Search engines have become an increasingly important educational tool. By just typing a few keywords into a search engine text-box, finding information has become an easy exercise. However, some people cannot use search engines effectively for
Search has its own bitter lesson
Human incentives to make content findable to your search matter more than technology
The enshittification of online search? Privacy and quality of Google, Bing and Apple in coding advice
Even though currently being challenged by ChatGPT and other large-language models (LLMs), Google Search remains one of the primary means for many individuals to find information on the internet. Interestingly, the way that we retrieve information on the web has hardly changed ever since Google was established in 1998, raising concerns as to Google's dominance in search and lack of competition. If the market for search was sufficiently competitive, then we should probably see a steady increase in search quality over time as well as alternative approaches to the Google's approach to search. However, hardly any research has so far looked at search quality, which is a key facet of a competitive market, especially not over time. In this report, we conducted a relatively large-scale quantitative comparison of search quality of 1,467 search queries relating to coding advice in October 2023. We focus on coding advice because the study of general search quality is difficult, with the aim of learning more about the assessment of search quality and motivating follow-up research into this important topic. We evaluate the search quality of Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and Apple Search, with a special emphasis on Apple Search, a widely used search engine that has never been explored in previous research. For the assessment of search quality, we use two independent metrics of search quality: 1) the number of trackers on the first search result, as a measure of privacy in web search, and 2) the average rank of the first Stack Overflow search result, under the assumption that Stack Overflow gives the best coding advice. Our results suggest that the privacy of search results is higher on Bing than on Google and Apple. Similarly, the quality of coding advice -- as measured by the average rank of Stack Overflow -- was highest on Bing.
IndieSearch
I built a prototype for client-side, fully distributed search for the IndieWeb — check out the demo & a little explainer.
atproto-aware concept search engine
a mockup of a webpage search engine that only indexes webpages that are referenced in atproto records. Surfaces related links based on social and community context.
Why Google’s New AI-Saturated Search Page Will Be A Disaster
Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has…
Paper page - Knowledge Navigator: LLM-guided Browsing Framework for Exploratory Search in Scientific Literature
Join the discussion on this paper page
Curated retrieval versus open web search in public AI information...
Public institutions increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to answer citizens' questions, often pairing a curated knowledge base with live web search, yet whether the sources behind these...
lieu — alexander cobleigh / cblgh.org
a purpose-built community search engine and how to use it
Search privately and without ads — Uruky
Search privately and without ads using Uruky, the private search engine.
Kuba's Journal - Launching Lycan - a search tool for your likes
You know that feeling when you’re trying to find a post (skeet) that you’ve seen some time ago, and you can’t find it? It happens to me all the time. Let’s say someone from the Bluesky dev team wrote some piece of technical detail, or some ATProto developer from the community posted about their project - I know more or less what I’m looking for, but not enough to find it in the global search. But I know I probably gave it a like, because I like everything 😅
Web search· Ollama Blog
A new web search API is now available in Ollama. Ollama provides a generous free tier of web searches for individuals to use, and higher rate limits are available via Ollama’s cloud.
Infoenon — Where Information Meets Phenomenon
Search publisher-controlled information, public knowledge, and the open social web.
Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search
Doing the mental work of connecting the dots across multiple web queries appears to help people understand the material better compared to an AI summary.
Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search
Doing the mental work of connecting the dots across multiple web queries appears to help people understand the material better compared to an AI summary.