I worked very briefly for a company that was hirable to push websites for SEO. It was basically all young underpaid contractors and interns even the HR team except for upper management who was all the same people from their previous big company running telemarketing bullshit.
So yeah just want to add the usual suspects definitely had a hand in the enshitification of the search engine as you might think.
Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they’re trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.
The true test is searching anything related to android and not get flooded by hundreds of links to auto generates blog content and useless bot created pages.
Here is an example for searching for “cats” with academic turned on. It’s not just .edus but it’s definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It’s just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I’ve reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.
I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).
They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.
They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).
All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.
I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.
I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.
I liked kagi for the first couple months I had it but then I noticed the results seems to be getting worse. Google tier. I cancelled because why pay for that?
I’m not sure if the results were better at first or whether I just noticed flaws more the longer I used it.
I’m often not even bothering to search for technical issues now. There’s been a big mindset shift in me. If I can’t figure it out on my own then pack it up and move on to the next thing. It’s a 5050 shot at best whether you’ll get help on a forum and search is a dumpster fire everywhere. I’m learning a lot more this way and retaining but fuck me running is it ever frustrating
not sure about other languages, but with Polish Google is still the most useful one, Bing and DDG don’t even hold a candle to it, that said i still think Google went to shit hard
I had not so good experiences with Contabo lately. Lot of outages and they withdrew 2 more month after the end of my subscription. Ionos had no outtages so far (5th month). In addition their web interface is better than Contabos.
There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
Edit: Also the main poin’t of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it’s just because it’s more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it’s faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.
I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.
It’s not really the ads on Google Search itself that break it.
It’s that almost every result is some automatically generated spam created entirely in response to Google’s algorithms. And it’s those pages that are covered in ads. Google broke the internet.
You can still get what you’re looking for, but I home in on results that look like forums or other actual user generated content. Didn’t even realise I was doing it tbh. I just mentally filter out most of the shit.
yup, nowadays if you don’t add “@r*ddit” to a tech related search in google you’ll get 10 seemingly copy pasted results that look like “1. download our drivers updater :))) 2. if you don’t want to do that, just give up lol”
Everything is a bot that gives you four paragraphs of text about how they’re a certified Microsoft Windows professional technician, but all they ever do is tell you to run sfc /scannow.
Same here. I almost responded asking what the issue is when I realized I query Google Search with specific keywords and cheats, ignoring all the bs in the list. At some point I just adapted and didn’t notice.
Now that I think about it there have been a few times where I’ve had to struggle to find something, especially if it is medical related. Gotta give old Reddit this: It’s been around so long with so much activity that you can at least get pointed in the right direction by throwing it into a search and hitting enter.
I have no idea why the best search engine is not mentioned in any of these comments. Maybe it is the same reason why I am not going to mention it either, to stop normies from ruining it.
A hint: they are the only major search engine to not give a flying fuck about DMCA and USA laws. This is also the reason why it is the undisputed king.
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