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I hate to admit it but Oligarch Alphabet's search result quality is generally far superior to DuckDuckGo. Also, like it or not, LLM distillation/summary is the future of the search engine industry and because they so dominate result relevancy-quality, that same oligarch brand also dominates the LLM distillation/summary field. If you don't like the energy and water consumption of proliferating LLM data centers, then StartPage.com is good for anonymizing and de-tracking oligarch service usage.

I really want to like DuckDuckGo but their index is just less complete and relevancy ranking less reliable. That leads to LLM misinterpretations: i.e. you submit a search in the form of a natural language query and the LLM returns an objectively incorrect answer, much more often than the oligarch search LLM.

Trivial example, the other day I asked DDG if D+D's "Shadow Touched" feat lets you cast the Invisibility spell on other characters. The correct answer is "yes". When your character takes the Shadow Touched feat, they learn the spell with no change in how the spell works; and Invisibility can be cast on self or another character by touch. But DDG's LLM incorrectly says "no". Worse, it doesn't even cite a source for the misinterpretation it's relaying.

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For a while there were low-quality doom articles circulating, misstating that data centers are "consuming" some amount of water for every LLM query. Now, do data centers use water for cooling, yes. Is the world in danger of "running out of water" because of this, no - because either you're recycling a fixed volume of water per server through heat-exchange systems to move the heat around, or else you're releasing the heated (but not otherwise "polluted") water back into the environment to replace with "wild" cold water. The water isn't destroyed, Earth won't become a desert planet just because of water-cooled LLM data centers.

I think focusing on the fiction of water depletion is a distraction, perhaps intentional, from a much more real problem: accelerating global warming. The laws of physics (entropy) dictate that information operations produce waste heat. Global warming was already a problem. Merely halting all fossil fuel production and consumption yesterday, would not be enough to prevent global glacier collapse; we would have to take aggressive measures to reverse it and there is no sign the world's ostensible leaders have any intention or even interest in doing that. We know cryptocurrency "mining" was already consuming power to rival entire nations; data center operations will only accelerate that.

There's a secondary global warming issue tied into that - rare earth mining to furnish new data center electronics. This is the big foofaraw over Ukraine, and Greenland, and to some degree even Venezuela; it looks like "oil" and the oil economy dinosaur oligarchs are not 100% irrelevant just yet, but behind the curtain the current world political shitshow is more and more about which oligarch gets to control exploitation of data center mineral sources. Mining and refining are energy intensive. Sadly, fusion tech will render all this anxiety and predation moot, probably within the lifetimes of a generation or two after mine.