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.
*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.
Don’t forget your glue on your pizza! Can’t have a pizza without glue…
It’s not just glue it‘s Elmer‘s Glue. They still have some standard.
The other day I asked google what season we were in. The AI got it wrong, and that’s like the simplest question ever.
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.
I was honestly getting so frustrated the other day at work when searching for something very specific and coming up empty handed. Tried DuckDuckGo and even fucking Bing and found what I needed in a matter of seconds. Google search is trash now. I have to go to the second page or further just to find something that isn’t an ad, AI response, or reddit. None of which are helpful.
DuckDuckGo is just Bing with a duck on it.
Regardless, I still got better results than Google.
I’ve been swapping around search engines too, but they still seem bad. I always end up back at Google just because I know how to manipulate the search terms better.
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.
Is that the one that costs money? You can’t have a true incognito search if that’s the case.
Incognito is on your client side browser in that the browser doesn’t retain any trace of the current session once you close the tab. The search engine still knows what you whacked off to.
True Incognito mode is a myth, it only stops keeping a history in the tab of that browser. Everytime you use a browser to go to any site ever, the browser logs you went there. So does your ISP and the site your connecting to. No matter which mode or browser you use, if you go to Google, then Google knows you went there and logs your searches.
The closest you can come to browsing the web anonymously would be with a mix of dedicated privacy OS like Tails and either a VPN or Tor as a middile man, but that assumes those proxys are not corrupted. Free VPNs make money by selling your “secret browsing” habits.
The internet is nothing more than wires, if you connect your wire to someone elses, every intermediatary knows.
You can use uBlock Origin and other privacy add-ons to block tracking and a VPN to hide your IP address but if you’re logged in to a search engine’s account then everything you search is tied to you no matter what you do.
Not if you used Dogpile. Also it still exists somehow.
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.
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!
I shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working
YEAH WHAT THE FUCK
What are quoted strings?
A string is just a collection of characters, in programmer speak. When you use quotation marks in your search to find exactly what you want. If your search was:
dog “fast drive”
Google used to show results that only had both the word “dog” and the joined phrase “fast drive” in the same result. Or tell you there were no results.
Now it feels like Google uses that as a suggestion, giving you “dog” and any combination of “fast drive”, “fast driver”, “fast driving”, or whatever else Google thinks you want, instead of what you asked for. Or if they don’t find it, they serve you up whatever they want, with a small message about there being no matching results.
I didn’t realize. I’m horrified.
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.
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.
Google makes money on ads. They make $300-$400 annually per user by displaying ads.
They are motivated to tarpit you in order to show you more ads.
Giving you your results quickly and efficiently costs them revenue.
Use kagi, or another search engine.
Is it sorta built similar to google? I keep switching search engines but Im SOOOOO used to google that its hard for me to adjust. I need something that kinda looks like google, but I can both Customize it more and just isnt google.
aHHH NAHHH i just tried it. It’s everything I want BUT THEY MAKE ME PAY TO SEARCH??! fuck no- I’m not about to fork over cash for a Subscriptions to USE THE INTERNET. Sounds really really nice but I’d much rather not. They aught to have it so you can pay for extra perks but paying JUST to search??? I’m good-
I remember Google saying like 2 decades ago that it was actually their goal to get you off of their website as quickly as possible. If you clicked on a link, and then clicked back in less than 30 seconds, then Google would consider that search result to be not what you were looking for.
The people who said that are long gone.
Golden parachuted away
More to it then that. tl;dr The engineers in charge at google were pushed to the side by the ads people.
Oh wow. Thanks for the added details
Google Maps is utter crap lately too. It seems to be making up locations, and several times in the past month, it’s taken me to the wrong place. It’s getting almost as bad as Apple Maps
My favorite one recently is constantly telling me to keep straight to remain on a highway like 7 times before I need to actually get off the highway. Glad I turned off the sound a long time ago otherwise I would have lost my fucking mind.
We have express (toll) lanes on some highways around me, and the navigation system loses its damn mind every time. “Keep going straight”, “continue going straight”, “proceed in a trajectory perpendicular to your current trajectory”; I fucking get it!
I went to a low data plan and learned that Google Maps consumes a vast amount of data (relative to my plan limit), and I download all my maps and had location off. 1 single bus route between two pinned locations was 30Mb. Maps and search could be so simple but they are insanely bloated.
Oh god, yes this too. All the sponsored location spam drives me crazy. I love when I zoom in to a location and it doesn’t mark ANY of the shops besides STARBUCKStm
Hey now, Apple Maps is more accurate, provides better directions where I am, has more up to date satellites imagery, and has been this way for years. I only use Google Maps to search because Yelp is god awful. I live in a rapidly expanding area and all of that matters.
SEO became too well known and is now filled with bullshit.
I used to a hater of Kagi but honestly its a damn good alternative search engine. They are doing some actual innovation and are very transparent. I still prefer a good searXNG instance but searxng is more for technical people who understand decentralized meta search instances. Here’s my simple guide on search engine alternatives to help you get away from google best you can.
Google is finally collapsing under the weight of its own greed and lack of innovation. Now other companies are showing up to steal their lunch especial with the big monopoly case going on right now.
You might be interested in learning how opaque Kagi really is…
Thank you both, Smokeydope and LucidNightmare. That was an interesting read! I gave SearXNG (paulgo.io) a try and it was a refreshing experience, I’m going to start using it regularly to see how well it does.
Thank you for actually reading what was provided! SearXNG is pretty good, and I kinda want to give self hosting it a try! Good luck on the hunt!
I am glad to have helped you out! @angrystego I hope you enjoy searxng and it bcomes a useful tool in your life. Paulgo is an excellent first instance choice. It was my daily driver when I wrote up that guide and seems to still hold up well today.
Now I use search.inetol.net and can recommend that as a good alternative in case paulgo isnt quite what you’re looking for or has too many timeout api errors. As always its a good idea to visit searx.space and try out some of the top instances with highest response time.
Thanks again for even more useful tips! I will definitely try it all out, it looks really good.
An article full of inaccuracies, but the most interesting bit is, all these conversations are possible because they clearly explain their views, which are publicly available on their website (for example, the philosophy behind the use of AI - which BTW is opt-in).
How is that an example of being opaque is beyond me.
Might want to go through and click the hyperlinks. Otherwise, I got nothing else to tell ya homie. It’s all right there.
I have fully switched to kagi, it’s not perfect but for the average case it’s better than google.
The internet has gotten worse in general, and it’s accelerating.
The vast majority of online content is now AI-generated.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.
It is half okay, but only if they are not getting paid to screw up your results. It is a coup against democracy where freedom of information is freedom of the press and is an entire fundamental pillar of democracy. Google’s entire business model has always been neo feudalism. A web crawler and search engine is like a library, it must be neutral, objective, and publicly funded as a non profit. Much the same with YT, it is our digital public commons and the most efficient form for information sharing in the primary form of human communication.
I read on here (I think) a couple months ago that adding “before:2023” to your search terms improves results a lot. I’ve found it to be true. Unless I’m looking for something specifically from the last couple years.
Unfortunately, I’m usually searching software development issues and half the results are a decade old (and are no longer relevant for the language anymore). Assuming “after:xx” works too this night help, thank you!
People still use Google?
You can’t actually believe the default search engine in most configurations isn’t used.
My question was mostly a light jab at OP
You honestly though the most used search engine has been abandoned by everyone? Maybe share what you’re using instead of just being pretentious?
I totally honestly believed that. I’m just so naive, how do I get by in life? Thank goodness you’re here to set me straight. What would I do without you? How did you get so good at computers? You must be some kind of wizard.
