Lately I have experienced something distressing. I am getting wildly varying results from different search engines. I am not entirely sure why that might be. It might be due to increased use of “artificial intelligence”. It might be because the search engine providers have different policies, particularly with respect to source they consider unreliable for one reason or another.
In other words they might be protecting me.
What I want in a search engine is a reliable and complete index of the information that is available on the Internet. I don’t want to be protected from knowledge that is bad for me from a search engine. I rely on online security companies for security and search engines for indices of information.
I’m starting to use multiple different search engines to do cross-comparisons which is a time-sucker. One of the challenges is that different search engines are not necessarily different search engines. Some search engines are actually frontends for Google or Bing.
On Google, at least, advertisers can buy top positions on the list of sites produced. Google also censors political sites its staff doesn’t like.
Searches are influenced by past searches. I am guessing how those algorithms work is different with each engine and perhaps by the people who choose to use that particular engine. While there isn’t evidence of which I am aware the google censors political sites on its own it does comply with laws and it does try to not allow deceptive advertising and nudity when not being knowingly posted by the person portrayed.
Steve
Which search queries did you see this?
I have read recently many sources of data (reddit, twitter, quora) have recently restricted their “data” from being scrapped by search engines – to prevent those companies data to be used to build AI models without being compensated; (it is important to note while much of the content on the web is user-generated, it belongs to the platform).
Before AI models, those companies were incentivized to let their data be scrapped to get search engines to drive traffic to their sites; with the alternate source of revenue of AI companies paying to train on the data, the incentive is to keep the data from being scrapped.