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Ask HN: Are there any search engines without AI?

19 points by ochrist ↗ HN
Many search engines are now engaging in using AI to enhance their search, but are there still any general purpose search engines that are not using AI?

I have of course tried to search for this, but if you include the word 'AI' in a search, most search engines believe you are in fact searching for AI.

50 comments

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ketzu
What form of "AI" are you looking to avoid?

Do you want to avoid the company engaging with AI? (Maybe because you don't want your searches being used as training.)

Do you want to avoid LLMs answering your search? I have not seen that widely adopted at all.

Depending on what you consider "AI" the answer might range from all of them to none of them are using AI.

ochrist
Mostly I want to ensure valid and correct search results, and I'm a bit worried that apparently all search engines are now struggling to use AI (ML/LLM) in one form or the other. I don't trust 'AI' in the current stage, and I don't have time (or reason) to teach them.

As you didn't provide a list of applicable search engines, maybe you just proved my point: There are no general purpose search engines that do not employ 'AI' in one form or the other.

I know there are several definitions of AI, so maybe this is really difficult to answer.

Kaijo
This is probably too far in the other direction, in that it seems not to have a web crawler, and only indexes submitted and curated links that meet some useability criteria, but, http://wiby.org/
ochrist
This reminds me of some of the early search engines before Google took over the world. Very nostalgic but yeah: Maybe a bit too much in the other direction :-)
gpderetta
> I want to ensure valid and correct search results,

This hasn't been a thing for a long time, possibly never was.

ketzu
> As you didn't provide a list of applicable search engines, maybe you just proved my point

No, I asked a question to clarify what you want because I find it difficult to understand your problem with search engines right now. All search engines I used recently, including Bing, produce a list of links.

I can make assumptions about what you mean by AI, as it is the hot topic these days, maybe you talk about chatGPT style Large Language Models (LLMs) usage in search engines. Although, only Bing seems to do that right now and only in addition to traditional search. Traditional search is not neccessarily "AI free" depending on how we classify various algorithms and strategies.

> I want to ensure valid and correct search results

In my mind, the correctness of the information within the linked websites has little todo with AI usage of the search engine. Most search results I encounter are valid and correct in the form of the linked website existing and actually having content related to my search.

Modern LLMs might actually be one of the few strategies to actually check correctness of search results at a large scale!

netsroht
AI is a very broad term. Most search engines use some kind of ML for building their search index and also for ranking because it works very well.

> Do you want to avoid LLMs answering your search? I have not seen that widely adopted at all.

It's starting to get more though. The brief answers that sometimes show up right beneath the search term will most likely get improved by leveraging LLMs.

ErikHuisman
Maybe search for "how do search engines work"
hoseja
But what if the search engine has GMOs in it? And maybe it's powered by nucular!
ochrist
I have a good knowledge of how search engines work (having built search myself several times in the past), but the recent use of ChatGPT and other variations of the same theme brought me to the conclusion that there might not be any pure search engines left that are not using 'AI' (or more precisely LLM). People in this community are also worried about these issues, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35601128 so I'm definitely not the only one.
toxicFork
May I ask: why?
ochrist
May I ask why you are asking that instead of answering the question? (btw I have tried to answer some of it in a sibling comment)
diffeomorphism
For the same reason the first question for any tech support, sale etc. is understanding the customer's requirement. Not asking that would be very rude.
welfare
I believe you have to be more specific what kind of AI you refer to.

Machine Learning algorithms, which include some really straight-forward ones like decision trees, linear regression, support vector machines, etc. are pretty ubiquitous.

If you mean generative AI models (e.g. what powers ChatGPT, Dall-E, etc.) then it's a different story.

ochrist
Yeah, maybe my question was a bit too general. I am not sure I would consider decision trees and the like as 'AI' in any sense. They are just another form of algorithms to me. So you are right: ChatGPT and similar tools are the type of technology I'm asking about. From the few answers I got it seems that there are no general search engines left that have not jumped on the LLM and GPT bandwagon. At least nobody has suggested any sites, only questioned me about my motives for asking this.
shmageggy
> I am not sure I would consider decision trees and the like as 'AI' in any sense.

These have always been considered AI, and I don’t see any reason that would change. E.g. https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/contents.html

ochrist
So if I were to replace a large switch statement with a decision table, then that's AI all of a sudden?
moffkalast
It's artificial and makes intelligent decisions, so yes? Even the switch statement was AI before you replaced it.

The definition of an intelligent decision appears as such: A choice or conclusion made after carefully considering various factors, options, and potential outcomes.

If those conclusions are made ahead of time and baked it, does it make any real difference if nobody can tell from the outside? I think not. It's safe to say there's a lot of intelligent decisions in any software in existence.

Wait, it's all AI?

Always has been.

What OP's probably really trying to say is they don't want to use black box AI of sufficient complexity that nobody alive knows how any of it works. That's the only real hard distinction I guess?

welfare
Correct, AI has always been a catch-all for many different algorithms and models for statistical analysis. One definition from the 50's is "the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without explicitly being programmed.”
netdur
technically, there is no search engine powered by AI
ochrist
Interesting. Care to elaborate?
mrweasel
Well it's not really AI is it. There aren't any AIs available. It's all machine learning, large language model and different types of algorithms, all branded as Artificial Intelligens. All the "AIs" available falls into the computer science bucket called AI/ML, so it's not completely wrong, but none are truly intelligent.

AI has been diluted to a point where we need to specify artificial general intelligence (AGI) when we want to refer to AI in the classical sense.

To my knowledge, no search engine, or any other tech is powered by an AGI.

ochrist
Interesting. In another comment user shmageggy claims that decision trees have always been considered AI. I realise that my question should have had a more precise definition of AI.
mrweasel
> In another comment user shmageggy claims that decision trees have always been considered AI

And that's true, if you think of AI as the computer science disciplin. All these things, even machine learning, is part of the broader umbrella of what computer science considers to be part of AI research field.

There's just a rather large difference in "being part of AI research" and actually being an AI. I'd argue that when your phone says it's using AI to help take better photos, then it more branding that AI. Sure they took the technology from the AI research field, but it's not an AI.

antegamisou
Closest I can think of:

https://search.marginalia.nu/

From the homepage:

   This search engine isn't particularly well equipped to answering queries posed like questions, instead try to imagine some text that might appear in the website you are looking for, and search for that.

    Where this search engine really shines is finding small, old and obscure websites about some given topic, perhaps old video games, a mystery, theology, the occult, knitting, computer science, or art.
marginalia_nu
Yeah. It's certified 100% AI-free free ranging ones and zeros. Although I don't really think this sort of "AI veganism" makes much sense.

LLMs/GPTs/whatever are a threat to search engines and the web because the modern web is an unbelievably annoying dumpster fire. They don't really provide better or faster answers, what they provide is an experience that is less annoying. This frog has been simmering for a long while now and we're so used to it that seeing literally anything else seems revolutionary.

You visit a website and need to dismiss a cookie policy notification, a request to show popups, a request to know your location, an invitation to subscribe to a newsletter, a sales rep wants to have a chat with you, then you get random layout shifts for several minutes as all the ad auctions finish, and then just as you're ready to read the content the website crashes and reloads and the circus starts over again. You try to leave, and it hijacks your back button into a redirect loop.

All of this is of course intentional, because it makes you stay on the page longer so that Google thinks you're reading the content. It's a fractal of dark patterns that's made for humans in the same sense a zoo is made for animals.

If anything, there's a glimmer of hope AI may fix this by flooding the bullshit market with so much low effort crap everyone doing this runs out of business.

Blogs, personal websites and stuff made by humans are probably the least affected by this.

stavros
Not only that, but it's so filled with SEO spam that you can't find anything nowadays. The best source of information is some random blogspot article some random dude has written on any given topic, but there's zero chance of finding it among the StackOverflow scrapers.
JPLeRouzic
> "need to dismiss a cookie policy notification, a request to show popups, a request to know your location, an invitation to subscribe to a newsletter, a sales rep wants to have a chat with you, then you get random layout shifts for several minutes as all the ad auctions finish, and then just as you're ready to read the content the website crashes and reloads and the circus starts over again."

You are describing the future of LLM/GPT search!

For example EU wants your first step to be implemented on LLM/GPT with also a step you missed: Certify you are not a minor [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/17/eu-lawmakers-call-for-rules-...

abhayhegde
> Blogs, personal websites and stuff made by humans are probably the least affected by this.

Until maybe the AI gets trained enough to emulate the styles of famous authors (which it already does for a few like Paul Graham etc).

But you are absolutely right how terrible the web search has been. I absolutely hate SEO recommended results. Thank you very much for Marginalia. I've been using it to discover text-only content rich websites.

marginalia_nu
> Until maybe the AI gets trained enough to emulate the styles of famous authors (which it already does for a few like Paul Graham etc).

Yeah I actually don't think this is a problem. There just isn't much incentive to emulating a personal website. Maybe someone will, but they don't get much traffic and don't make any money.

ochrist
Brilliant. I don't think I have ever heard of this before. Will definitely check this out.
marginalia_nu
It's still some way away from being viable as a daily driver search engine. It's gotten a lot better, but it's still fairly limited from its small index.
yawnxyz
would you consider page rank AI?
ochrist
No, that is an algorithm. I would not consider that AI at all.
theusus
https://www.startpage.com/ doesn't use AI currently. And it proxies Google search results.
ochrist
Thank you. I have been looking at startpage earlier on, but will give it a closer look (currently I am mostly using DDG).
ketzu
If they proxy google search results, wouldn't google suffice for the original question?
calme_toi
For me, it’s ask questions in r/ask Reddit or r/eli5 if you are not in a hurry of getting the answers.

Asking questions in forums has been a habit I picked up recently.

The process of writing it down and describing it to other people really helps a lot than I expected.

andyjohnson0
Check out Kagi [1]. I've been using it since Jan 2022 and am very happy with it. They have AI tools for document summarising etc but the core search seems to be free of obvious AI intrusions, as well as being ad-free and privacy-respecting.

[1] https://kagi.com

sintezcs
+1 for Kagi, using them for more than a year and I’m happy
ajdude
I came here to recommend Kagi. We should support search engines that aren't ad incentivized or trying to mine our personal data.
visarga
grep, if you consider regexes not AI