We have a couple of projects at work that utilize AI and I will occasionally get useful information from Brave Search’s AI-powered answers tool. But aside from that, I don’t use any AI products at all. I think the tech is barely functional for the vast majority of proposed use cases.
➝ Source: m.slashdot.org
Brave:
Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.
Now they just need to convince Apple to offer it as a default search option in Safari so I can start hounding my friends and family to switch.
➝ Source: brave.com
Michael Tsai:
I’ve long been in the camp saying that Google’s search was way ahead. I’m not sure what’s happened, but in the last few months I’ve noticed a huge decline in the quality of its results. I now regularly repeat my searches with DuckDuckGo to make sure I’m not missing something. Sometimes the problem is SEO spam, where the page I want isn’t on the first page or two of results, but perhaps if I clicked Next enough times I would eventually see it. Other times, I’m searching for something rare, Google only finds a handful of matches, and it appears that the page in question is not even indexed.
I don’t use Google as often as I used to. I switched to DuckDuckGo a handful of years ago and most recently switched to SearX early last year. I still fallback to DuckDuckGo and Google, though, when I’m having a hard time finding what I’m looking for.
Here’s the thing, web search isn’t good anymore. It doesn’t matter what service I use, the results are peppered with SEO spam and mediocre links. What I think I want is a search engine that only gave me results from small, independent weblogs.
More often than not I just want to find information from a normal person that’s writing about something because they care deeply about it. And that’s very difficult to find in search engines today.
➝ Source: mjtsai.com
I agree with much of what is said in this piece, but this bit of misinformation jumped out at me:
DuckDuckGo is not a search engine. It’s more aptly described as a search engine frontend. They do handle features like bangs and instant answers internally, but their actual search results come from third-parties like Bing. They don’t operate a crawler for their search results, and are not independent.
I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere as well, but it’s not entirely true. DuckDuckGo does operate a web crawler for their search results. They have partnered with third-parties like Bing, but my understanding is that this is to supplement the results they provide in searches.
➝ Source: drewdevault.com
Apple still doesn’t let you add a custom search engine to Safari, which is one of the reasons I started using Firefox on iOS a few months ago. But xSearch gives you the next best thing. You can add search engines to Safari that are triggered with a command in the address bar.
For example, I setup my SearX instance with “.”. So I can select the address bar, enter a period, space, and then my search term. I still want to see Apple add native support for custom search engines, but I guess I’ll have to settle with this for now.
➝ Source: apps.apple.com
From the announcement:
Under the hood, nearly all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect, but without compromising their privacy. Tailcat does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to improve search results.
I signed up for the waitlist. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years and have been very happy, but I’ll still give this alternative a try to see how it compares.
➝ Source: brave.com
Faster review times, subscription pricing, and search ads — all of which would be huge news on their own — are all coming to the App Store. I think these changes will be good overall. The faster review times give developers a little more assurance that bug fixes will go live in a timely manner and search ads will help developers find a steady stream of new customers. I’m still a little lukewarm on the subscription pricing change, though.
My biggest fear is that developers will ask too much for their apps and I’ll be forced to pay an unreasonable monthly fee in order to continue using them. In an ideal world, for me at least, developers of high-quality productivity apps will charge a yearly fee at a price point similar to what they charge to purchase the app today.
I’m excited to see how these changes play out, but I expect they’ll result in a more healthy ecosystem for developers and users alike. And with announcements like this coming the week before WWDC, it feels like we’re in for one hell of a keynote. Phil Schiller even referenced this at the beginning of his call with John Gruber:
We’ve got a bunch of App Store/developer-related announcements for WWDC next week, but frankly, we’ve got a busy enough keynote that we decided we’re not going to cover those in the keynote. And rather, just cover them in the afternoon and throughout the week.
I’m really glad Phil Schiller was put in charge of the App Store.
Stephen Hackett:
Google Now, Alexa and Cortana have all removed the boundaries between what information is local and what’s not. Apple’s not quite there with iOS 9, but I think iOS 10 could push it to the next level. Why maintain two services, with overlapping and somewhat confusing feature sets, when a single, unified experience could get the job done?
It would make perfect sense for Apple to merge Siri and Spotlight alongside the introduction of the rumored Siri SDK.
