Idk, doing this "properly" would take an immense amount of effort and manpower. This feels more like a "let me get enough info for an educated guess" EDA process, which still seems to have taken a lot of effort and I appreciate it a lot.

Did you try Marginalia?

it meets your criteria+ it's opensource.

I really liked Kagi at first, especially since I use it mainly for programming as well, but recently I feel like the quality has gone downhill. Right around the time they integrated the Brave stuff I've noticed a significant amount of me having to scroll down past the usual Google-like fluff results before getting to actually relevant information. It's a little sad to see because when I first used it, it was so good now it basically feels like a skinned Google-lite at this point. I'm still a customer but only because I haven't found a good alternative yet.

It depends. Chatbots are terrible at broad queries or parsing very detailed information, but they're surprisingly good with very fuzzy searches. If I want a link to a specific website I go to a search engine. If I want to ask "hey, what's that 80s horror comedy that's kinda like Gremlins but not Gremlins and it has one of the monsters coming out of the toilet in the poster?" I go to a chatbot.

EDIT: Heh. Just for laughs, I tried that exact query on Perplexity.ai. It got it right:

The movie you are referring to is "Ghoulies." It is a 1984 horror comedy film that features small, impish creatures similar to those in Gremlins. One of the iconic images associated with the movie is a Ghoulie coming out of a toilet, which is also featured on the poster.

I use it as an answer engine. Queries like: what's that css property for xyz, or please summarize this email, or give me the top 25 most commonly used color words in English in a json schema like this.

All of that could be found with a normal search engine but I'd have to work harder and sort through a lot of trash along the way.

ChatGPT just understands what I'm looking for almost no matter how poorly worded my query is and just answers the question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM&pp=ygUTbGVnYWwgZWFnbGUgY2hhdGdwdA%3D%3D

Yes, they do. Lawyers in the US did, citing invented cases in court.

It's a whatever question you ask engine. You can ask for the information directly and/or ask for sources to back it up.

Interesting responses here - perhaps I’ll add it to my daily rotation as a science experiment.

More and more yes. You often get an answer without having to link out to some bullshit site with ads everywhere. It's often pretty clean and precise.

It's just Bing.

Google just killed its cache service. Bad news for searxng.

At least what I see with this experiment/article is that is overly verbose, he takes a long time to get to the point. And then when he does his methodology shows an experiment that cannot be verified. Even when something is "subjective" we can still draw conclusions from it if we set up proper non-subjective ways of evaluating the results we see (ie. Rubrics). The fact that he doesn't really say what leads him to say in detail what is a "terrible/v. bad/bad/good result" is a massive red flag in his method.

After seeing that, I no longer read the rest of it. Any conclusions drawn from a flawed methodology are inherently fallacies or hearsay.

If in any case it is further explained in the article and that somehow refutes what I've postulated later on, then I would have to say that the article is poorly written.

All this to say... I agree with you, not worth the read.

You fell for the marginalia ad!