellbeach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about

        • Twig@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Based on the downdetector conversation, it’s “working intermittently”. I managed to get one search through on bing and a bunch of failures. No successes for duckduckgo.

        EDIT: Also, while I was at least getting to the Bing main page without problems before – just getting errors when attempting to search – now even the main page is loading extremely slowly.

    • bean@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Companies need to stop using TWITTER for anything. They’re walling up the garden we built, and it’s a cesspool of bots and run by a megalomaniac charlatan.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’m kind of surprised that the Bing guys don’t seem to have a system status page (that I could find) and haven’t managed to have any kind of status message put on their main page.

      Finally answering the question “If Bing was down, would anyone notice”?

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Bing guys don’t seem to have a system status page (that I could find)

      Microsoft’s current MO is “very basic information is a privilege, not something you as the user should have access to easily”.

      It’s why I have to use PowerShell and Graph to get half the relevant data I need, because they won’t just put it in the god damn admin panels.

    • sturlabragason@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      It seems my (very hated choice) of an Bing independent search engine is paying off; Brave Search.

      Before you start telling me the CEO is a fucking dickwad, I know. Most leadership types are.

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
        0·
        2 years ago

        I was paying for Kagi until recently, but they keep working on functionality I’m not interested in rather than lowering their prices. Other than that it was a fine experience, but too pricey, and the argument that that’s the cost of running a search engine doesn’t hold when they choose to develop all kinds of extra stuff.

        I wish I liked SearXNG better, but the results are sadly not that great for me.

      • Katzastrophe@feddit.deEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Honest question, in what way do you think your comment is contributing to the conversation? At best it’s a recommendation bundled with a brag, which will only make people hate the thing you’re talking about even more, and at worst you’re making fun of people for simply using a different search engine.

        You could have said something like “Fyi, Brave doesn’t use a bigger search engine as its base, so if you need to look something up rn you can use their search engine”, much nicer, not patronizing, and actually helpful

        • aasatru@kbin.earth
          0·
          2 years ago

          I think there’s a lot of us who would ideally want to avoid both Microsoft and Google, and now that Bing is having problems it’s more relevant than ever. I don’t really see how the comment is braggy or patronising.

          That said, I’m not comfortable using Brave either. I wish Mozilla or the Internet Archive would launch a search engine. Maybe both in cooperation. Then again, it would require Mozilla to bite the hand that feeds it.

          • ekZepp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            Totally agreed. Hell, I’m even considering a full dive in Linux for the future. Anyone know if is possible to use something like Valve’s Proton to have windows programs run smoothly? (wine is kinda heavy)

            • kurcatovium@lemm.eeEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              It depends on what programs and how much do you need them. Some are fine with plain wine, some need more tinkering. There are multiple ways, starting from lutris, through bottles, to steam’s “non-steam game”. But still there are some SW that just won’t work on linux no matter what.

          • Katzastrophe@feddit.deEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            The reason why I interpret the comment as patronizing is how it is formulated as a personal comment, the choice of language, about how their choice of engine is hated, even though the comment they are responding to has not made an insinuation that choosing a search engine not based on the bigger ones is a bad thing (nor has it mentioned Brave at all), as well as how it is not contributing anything to the conversation apart from the information that the writer in question:

            A. Uses Brave

            B. Apparently made the ‘unpopular’ choice to use an independent search engine

            C. Is aware of controversies surrounding Brave’s leadership

            None of this information is a response or even reinterpretation of the prior text, as such it is akin to someone shouting “Well I use Android!!” in the middle of a conversation about how to solve a problem with FaceID

            And about an independent search engine, I would also much prefer more options, but as you have already said, the organizations with the biggest potential are also currently quite unwilling to do anything to solve the situation

            • aasatru@kbin.earth
              0·
              2 years ago

              Yeah, fair enough. I read the post more favourably, as a “at least my alternative is still working well for me”, but then also being aware that every time Brave is mentioned someone jumps on and reminds everyone that the CEO is a jerk, so it saves us the time by addressing it right away.

              Both interpretations are valid I guess. :)

        • sturlabragason@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Well I didn’t intend for it to come off as to dickish or patronizing, but I guess I can see that now, and for that I am sorry. It might be my toxic personality bleeding trough :D

          But you are totally correct, I could have phrased my comment wayyy better.

          Also;

          I don’t really like Brave at all, I don’t like Mozilla either. It’s more that I am forced to use something that doesn’t interrupt my productivity. Frankly I don’t like the state of the internet, and especially browsers, one of the the most important aspects of the experience. I’d really prefer to use something that is akin to Linux when it comes to browsers, i.e. not run by a board of ass wipes. Same for my search engine. I’m glad for the parts of it that are modernized-retro, i.e. easily being able to self-host/web-host containerized stuff, add stuff to your RSS feed, Lemmy etc. I’d like a browser that embodies some of that. I host a bunch of stuff on a Ubuntu laptop running Traefik and some containers… Gives me a warm feeling.

          • Katzastrophe@feddit.deEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            No worries, it’s understandable that sometimes we just accidentally let the inner asshole out.

            My comment was also not something I usually write, but rather an accidental rant on my part. I’ve seen an increase in rude comments in recent times, and your comment was unfortunately the last drop in the bucket so to speak.

            Long story short, I’m sorry for ranting at you, it wasn’t something I should have done in hindsight, and I intend to not let it happen again

  • FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I was screen sharing to someone when this happened and they asked why I don’t use Google when other search engines are this unreliable. Despite me explaining it wasn’t the usual, It was still pretty embarrassing lol. Wonder if DDG has the resources for an independent index.