This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The search industry continues to undergo big changes. Leta will not be able to follow and will likely become less useful over time.
None of the "Big changes" of late have improved the user experience, absolutely nobody who'd use Leta would complain that it doesn't have AI summaries or whatever other bullshit.
Does this feel like a big cop out to anyone else? How weird...
I doubt they’re referring to feature parity WRT machine learning summaries and the like. “Less useful over time” is more likely a gentle way of saying ungraceful performance degradation.
Escalation in the SEO wars is accelerating. Various culprits but obviously generative NLP technologies designed specifically to sound human are nukes in this metaphor.
Any index developer that isn’t willing or can’t afford to continue fighting the war must choose:
If the index is the developer’s only product, the only real risk of option 1 is damaging their street cred.
In OP’s case, the index was not even their core product, so option 2 was the wiser decision.
No way! Is that why it’s been timing out a lot lately? Oh man, I like Leta. I’ve been using it for several months now. Sigh, I guess it’s back to startpage (and ddg).
I recently discovered Marginalia and I am gonna test it now
I just need a search engine the will also give calculator and unit conversation results. Everything else sounds be search results.
At this point, it's been too many years that I will just query "76 f in c" or "2500*12/3" from my url bar, so this I appreciate the most modest "intelligence" from my web browser.
Literally everything else makes my experience worse, though.
So I'm taking recommendations for more search engines to try out. I don't know why I start page bothers me so much, but it feels like the results my ISP would give me through DNS capture a decade and two ago.
you might be able to wire up https://www.wolframalpha.com/ to your search bar for those sort of conversions or calculations. I love using it for time conversions or time zone conversions.
DuckDuckGo still does that, and it generates UUIDs too, which is nice.
I never thought to use a search engine to generate a UUID. Interesting.
There's also 4get that is similar to SearXNG. https://4get.ca/
I have not tried it much personally though.
git repo: https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get
and Mojeek =^]
I hope this is a joke, because it's the most useful search engine I have ever used in the past decade.
Cannot speak for anyone else, but I have been having problems with my preferred SearXNG instances returning garbage results that have nothing to do with what I searched. Before anyone asks, no I am unable to self-host my own personal instance and don't feel like changing settings every time I close and reopen my browser.
For me disable bing and yahoo make better. And google look like not return result anymore.
Edit: Setting saved in cookie. If browser autodelete cookie, add exclude for searxng instance domain.
I'll have to look up how to do that cookie autodelete thing because I clearly never thought of anything like that. Thanks for the idea.
For firefox: settings -> privacy & security -> cookies and site data -> manage exceptions
self-hosting implies making the service available for yourself with tunnels or port forwards. Yet, I've been running searxng container and accessing it via localhost without issues. I could write a guide and share my docker compose file..
I was just starting to use it, damn. I wonder if google has tried to take them down for using their search results...
I was thinking of setting up my own searxng instance, but I know they do have problems with google results now.
Not sure about goog results but I love my SearxNG service. Works well, fast enough for me.
Misread as their vpn service and had a mini heart attack.
Similar privacy can be achieved through the combination of a VPN and a privacy-focused browser. We have therefore decided to discontinue Leta and continue to advance the development of state-of-the-art of VPNs and browser privacy
I never knew this SE was even a thing.
I'm adding this to the list of things that I would have used if not for learning about it from a shutdown announcement.
This was unfortunately expected.
Kinda expected, I always disable leta when I setup a mullvad browser.
The biggest killer was not being able to go to the original engine. Let's search for the image of a duck, oh leta doesn't do images, ok open this search in Google... Not a option either. Adds lots of friction
I like the DDG option of having a g! Escape to Google with my query if I need it.
Man I use Mullvad's VPN and their DNS servers and I had no idea they even made this!
Seems like they didn't advertise it very well I knew about their browser but never heard of this.
They made it the default search engine on their browser, which is now not working. Heh
