That seemed to me like a radically high estimate of people who use ad blockers. But I see that the first page of results on MyFavoriteWebSearchEngine support that claim.
> This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free.
>
> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text.
Interestingly, one of my biggest problems with Gmail is that they don't allow actual plaintext. I used to routinely collaborate with developers who were vision-impaired, and the official Gmail phone app wouldn't let me send them plaintext email. Instead, it was some sort of HTML thing. Unfortunately, we sometimes sent code snippets to each other over email, and though admittedly it looked more or less fine, Gmail changed the underlying representation enough that my collaborators' screen readers would mess up on the parsing.
This led to me leaving Gmail on my phone, which led ultimately to me leaving Gmail entirely.
Google is completely inadequate at mathematical search. But here is a concrete problem that no search seems to handle: given some complicated integral (say, some contour integral involving a K-Bessel function), find where it appears in the literature.
Most search will totally fail, because this is made of math symbols. Embedding-based search will give various related things involving, say, integrals and Bessel functions. But then I end up opening Gradshteyn and Ryzhik and trying to find where in this book the relevant terrible integrals appear.
This is a common experience for analytic number theorists. And it's a lousy experience.
From the title, I had thought that this would be a new tool for searching science, such as searching the arxiv. But this is actually a survey.
I quote the conclusion of the survey:
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In conclusion, rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated substantial potential in areas such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. These developments have sparked increasing interest in applying AI to scientific research. However, despite the growing potential of AI in this domain, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that consolidate current knowledge, hindering further progress. This paper addresses this gap by providing a detailed survey and unified framework for AI4Research. Our contributions include a systematic taxonomy for classifying AI4Research tasks, identification of key research gaps and future directions, and a compilation of open-source resources to support the community. We believe this work will enhance our understanding of AI’s role in research and serve as a catalyst for future advancements in the field.
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I jumped at this because I'm a mathematician who has been complaining about the lack of effective mathematical search for several years.
This will not be taught in textbooks. Wildberger works in a math world where "infinity" or even "really really big numbers" don't exist. There is nothing mathematically wrong about that world, but others (like me) do not find this problem context to be a useful framework to work in.
I've been using it as my primary search engine for a couple of months. It's not great as a search engine. I find their locality of search to not be well-supported (e.g. the search "food near me" works good in google and not great in ecosia).
Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.
It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.
I made a partial replacement that doesn't allow user-submitted content at https://davidlowryduda.com/static/MathShare/. It just stores the content in the URL, and is limited by URL size limits. In practice this means you have approximately one page of text.
I wrote about making this at https://davidlowryduda.com/mathshare/. I was trying out the LLM interaction that made it near the top of HN recently, and it worked very well.
I'm confronted with a similar problem frequently. I have a growing bash script and it's slowly growing in complexity. Once bash scripts become sufficiently long, I find editing them later to be very annoying.
So instead, at some point I change the language entirely and write a utility in python/lua/c/whatever other language I want.
As time goes on, my limit for "sufficient complexity" to justify leaving bash and using something like python has dropped radically. Now I follow the rule that as soon as I do something "nontrivial", it should be in a scripting language.
As a side-effect, my bash scripting skills are worse than they once were. And now the scope of what I consider "trivial" is shrinking!