this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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[–] UnculturedSwine 68 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Google search has enshittified far faster than I ever thought possible. It used to work like magic. Too bad capitalism dictates that usefulness has a ceiling.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I've switched to Kagi recently and honestly it's better than Google ever was. You can assign weights to sites to see more or less of them in your results, it automatically cuts the listicle crap out, it has various built in filters for specific things like forums or scientific studies.

Downside: it's $10/mo. But I'm at the "I'd rather pay with money than data" stage of my life. Especially if it actually makes the experience fucking usable again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Another happy Kagi user here, it’s great.

[–] UnculturedSwine 2 points 6 months ago

I'm at that point as well I think. Thank you for the suggestion!

[–] [email protected] -4 points 6 months ago (3 children)
[–] Veraxus 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

TL;DR; “AI bad, they made some t-shirts, and the owner says some stupid crap sometimes.” 🙄

As long as the results remain the best and they don’t screw me over, I’m happy to keep paying for them.

But lets be honest, even Duck Duck Go is better than Google these days. It’s fine if folks don’t want to pay for search, but you’ll have a better experience avoiding Google, either way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

But lets be honest, even Duck Duck Go is better than Google these days.

I hate to say it, because I love their privacy policy, but it we're being honest, it's not. DDG mostly uses Bing, and I struggle to find what I'm after on that engine. I have better results with Brave search, who now run their own index (but their tech bro CEO leaves me nervous at every turn)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

You're linking to a halfhearted attempt at an exposé written by someone who acts unreasonable towards any attempts at clarification.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's not the point though. The point is that the ceo of the company hounds the person with their wall of text over something that they had virtually no exposure on at all. If not for that, it'd have remained completely obscure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Wasn't the explosion of that after the fact?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I'm gonna keep it real with you, I'll take "weirdo CEO and optional AI tools" over "corporate entity so powerful that society has literally warped around it, whose primary business model is psychological manipulation" any day of the week. The other search engines are so poor at what they do that they're not viable options.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

The world is a much worse place with bad search. We need a search system that is treated like a utility and paid based on success not ad views.