Just today a number of my searches had me wondering whether AI slop generators were generating articles and suitably titled websites in response to the searches I was making on my search engine.

I don’t know how they’d do that without being able to snatch search terms I make to my search engine (DDG, with its AI features disabled), just don’t find it plausible that anyone is bothering to generate hundreds of sites on extremely narrow aspects of obscure topics, even if semi-automated.

And they often have the same question worded slightly differently three or four times in the first paragraph.

Increasingly find that search engines ignore instructions to filter by date or site, which coupled with ignoring all operands will kill off their utility entirely.

Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.

Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.

I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.

Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.

Yup.

DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.

Aye.

Have developed the habit of unblocking telemetry every so often, so that the settings I value show up as in use by someone.

Am tired, but bit confused at sequence of events.

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users the banned extensions?

Or…

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering some undefined type of extension, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users any which seemed to fall under the ban under an abundance of caution until they could assess each & reinstate those which did not fit the ban?

Or, more worryingly, but maybe implied by the supposed temporary intent of the ban…

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla temporarily removed for Russian users the extensions in order to give Russia the ability to track or otherwise meddle with Russian users of those extensions… or to enable Russia to interfere with the extensions’ code for their own ends?

I feel I can make a reasonable guess, but there’s a fairly big safety issue here depending on what happened.

Anyone dissenting within an authoritarian regime knows to exercise extreme caution, but always good to put out reminders to have multiple layers of protection, so if one fails you are still ok.

Having intermittent difficulties loading various things from different phone browsers for the past hour. More so on Firefox.

Have yet to try desktop browsers.

That one’s good enough to suggest to them!

Can see why they’d maybe be wary of getting into appraising open source projects if taking payments, but maybe something they could collaborate on with EFF & others. Maybe also that “alternative to” project, which doesn’t currently focus on open source stuff but naturally covers quite a lot of it.

Maybe just so new users realise they’re a thing.

Firefox out of the box isn’t very attractive, so mixing in themes by default maybe helps retain new people without driving us lot away.

We will arse them on the beaches?

They hear someone recommend it, maybe on foot of a conversation about privacy concerns, and give it a try.

Doesn’t mean they’ve got to grips with it, but if they haven’t uninstalled it, they probably retain the intent to try.

Bitwarden is on FF, as are various video downloaders. Guessing from the title, equivalents of Singlepage. No idea what Forest or the others do, but a search by functionality may turf something up.

Aye, but OP wants extensions which are on Chrome but which are not on Firefox.

Depends on your aptitude & what you want the extensions to do (some being much more complex than others), but most people can learn the skills needed.

You’ll only know if you try, but even if you can’t manage to write exactly what you want, you’ll learn a lot on the way.

There are great resources out there, and forums where you can seek help from more experienced people.

There’s also Orion browser, which isn’t FOSS, but which takes both Firefox & Chromium extensions.

Suspect it would operate more on the basis of a person confirming that the article is of reasonable quality & accuracy.

So not unlike editors selecting what to publish, what to reject & what to send back for improvements.

If good articles by AI get accepted & poor articles by people get rejected, there may still be impacts, but at face value it might be sufficient for us seeking to read stuff.

Have got fairly good at spotting these from the first few lines, but it would be nice to not bother clicking on them in the first place & better again if they didn’t clog up my search results.

Back when it was just humans churning out rubbish, there was far less of it in the way of good information, but it helped enormously that search engines still respected operands.

Bringing that back would likely help far more than a detector extension.

Will take a look under my bonnet later & get back to you, but as I recall it took a whole lot of trial and error with how I enabled which aspect & in what order. None of which was in any guide, or rather, following what worked for others did not work for me, but am stubborn so got it all working alright in the end (just scared to adjust anything now).