Technology

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.

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.

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)

Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.

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.

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/

Kagi is pretty awesome

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.

Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.

• Dead Internet Theory

It becomes more and more true every day.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.

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).

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

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?

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.