I know it’s been getting worse over time, but I could still find what I needed after some digging.
Recently it’s been like 10 minutes of adjusting search terms, still getting completely useless or irrelevant results, and me just giving up afterwards. Other search engines seem just as bad.
HAHAHAHAHAH no. Google Search has gotten so much worse in the last couple of YEARS more like.
The reason behind this is not a bug but a feature. Google wants the trip from search to result to take longer as they can show you more ads that way.
The internet has gotten worse in general, and it’s accelerating.
The vast majority of online content is now AI-generated.I shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working
What are quoted strings?
You mean when plused strings stopped? Because that was tragic as hell
The internet has slowly become more and more useless over time since the pandemic. It’s fucking impossible to find anything now. Half the time it’s like I have better luck doing an lan search on my home network than looking it up on Google and I’m not even very deep into the self hosted everything rabbit hole.
It’s like they want us all to be stupid, uninformed and not know how to do anything.
*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it’s just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.
It has definitely been getting worse over years, but I specifically meant the last couple of weeks. I could still find what I needed between all the garbage… now I can’t even find it after adjusting the search multiple times.
If we could roll back the internet 10-15 years, everything would be much better.
Try finding old band photos. Basically impossible
I recommend Kagi, I’ve been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.
Yes it’s paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn’t a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I’m either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I’m paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.
Now it’s up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.
Kagi is amazing. I absolutely love its’ filtering features and I use that forums toggle all the time. It feels like such a more relevant experience for me. I tried it out with the 300 searches limit, but that wasn’t even close to enough, turns out I easily use 4 times that in a month and even though it’s not cheap it feels like it’s worth it.
I second kagi. Have been using it for almost a year now and I will stick with it. I switched from google to ddg some years ago to ddg before, but kagi is simply better.
A colleague also uses it and is also very satisfied with it.
Got some bad news about Kagi…
I’ve read it, I read the discussion around it, idk man. One guy’s thoughts on a company and it’s founder isn’t enough to move me off of something without better proof, better alternatives, and worse crimes than maybe having a bad long term vision.
Hopefully every company outgrows it’s founder and becomes a system. We’ll have to see, right now I’m satisfied and that gets me off Google and signals to others I’m willing to pay.
It’s okay if you don’t care, that’s on you and the others who don’t care.
I was about to pay for the thing, and stumbled upon that website that provides quite a bit of substantial “what the fuck?” Reactions from me.
Just throwing the knowledge out there for people like me who do care. :)
That article is quite dense with inaccurate information (e.g. they own a T-shirt factory), and a lot of guesses. There is no need to listen to a random guy idea about kagi’s AI approach when they have that documented on their site.
Also, the “blase attitude to privacy” is because of a technicality of GDPR? (Not having the ability to download a file with your email address) I am a big fan of GDPR, and their privacy policy is the best I have seen (I read the pp of every product I use and I often choose products also based on it), so really I don’t care about the technical compliance to GDPR (I am not an auditor), but the substantial compliance.
All-in-all, the article raises some good points, but it is a very random opinion from a random person without any particular competencies in the matter. I would take it for what it is tbh
EDIT: To add a few more:
- They achieved profitability (BTW, 2 years of operation and being profitable with 30k users, they really don’t know what they are doing /s)
- Their price changed twice. It was raised once, and the change was reverted later on, with unlimited searches. For me that is a great sign, especially considering the transparency of telling exactly how much each search costs for them.
Source: see https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi (published ~1 month after the linked post).
Inaccurate about the factory, even though it was posted on their own blog…?
I understand the sunk cost fallacy, but standing up for a corporation that says no one but a few deserves privacy, is a little whacky to me.
They don’t own the T-shirt factory. It is a simple sentence, they used a small Serbian (I think) company. The business entity is to import goods.
It’s a formal difference but shows how sloppy that post is.
The results are usually the most clicked, not necessarily the factual links. Others have recommended kagi. I haven’t tried it yet. I remember when the internet started and you had to use them all!
I’ll have to try kagi some time
EDIT: subscription based… Idk, definite maybe on that one.
I’ve used Kagi’s free trial. I’d turn to it when nothing else was helping and it did really well, but recently it hasn’t been helping either. It’s probably still fine for most things, but I’m often searching niche developer/programming things that are too burried under SEO/AI spam to find anymore.
FWIW, the default “programming” lens works quite well in Kagi, you can also create your own lens if you have a set of websites from which you routinely search info, and there are tons of bangs already (which can also be mapped to lenses BTW). In addition, you can downrank AI/SEO stuff when you find it (it is downranked by default in kagi), so that over time your results are quite clean.
Not if you used Dogpile. Also it still exists somehow.
Got some bad news about Kagi, folks…
Hmm maybe Dogpile it is then!
I was just about to try Kagi out and then ran into this post of a bunch of different search engines. Dogpile is not on there, so maybe I need to look it up now!
SEO became too well known and is now filled with bullshit.
There are many factors at play here, some of which including:
- AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there’s an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
- Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
- Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn’t need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
- SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing “page ranking” algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. “Search Engine Optimization” is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
- Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.
That said, it depends on what you’re searching for. If you’re searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they’re still online).
Ill add something I’ve never really seen anyone mention: it used to be a lot better at staying on topic without ME keeping it that way
For example: this weekend I was playing Blops 3 and googled shit like “Winslow accord bo3” and after 1-3 searches I could just type shit related to bo3 and even if it had relevant pages related to other shit, it’d remember my recent searches and keep them rather relevant even if it was on my phone or a new window rather than the same search bar
At least, it used to work that way. Now every 4-5 searches it suddenly forgets what tangent I was on and I have to start adding qualifiers again to get relevant searches
I’ve been using Kagi since ~February and it’s changed my views on Search. Beforehand, if use a combination of Google, Bing, DDG, and Brave and rarely find what I needed in satisfactory time. Now I’m typically finding it in the top 5 without all the cruft + have access to a handful of LLM assistants to choose from for other tasks (when needed).
I’ve also heard good things about SearXNG.
Might want to give this a read on ol’ Kagi…
I’m aware.
I hope you don’t pay for it then, since Vlad himself said,
Is this how you live your life? Going around telling people how to live theirs?
Jesus christ dude. I said I’m aware.
I have specific use cases that Kagi, and nothing else that I’ve found but feel free to try me, satisfies to a T with speed and value.
Unlike you, I’m aware enough to realize I’m not the average consumer and that not everyone might fall into my bucket, so it was merely a suggestion ALONG WITH ANOTHER SUGGESTION (SearXNG). I’ll leave it up to the reader to do their own tests and see if it suits their needs.
I guarantee something you eat came from Nestle somehow and that something you own or wear was made on the backs of a sweatshop of some sort. Quit with your holier-than-thou bullshit.
LOL
Chill the fuck out, homie. It’s not that fucking serious. I guarantee you will live a lot longer by getting rid of some of that anger in a healthy manner. Hope your day gets better, asshole. :)
Yes, it’s fantastic!
I stopped using it last year it got so bad, I ended up using DDG but that’s gotten shit and I’ve found myself back on Google. To me it feels 10% better than it was when I stopped.
Although everyone’s experiences with Google are so different we’re probably all being A/B tested.
yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:
- ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
- duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
- any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
- marginalia.nu - specifically ‘random’ - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
Aside from DDG, these are all new to me. I’ll take a look this week, thank you.
Yeah, last month I finally had enough and DDG has been alright
