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Comment by koeng | Hacker News Reader

What is the search engine that it uses?

searxng, which is a locally running meta search engine combining a lot of different sources (including Google and co)

This might be more of a searxng question, but doesn't it quickly run up against anti-bot measures? CAPTCHA challenges and Forbidden responses? I can see the manual has some support for dealing with CAPTCHA [1], but in practical terms, I would guess a tool like this can't be used extensively all day long.

I'm wondering if there's a search API that would make the backend seamless for something like this.

1. https://docs.searxng.org/admin/answer-captcha.html

As a last resort we could have AI work on top of a real web browser and solving captchas as well. Should look like normal usage. I think these kinds of systems LLM + RAG + Web Agent will become widespread and the preferred method to interact with the web.

We can escape all ads and dark UI patterns by delegating this task to AI agents. We could have it collect our feeds, filter, rank and summarize them to our preferences, not theirs. I think every web browser, operating system and mobile device will come equipped with its own LLM agent.

The development of AI screen agents will probably get a big boost from training on millions of screen capture videos with commentary on YouTube. They will become a major point of competition on features. Not just browser, but also OS, device and even the chips inside are going to be tailored for AI agents running locally.

If everyone consumes like that what's even the incentive for content creators?

If content creators can't find anything that is uniquely human and cannot be made by AI, then maybe they are not creative enough for the job. The thing about generative AI is that it can take context, you can put a lot or very little guidance in it. The more you specify, the more you can mix your own unique sauce in the final result.

I personally use AI for text style changes, as a summarizer of ideas and as rubber duck, something to bounce ideas off of. It's good to get ideas flowing and sometimes can help you realize things you missed, or frame something better than you could.

I didn't run into a lot of timeouts while using it myself, but you would probably need another search source if you plan to host this service for multiple users at the same time.

There are projects like flareresolverr which might be interesting

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