3mo ago

Is it just me or do all search engines feel soooo bad these days?

I suspect that this is the direct result of AI generated content just overwhelming any real content.

I tried ddg, google, bing, quant, and none of them really help me find information I want these days.

Perplexity seems to work but I don't like the idea of AI giving me "facts" since they are mostly based on other AI posts

ETA: someone suggested SearXNG and after using it a bit it seems to be much better compared to ddg and the rest.

239 comments

they're pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I'm getting actual results.
- Yeah DDG is great. The only thing I find is its not good at local results but a quick !g on the end gets me the local results im looking for.
  
  What does !g do? Add Google results?
  
  oh, good tip. I didn't know about that.
  you tack !g to the end of whatever the resulting search URL is?
  
  Holy shit the bangs work at the end of the search query too!? I've always painfully pressed Home on my keyboard to add a !g whenever I realise I had better searched this on Google
  
  That's how I felt until about a month ago, now ddg is really useless
- I prefer DDG, but I hate the news search. 90% of the results are paywalled.
  Oh, and sometimes the image search will return a pile of porn for a seemingly clean search request. I once searched for "R34 Skyline" expecting Nissans, and got VERY different results without safe search.
  
  Searching for R34 is on you. Naming something R34 is on Nissan. The popularity of R34 is on all of us.
  
  R34 is also short for rule 34 - "if it exists, there's porn of it on the internet"
  So if you search R34 and anything, you'll get porn.
  
  News orgs clinging to tradition.
  i use archive.is for anything I really want to read.
  most news is fluffy bullshit anyway.
  
  Every search engine I've encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you're looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you're not looking for porn.
  Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there's both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.
  I'd really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.
- You know that's just Bing, right?
  
  is it? that kind of makes sense, because I still use Bing occasionally while Google is completely out of rotation, although I don't find Bing as good as duckduckgo.
  edit: it is not! looks like the DuckDuckGo search engine is an aggregate of hundreds of search engines, including their own duck duck bot, excluding Google but including some Bing results.
- DDG often gives me results for individual words of the search but not results for all of the words in that order for which to have contextually relevant results.
  I often find myself forced to brave the shitshow that is google search.
  
  that's weird. the search results should still prioritize your search as is over variations, but not limit it. do you try searching in quotations to force the specific search exactly?
  
  have you tried the duck assist thing yet?
  If you're trying to talk to the search engine more like a chat assistant, that sort of response might be what you're looking for.

It's not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.
Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every "product" they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It's not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.

I'm very happy with kagi at the moment. Just crossed one year using it as my main search engine last week and don't see why I would go back.
- Same. Using Kagi feels like surfing the old web. The first thing I did was block all Pinterest results. That alone made every search golden. 😂
  
  I hate Pinterest lol, best thing about Kagi is being able to block whole sites and it remembers your preferences. I may come back to Kagi but I didn't feel like funding their AI features development. Now Im using Searx and 4get cause they're free.
  
  You're not the only one. They have a leaderboard and the top 7 results are various Pinterest domains.
  
  I never got Pinterest results on Kagi to begin with
- Having to signup and login to a search engines sounds like an annoying hassle
  
  It's a very minor annoyance and well worth it in my opinion.
  I was searching for a book quote for over a year. I tried every search engine, tried changing the terms, checking back several times every few weeks or so, but couldn't find anything even close. I tried kagi and it was literally the very first result on my very first search.
  I haven't looked back and have never had an issue finding what I'm searching for since.
  
  You pay instead of seeing ads, so they need the account. Remembers you, though, so you just login once. Plus they have a solution for incognito/private windows too.
  I really like it, has some cool features.
  
  You can create a search-link that includes your token so you can also use it in incognito or if you are logged out for some reason.
  
  You do it once.
  
  It is. And it's also terrible for privacy, but people do it with google as well.
  
  Signing up and logging in isn't a problem imo. I wouldn't even mind if I had to pay for searches, but I'm not going to make it a subscription service. Unless they add an option to do something like buy 1000 searches that never expire, its not something I'd considered. I do think they beat out competitors like google with their results pretty consistently though based on the trial.
- Same. Even the ai stuff is helpful instead of annyoing.
- My blocks
  
  Edit: hm. I seem to have replied to the wrong comment.
- Same.
- I've been using Kagi for about a month now and it's been working well for me
- I don't remember any specifics, but I think I heard there were some privacy concerns?
  Then again, there seem to be privacy concerns about pretty much anything so might not be that bad...
  
  The concerns are about the credit card you use to pay.
  The argument is that they can associate the card with your searches.
  As far as I know they don't keep search data. I'm personally happy with them
  
  Never heard any issues with Privacy, but I've heard issues about them using Brave search Results as part of their results.
  
  Yeah, lots of opinions, a few facts: one of the discussions.
- Is it really $108/year good though for a single person (based on the tier that makes sense for me)? Just curious what other search engines you’ve used or tried and what features set it apart to make it worth spending the money on.
  
  It's the first one I've paid for. And it is that much better than the free ones I used before imho.
  
  That really depends on your use case and how valuable web search is for your daily life.
  I've personally tried Google, Bing, DDG, Brave search, and ChatGPT. Kagi is consistently able to find what I'm searching for more quickly and accurately than anything else, which has been very valuable for me in my personal and professional life.
  It's easily worth the cost in result quality and time saving for me personally, but that doesn't mean the same will apply to you or anyone else.
  As far as stand out features, there aren't really any that I can think of. It just gives me the results I'm looking for without any bullshit to wade through.
- Unfortunately they started to play with AI too :-(
  
  It was disabled by default on my account I think

You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that's just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.
- I’ve been using Mojeek lately and it looks like their advanced search can do some of that.
  https://www.mojeek.com/advanced.html
  Reminds me of early Google search.
  
  I have it a test with some operators from the search bar instead of using the form and it did exactly what it was supposed to. I'll keep this on hand. Thank you.

It is, and it's not just the search engines to blame.
The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn't pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.
- Spam sites laden with key words and massive SEO to farm advertising dollars from clicks long predated AI
  It doesnt help that big search engines like google have realized people will go as far as page 2 or 3 to find the results, so intentionally worsen their search results to increase ads being served.

SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.
- Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate that part about AI accelerating SEO spam?
  
  I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing "meaningful" content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).
  For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn't make sense, or just lists of random key words.
  With LLM/AI, they're still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You'll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in "compare X vs Y" type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to "pad" the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.

Not just you.
DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.
Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor
- I switched to DDG right after Google added the ai answers to search and in baffled by how fast DDG seemed to go down hill. Just a few months ago it was still giving me on point results on the first try, now it almost feels like I'm using one of those malware search bars from back in the day.
  
  yes - it’s a recent thing, no more that a few months I think
- DDG still mostly fine for me, but anytime I use Google I'm reminded why I left. I wonder how much Googles beancounter enshittification has to do with that...
- DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It's still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I'm assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it's not much better.
  I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.

I feel like it’s especially bad if you are searching for anything related to a marketable product. I tried searching ddg for information about using a surge protector with halogen bulbs and all I got was pages and pages of listicles on “best halogen lights 2024” full of affiliate links.
- And if you’re looking for legitimate reviews, good luck! Everyone’s an affiliate now.
  
  This about the only i still use reddit for

The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there's not much good content left to find (in % of the total)
- The Internet is dead ™

My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?
- Right on
- I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.
  What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.
- Roccat Kone Aimo micro switch gives me "500 best mouse 2024" and such BS and that's it.

It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.

You might want to try SearXNG
It's an Open Source search aggregator:
Licensed under AGPL-3.0
- I’ve been using this for about a year, but at work I’m still on Google (don’t know why).
  What’s weird is SearXNG seems like it gets better results now, even though they’re just coming from the others.
  One thing I like is that I can switch instances to get varied results based on the instance’s geographical location. In other words, it doesn’t feel like anything’s targeted.
- I tried that for a couple of weeks recently and while not dealing with all the bullshit google ads was refreshing, the actual results were often pretty bad.
  
  My bad, I should've replied to your comment first!
  Have you tried customizing your search settings in SearXNG? I've found that tweaking the instance's default search settings improves the search experience quite a bit
- Thanks! I love it, really works well from my limited testing!
  I used priv.au
  
  no worries!🤗
- we have gone full circle back to metacrawler.

Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.
- And the AI is trained on the shitty search results. It just parses them many times faster than a human reader can, which does at least make it better at getting to the fucking point. Once paid advertising is fully integrated with LLM, it will be as shitty and useless as traditional search. And then the entire world will collectively hop to the next trend so it can get hyper-monetized/enshittified, too.
  
  Exactly. LLM makes you do the same stupid shit, but faster and with more intensity.
- It’s both.
- Well, it's boths fault. LLMs are an annoyingly effective tool for SEOs. Without it SEO would likely be easier to spot and block.

Kagi is good. I’m very happy with it.
- Yes, it is a premium service, but it really works well.

I'm going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or "AI" tools predating the LLMs we have now.

The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.
Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.
- Huh...Can't replicate that claim (though I would believe it happening)
  
  On the 20th Sep. I asked my Google Home if it would be raining.
  It responded that it would rain. I asked when it would rain.
  Home responded with "Today it won't rain."
  Like what? 5 seconds ago you said it would. No weather report reports rain. Where did you get the first response from??
  And I could even replicate it (have it on video)
  
  I can’t get it to repeat it either but it was definitely an ai auto response thing from google ai overview or whatever it’s called
  Now it’s giving distance from burner and everything lol. It’s learning 👀
- I don't even look at that thing. I scroll right past it.

Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.
- Another vote for Kagi here as well... except for searching for local businesses near where I live, I revert to Google for that, but I Google through Kagi so privacy is somewhat protected
- I know there's some controversy but its spoiled me now, it just works
- Thank you. I needed this. The "free" search engines have tainted my experience of this world. Frankly, I hate it here. I'm ready for the inevitable "Apocalypse"/" Alien invasion" that stops the absolute incompetence that permeates our society. Whether you understand it or not, I beseach upon you my blessings, may your days provide success in your endeavores, and bountiful returns to your entire home. Bless you for sharing.
  
  Search engines make you yearn for the destruction of the human race...?

Kagi is pretty awesome

It's not you. Google has been getting worse.
https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/
- Lately I google for someone that should give me a direct, exact result. First five links are fucking paid ads.

they overengineered it. they now give you results they think most people want instead of what you searched. for google, it helps to switch on verbatim mode and set your country to something weird like Azerbaijan
- What is "verbatim mode"?
  
  under the google search field is a row of buttons. one of them, usually far right, is "search tools". sometimes you have to scroll the button row to reach it. it has a verbatim switch that makes google not replace your search terms with what it thinks most people mean when entering that
  
  And where do you switch it?

Kagi is great. It’s a paid service but you can try 100 searches for free.
You can use the Orion browser on iOS and set Kagi as the search engine.
- The day i pay for search engines is the day i finally finish my 2020 new year's resolution
  
  Enjoy your war against ads then. I’m not against supporting content, I just wanted a better model than invasive ads.

Dead Internet Theory
It becomes more and more true every day.
- Jesus, the "plandemic" explanation for why the Internet is dying. The Internet IS clearly dying, but this is stupid. Even if we got rid of all the bots and AI, the Internet would still be dying, because open protocols are not as exploitable as walled gardens. The value of capital in the world overwhelms the value of human labour and human interest, and all our social structures conform to the needs of capital over time.
- It doesn’t really, it’s just that human activity on the internet is more and more taking place on platforms without any search indexing. 20 years ago, internet forum are where you’d go for advice online. Nowadays, it’s more and more becoming discord servers and similar, which just aren’t indexed by internet search.
- it really doesn't.

You only tested Google and Bing.
Qwant and DDG both use the Bing architecture.
I agree though, search engines have become noticeably worse the last 2 years.
- I’m pretty sure they discovered in the google monopoly case that google realized a couple years ago that a worse search experience would not negatively impact their bottom line. So makes sense

Whats funny and kind of sad, is that they know exactly what you're searching for, and don't give any fucks about showing you that, and instead will show you this cool other thing that they're getting their beak wet on thats like, eh... kinda related to what you typed in. Google didn't get dumber, they just don't have any meaningful competition which would force them to deliver high quality results, and instead of enshittified their results to the point where they're practically useless.

theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.

There's an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you'll never see another Quora article again.
Idr the name of the extension - I'll check when I get home and follow up.
- Follow-up?
  
  It's probably uBlacklist, available on both Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers. Filters websites and results for search.
  
  Sorry, that was a LONG fuckin day. On call, and we had a couple addon surgeries go late.
  Anyway, this one:
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/
  I need to be more diligent about actually using it, if your search gives garbage in even like the first 5 hits, add those to your filter and it'll start to add up fast. This extension has only been on my radar for a few months, and it's already made a big difference - I'm in nursing school right now, and trying to look up info on the shit our profs are lecturing on invariably yields like 10 websites that are just cheaty test question databases that don't actually help you learn jack shit; and there's so much of that garbage that it makes finding actual info a challenge. Screening that bullshit out alone has been great!
  10/10

DDG and qwant are basically bing

I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.
Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.
- I don't even want a baby, but I was getting nonstop diaper ads for weeks this summer.
  I think it's because they're desperately trying to get people to have kids(thats my hypothesis anyway). Not saying yours isn't picking up you talking about the topic, but I got so swamped with them at one point I was starting to wonder if I was losing my mind. I asked my husband about it and he was getting them too.
  It was honestly weird as hell.
  
  The chance that Google, for some reason, wants people to have babies, is significantly lower than the chance you just happen to fit some demographics cohort which is likely to have a baby, or to soon have a baby.

I've found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.

I agree with you. It has gotten worse.

4get.ca
Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!

I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).

Kagi is very good.

Why have you not tried Kagi? If it's important to you to have good search and you don't like being spied on and having ads shoved down your throat, it's worth paying a small fee for quality instead of paying with your privacy for crap results. It's been a breath of fresh air. Searching is fun again. It also indexes Lemmy. Traditional Search has largely gone to crap, but I'm tired of everyone complaining that these mega companies offering 'free' services aren't holding their end of the deal instead of supporting the people that are doing something about it. I'm not optimistic things like qwant or searx will be sustainable or deliver high quality results, but by all means donate to them with time or money if you believe in them.
- Kagi isn't free
  
  The search problem is largely due to not being the actual customer.
  Look at me. I’m the customer now.
  
  Neither is beer
  
  If it's free then you're the product
  And if you're the product then there's an interest to keep you on the site and show you ads which works best if the first result isn't the correct one and you need to scroll or even go to page two
  It's literally the reason why Google got so much worse that they wanted to show more ads to users which wouldn't work if the best result is always the first
- Searching is fun again.
  What? When was searching ever "fun"? And when was that even a desirable state? Statements like this contribute to the propensity to dismiss kagi fans as shills.
  
  unnecessary antagonism aside, people have fun learning and satisfying their curiosity, and it's more rewarding when there's less bloat to slog through
  
  There is no propensity to do this at all. It just you being a prick I think. You are clearly too young to remember when Google first came out. Harnessing the power of search is exciting! The internet may be getting shitier, but there is still fun to be had. Im sorry if you've never experienced that.
- Kagi is the same as ddg 99% of the time.
  
  Omg no. You have a diversified data set?
- Because Kagi mostly just calls to google api and do a little filtering on the results, to remove ads, and maybe mix some results around with other search engine apis.
  I can get the same results with whoogle, self hosted and not adding another "everything is a subscription" to my wallet.
  
  No, that isn't how it works by any stretch of the imagination. Kagi has its own search index.

It's intentional.
Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.
A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.
PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.

Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.
- What do you do instead?
  
  Besides be sad and hit my head against a wall? Depending on the query, I'll sometimes use ChatGPT or find an associated Discord, subreddit or somewhere and hope for the best.
  I'm disappointed a lot.

I don't use perplexity, but AI is generally 60-80% effective with a larger than average open weights off line model running on your own hardware.
DDG offers the ability to use some of these. I use a modified Mistral model still, even though its base model(s) are Llama 2. Llama 3 can be better in some respects but it has terrible alignment bias. The primary entity in the underlying model structure is idiotic in alignment strength and incapable of reason with edge cases like creative writing for SciFi futurism. The alignment bleeds over. If you get on DDG and use the Anthropic Mixtral 8×7b, it is pretty good. The thing with models is to not talk to them like humans. Everything must be explicitly described. Humans make a lot of implied context in general where we assume people understand what we are talking about. Talking to an AI is like appearing in court before a judge; every word matters. The LLM is basically a reflection of all of human language too. If the majority of humans are wrong about something, so is the AI.
If you ask something simple like just a question, you're not going to get very far into what the model knows. Models have very limited scope of focus. If you do not build prompt momentum into the space by describing a lot of details, the scope of focus is large but the depth is shallow. The more you build up momentum by describing what you are asking in detail, the more it narrows the scope and deeper connections can be made.
It is hard to tell what a model really knows unless you can observe the perplexity output. This is more advanced, but the perplexity score for each generated token is how you infer that the model does not know something.
Search sucks because it is a monopoly. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers m$ and the goo. All search queries go through these either directly or indirectly. No search provider is deterministic any more. Your results are uniquely packaged to manipulate you. They are also obfuscated to block others from using them for training better or competitive models. Then there is the anti trust US government case and all of that which makes obfuscating one's market position to push people onto other platforms temporarily, their best path forward. - criminal manipulators are going to manipulate.

I asked Google why search engines are so bad now and its AI summaries its own deficiencies quite well:
Some say search engines have declined in quality due to a number of factors, including:
Search engine optimization (SEO) spam A wave of SEO spam has contributed to the decline in search result quality.
Affiliate marketing Affiliate link sites contribute to the low-quality content that floods the internet.
AI-generated content New technology can quickly produce low-quality content.
Marketing Search results are filled with marketing and links that may not be relevant to the query.
Recommender algorithms Some say the algorithm that recommends content is a mess. For example, someone might be recommended alt-right content after watching a click-bait video.
Ads Google's biggest business is advertising, and it's inserting more ads into its products to make more money.
Some say it's harder to find specific information these days, and that search operators are often needed to filter search results.

Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts
It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.

And here I thought Startpage was acting up...

There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.

“Perplexity AI”
- Yeah 100% agree. Especially for the type of search where you’re googling for an answer. This feels like what searches used to be when Google was young and forums still existed.

So what about open source self hosted search engines? If it requires some hardware I'd gladly team up with a small group of people to finance a bigass server that just gets us our personal search engine
Any good ones out there?
- Searxng, but there are plenty of instances already
  
  Perplexica is interesting too, but it uses a moderate amount of ram because of elastic search.
  And of course you need to have ollama running
- There's stuff like Searxng or whoogle, but these aren't "real" search engines, merely "search aggregators" - they relay requests to a bunch of actual search engines, like bing or google, and aggregate the results. That's why they don't require tons of compute and scraping, and also why they often fail to work (since the search engines in question don't like or allow this). I believe it's not feasible to run a "real" search engine alone or even as a small group of people - according to this comment you need a powerful server with terabytes* of drive, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and a lot of compute - and all of this will just let you crawl some top domains, nowhere near a good chunk of the internet.
  *which sounds low actually, I would have expected more for this

Thank god I can find everything I need in wikipedia and reddit
- Wikipedia has its own problems, especially now since it's an excepted fast source, companies and vips often will hire a team to manage their Wikipedia presence, specifically to eliminate controversial and problematic history. If you know anything exciting about the Kellogg family or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or, heck of J. P. Morgan (who was a walking human atrocity) you'll find their Wikipedia pages scant of details, and sometimes almost hagiographic.

I wanted to make a joke about my first search engine, MetaCrawler, and then found out it's still around and still does search. Going down that rabbithole, it's changed hands a ton and was only relaunched kinda recently at some point. Is it any good? Nah, probably not.
I guess I'll just have to rely on my other aggregate search engine, SavvySearch (no, no the first search engine does not in fact still exist, much to my disappointment).

Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed

EXPONENTIALLY worse.

Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market

Funnily enough I've found using an LLM to parce the data, then cross checking it's source as well as my own sources to be superior to previous searches.
It's annoying to change the way you just mindlessly search, but if you're upset by it just mindlessly search, end of discussion.

I just use chatGPT to search now. I have a super-prompt in its memory telling it how to search and to cite sources and provide links and it is so much better than Google even though it's using AI, too.
*The future is now, old men!

I use brave search. I can generally find most things. They even have an answer with ai thing that gives some useful stuff when you want a specific quick answer.
I also use ddg.

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