Tootfinder

When "AI" search engines look for sources, they go for fringe and not established quality sites. What could possibly go wrong?
(Original title: AI-powered search engines rely on “less popular” sources, researchers find)
https://arstechnica.com/a…

AI-powered search engines rely on “less popular” sources, researchers find
Generative search engines often cite sites that wouldn’t appear in Google’s top 100 links.

trec_web: TREC WT10g (2003)
A web graph network originally constructed in 2003 as a testbed for information-retrieval techniques, including web search engines. Distributed by University of Glasgow.
This network has 1601787 nodes and 8063026 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net…

I just spent ~20 minutes trying to find information on how to do something in a Golang library on my client computer, before I decided it was worth pulling up @… on my personal computer to look it up instead.
Immediately found the answer I needed to get me moving.
We don’t need “vibe coding”, we need search engines that actually work.

I figure even if it is someday possible for the transhumanists to upload themselves into a machine, it will be a nightmare attempting to later transplant themselves into the new improved updated wow machine that will someday replace it!
Folks who balk about Mastodon not letting you migrate your entire presence elsewhere likely have never tried to extricate their personal workflow from a 15 year old laptop! 😅
That is, of course, AFTER previously spending an hour or so to weed out the about:config AI functions and add no-AI search engines to the fresh Firefox install 😞
Yes, I have contemplated installing Emacs and nothing else. Would seem the only sensible thing to do, but 'sensible' was never listed on my report card.

How good are LLMs at Retrieving Documents in a Specific Domain?
Nafis Tanveer Islam, Zhiming Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22658 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

How good are LLMs at Retrieving Documents in a Specific Domain?
Classical search engines using indexing methods in data infrastructures primarily allow keyword-based queries to retrieve content. While these indexing-based methods are highly scalable and efficient, due to a lack of an appropriate evaluation dataset and a limited understanding of semantics, they often fail to capture the user's intent and generate incomplete responses during evaluation. This problem also extends to domain-specific search systems that utilize a Knowledge Base (KB) to access da…

Observation-Free Attacks on Online Learning to Rank
Sameep Chattopadhyay, Nikhil Karamchandani, Sharayu Mohair
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22855 https://arx…

Observation-Free Attacks on Online Learning to Rank
Online learning to rank (OLTR) plays a critical role in information retrieval and machine learning systems, with a wide range of applications in search engines and content recommenders. However, despite their extensive adoption, the susceptibility of OLTR algorithms to coordinated adversarial attacks remains poorly understood. In this work, we present a novel framework for attacking some of the widely used OLTR algorithms. Our framework is designed to promote a set of target items so that they …

trec_web: TREC WT10g (2003)
A web graph network originally constructed in 2003 as a testbed for information-retrieval techniques, including web search engines. Distributed by University of Glasgow.
This network has 1601787 nodes and 8063026 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net…

Document: to avoid an EU fine, Google offered to tweak its search results to show vertical search engines in their own box on Search (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-offers-tweak-search-resu…

Russia pressures Apple to make Russian search engines default on locally-sold iPhones https://therecord.media/russia-apple-search-engine-default

One of the things I love about
@… (and several other modern search engines) is the !w to go straight to the search results from Wikipedia. It's a useful way to go straight to a reliable source right from your search bar.
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/

Anyone using UTM/QEMU with a NT 3.51 VM?
I’m looking for correct network settings. It detects NE2000 ISA and assigns an IP but I can’t ping anything.
UTM mentions to set IRQ to 9 but that’s not an option I see (it’s set to 2).
Mainly I want to access a FTP server on the host computer to transfer files.
👉 I know how to use search engines, therefore please only make suggestions if you are personally familiar with this, thank you. 👈

«younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to #Wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information.»
All of those "alternatives" are facilitated through algorithmic recommendation engines designed to maximize profits, what could possible go wrong there…
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/

“TABS [by Mozilla] pulls exactly the data you need—from HTML to Markdown to JSON—using the fastest, most efficient method for each page. It adapts to the structure and complexity of the site, staying stealthy and reliable so your [AI] agents always get what they need without friction.”
Ethical Stealthy AI Scraping (tm) by Mozilla.
#Mozilla

trec_web: TREC WT10g (2003)
A web graph network originally constructed in 2003 as a testbed for information-retrieval techniques, including web search engines. Distributed by University of Glasgow.
This network has 1601787 nodes and 8063026 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net…

Zurich-based DeepJudge, which builds customized search indexes for law firms that plug into AI tools like ChatGPT, raised a $41M Series A at a $300M valuation (Alicia Park/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2025…

Meet The Ex-Google Researchers Building AI Search For Law Firms
Legal tech startup DeepJudge has raised $41 million to build out customized search engines for law firms.

Bing's web crawler is a true putz of the Internet.
By-the-way, various other search engines use Bing as the underlying web crawler, so this is far from being a Microsoft issue.
Bing's web crawler refuses to index content that does not meet its standards.
And what are those standards? It is that pages contain a bunch of meta tags and such.
Well, some of my archival content was written around 1995, long before those meta tags were conceived.
Thus, from Bi…

TaoSR-SHE: Stepwise Hybrid Examination Reinforcement Learning Framework for E-commerce Search Relevance
Pengkun Jiao, Yiming Jin, Jianhui Yang, Chenhe Dong, Zerui Huang, Shaowei Yao, Xiaojiang Zhou, Dan Ou, Haihong Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07972

TaoSR-SHE: Stepwise Hybrid Examination Reinforcement Learning Framework for E-commerce Search Relevance
Query-product relevance analysis is a foundational technology in e-commerce search engines and has become increasingly important in AI-driven e-commerce. The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs), particularly their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities, offers promising opportunities for developing relevance systems that are both more interpretable and more robust. However, existing training paradigms have notable limitations: SFT and DPO suffer from poor generalization on l…

I won the internet today. Was searching for how to modify #Ollama environment variables in #homebrew on #macOS. The second entry in

Curlie - The Collector of URLs
Some search engines for the web are also based on @…, among other things. You can also enter your websites in this so that they can be found more easily when people search for keywords that relate to your pages.
🐿️ https://…

Curlie
Collector of URLs

Exposing Citation Vulnerabilities in Generative Engines
Riku Mochizuki, Shusuke Komatsu, Souta Noguchi, Kazuto Ataka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06823 https://

Exposing Citation Vulnerabilities in Generative Engines
We analyze answers generated by generative engines (GEs) from the perspectives of citation publishers and the content-injection barrier, defined as the difficulty for attackers to manipulate answers to user prompts by placing malicious content on the web. GEs integrate two functions: web search and answer generation that cites web pages using large language models. Because anyone can publish information on the web, GEs are vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Existing studies of citation evaluation…

And by going on with the rest of my day, it means I then have to go down the rabbit hole of “I wonder what else is being celebrated today” and of to the search engines I went.

Search is Dead.
Really, this should not have taken two hours across oodles of prompts using four different search engines, but every one of those prompts was deconstructed into syllables to match anything even remotely thesaurused, regardless of details provided, regardless quote marks, minus or plus signs. "Malcolm Strauss"? oh, you mean RICHARD! No, fuck you bot, and Diana Allen is neither Rita Hayworth or Woody Allen and 1923 is not 1945 and a 2006 is unlikely to be SILENT, and this shouldn't take two hours before, finally, only Google would find this mention with the key phrase "presumed lost".
Silent Era : Progressive Silent Film List
https://www.silentera.com/PSFL/data/S/Salome1923.html

What Generative Search Engines Like and How to Optimize Web Content Cooperatively
Yujiang Wu, Shanshan Zhong, Yubin Kim, Chenyan Xiong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11438 https://

What Generative Search Engines Like and How to Optimize Web Content Cooperatively
By employing large language models (LLMs) to retrieve documents and generate natural language responses, Generative Engines, such as Google AI overview and ChatGPT, provide significantly enhanced user experiences and have rapidly become the new form of search. Their rapid adoption also drives the needs of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), as content providers are eager to gain more traction from them. In this paper, we introduce AutoGEO, a framework to automatically learn generative engine …

Apparently the "Brother printer support scam" is still a thing. Great job, search engines, certificate providers, browser developers, and every other tech field that's failed to stanch this over the last decade or two.

Stratified GRPO: Handling Structural Heterogeneity in Reinforcement Learning of LLM Search Agents
Mingkang Zhu, Xi Chen, Bei Yu, Hengshuang Zhao, Jiaya Jia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06214

Stratified GRPO: Handling Structural Heterogeneity in Reinforcement Learning of LLM Search Agents
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools such as search engines to solve complex, multi-step problems, and reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key paradigm for training them. However, the trajectories of search agents are structurally heterogeneous, where variations in the number, placement, and outcomes of search calls lead to fundamentally different answer directions and reward distributions. Standard policy gradient methods, which use a single global baselin…

You can easily make text-based interfaces that don’t do this.
E.g. normal search engines don’t say “I found 37 results, that’s a really great search term, Thomas!”.
That would be weird, wouldn’t it?
Yet…

trec_web: TREC WT10g (2003)
A web graph network originally constructed in 2003 as a testbed for information-retrieval techniques, including web search engines. Distributed by University of Glasgow.
This network has 1601787 nodes and 8063026 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net…

US disrupts multimillion-dollar bank account takeover operation targeting Americans https://therecord.media/us-disrupts-bank-account-takeover-operation-web3adspanels

Cool little adapted tale on AI, by Alison Gopnik:
https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/stone-soup-ai

Wanna feel old? Back in the now seemingly forever-ago days of 2021 we had an interlinked network of human-curated knowledge we called the world wide web and search engines that could pinpoint accurate information in fractions of a second

Deep Learning-Based Approach for Improving Relational Aggregated Search
Sara Saad Soliman, Ahmed Younes, Islam Elkabani, Ashraf Elsayed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00966 https://…

Deep Learning-Based Approach for Improving Relational Aggregated Search
Due to an information explosion on the internet, there is a need for the development of aggregated search systems that can boost the retrieval and management of content in various formats. To further improve the clustering of Arabic text data in aggregated search environments, this research investigates the application of advanced natural language processing techniques, namely stacked autoencoders and AraBERT embeddings. By transcending the limitations of traditional search engines, which are i…

trec_web: TREC WT10g (2003)
A web graph network originally constructed in 2003 as a testbed for information-retrieval techniques, including web search engines. Distributed by University of Glasgow.
This network has 1601787 nodes and 8063026 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net…

Backdoor-Powered Prompt Injection Attacks Nullify Defense Methods
Yulin Chen, Haoran Li, Yuan Sui, Yangqiu Song, Bryan Hooi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03705 https://

Backdoor-Powered Prompt Injection Attacks Nullify Defense Methods
With the development of technology, large language models (LLMs) have dominated the downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, because of the LLMs' instruction-following abilities and inability to distinguish the instructions in the data content, such as web pages from search engines, the LLMs are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. These attacks trick the LLMs into deviating from the original input instruction and executing the attackers' target instruction. Recently, var…

trec_web: TREC WT10g (2003)
A web graph network originally constructed in 2003 as a testbed for information-retrieval techniques, including web search engines. Distributed by University of Glasgow.
This network has 1601787 nodes and 8063026 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net…