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Comment by Imustaskforhelp

10 hours ago

Another comment here but here are all the search engines I looked at:

1. DDG 2. Kagi 3. Brave 4. Ecosia 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia 7. Mojeek 8. Yandex.ru

from 1-5 all referenced .net before .dev and DDG referenced .net before github , marinalia didn't give me either .net, .dev or gh link but rather docker.com or some other tech articles

Mojeek and Yandex.ru DID give me .dev links before .net at the time of writing.

I literally opened these two as a joke especially Mojeek not expecting too much But I just know names of lots of search engines so I tried.

Mojeek and Yandex.ru have surprised me although I think yandex.ru might have referenced the .dev because of https://nanoclaw.dev/ru/ as it points to this.

Mojeek seems interesting now from this observation

I also wanted to try swisscows but looks like they have become 100% premium as I do remember being able to search for free but now a popup comes.

I also tried baidu (chinese search engine) and it gave results in chinese and firefox translate sort of stuttered and didn't work when I tried to translate, I don't know chinese so pasted it in claude and it doesn't link to either .net or .dev but rather chinese links.

Now with all of this observation, I think that we do know one Provider (Mojeek) who won. A lot of these on these lists are actually not independent except Mojeek and brave and probably yandex.ru

SO I guess the main takeaway from this could be that Independent search engines can be interesting. They can still be hit or miss but the more independent search engines the merrier given that some might miss but some will also hit.

My comment definitely feels like a good reputation bonus for mojeek. Well anything for more independent search engines imo. I looked at their about me and it seems that they are a single person (Marc Smith). Fascinating stuff

I know marginalia_nu is on hn so maybe marginalia and mojeek can share some index together. Anyways this was a fun exciting experiment to do. I hope the community tries out other search engines if I may have missed any and share insights if a particular search engine gives interesting results.

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Imustaskforhelp

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roywiggins  10 hours ago

I think you put more effort into this comment than the entire OP, which was clearly written by Claude.

  • Imustaskforhelp  10 hours ago

    Now that does say something about the world, doesn't it?

    I think this had just made me curious so yeah haha

    I mean one thing I am not understanding is why they would write an article with AI tho. They still prompted AI, might as well give us what they prompted or just write under <300 words or less. I mean its literally twitter (refuse to call it X)

    Or like make a 2 minute video with screenshare just talking to the camera about it like they might've with claude perhaps.

    They also have discord, They could have literally given a free contributor to help write the article from such video or concerns and credit them properly. I mean, heck I could've written the article for free for just a credit at this point where I got so invested haha.

    I genuinely don't understand why you would prompt an article/text out of all things with AI. I hope I never get persuaded with this dark side lol.

    • roywiggins  10 hours ago

      My guesses in no particular order:

      1) this style genuinely is preferred by lots of people on X/Twitter so you might as well lean into it

      2) People who spend a lot of time with LLMs think this sort of writing is normal or even standard just through overexposure, a sort of pseudo social proof

      2b) People who spend a lot of time with other people who use LLMs think this is how humans write (actual social proof)

      3) People are insecure about their writing ability and find the non-judgmental non-human LLM editor soothing

      4) people are lazy

      5) people aren't lazy per se but they know writing has been so devalued that they aren't going to spend time on it that they don't need to

      6) their first experience of writing was trying to hit word count requirements in grade school and that stuck

      7) Visibly using LLMs is becoming a shibboleth for a social group on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's a marker that you are dogfooding the crappy AI tools you're developing and selling. Under this theory, being visibly LLM output is actually intentional: "look ma, no hands- all NanoClaw!"

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