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.
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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
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 It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago.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.
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…
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
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).
DDG and qwant are basically bing
Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market
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.
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 legit had no clue what a Fumo plushie was 😵💫
Has it gotten worse? They’ve been dogshit for a long time, maybe they’ve gotten worse and I haven’t noticed
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’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.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now and it’s been working well for me
Same.
Having to signup and login to a search engines sounds like an annoying hassle
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.
It is. And it’s also terrible for privacy, but people do it with google as well.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not gonna subscription my heated car seats but search is a service that costs an ongoing amount to provide. The subscription isn’t significant, it’s $5 a month for 300 searches (or $10 for unlimited).
I know we’ve been conditioned to expect search for free, but if we want to get away from the “the user is the product” model then I think it’s a good thing to have a subscription to a service that has ongoing costs to provide.
Up to 300 searches. I’m not asking for free. Just for it to not be a subscription. Just sell me 300 searches.
Ah right, I get you. I wonder if they have considered this. Pretty sure their free/demo tier is 100 searches not confined to a time period so presumably the platform could handle that model.
Yes but then how do they get that sweet sweet recurring revenue
By having a good product, so people want to use it and need to top-up on new searches regularly as a result?
Hmm, perhaps. But…recurring revenue sure is easier than…whatever you said.
You do it once.
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
I think this might be it. There were also some statements by the CEO I think which didn’t exactly inspire confidencenin their company - but again, I don’t remember the details unfortunately
That’s what’s kept me from using it, although I very much like the idea of paying for a good service. I would love to see them figure out a way to avoid accounts.
Never heard any issues with Privacy, but I’ve heard issues about them using Brave search Results as part of their results.
If i remember right, it wasn’t just using brave, but including a referral id in brave searches. It wasn’t intended, and they fixed it, so all good with me.
Yeah, lots of opinions, a few facts: one of the discussions.
It was not even the emails. I tried to duckgo it and only found this controversy (which was new to me). What I saw was a specific qute, possibly on topic of privacy or something adjecent which just made me go “nope!”
My blocks
Edit: hm. I seem to have replied to the wrong comment.
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.
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.
It’s the first one I’ve paid for. And it is that much better than the free ones I used before imho.
Unfortunately they started to play with AI too :-(
It was disabled by default on my account I think
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.
Leaderboard here for anyone curious
Yep everyone blocking Pinterest.
Also the most prioritized website is Wikipedia. Guess everyone wants facts in the the age of hallucinatory AI
I never got Pinterest results on Kagi to begin with
Same. Even the ai stuff is helpful instead of annyoing.
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.
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 are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.
And here I thought Startpage was acting up…
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
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
If you think paying means you aren’t still the product, I have news for you.
I don’t need my search history tied directly to a means of payment, and not because I search for illicit stuff, but because I don’t need an advertising profile built on me that is absolutely tied to me now, because I paid for it.
If Kagi doesn’t turn out to be selling that info in a year or two, I’ll eat a bug.
I pay anonymously through crypto accounts. It’s easy and I can open new Kagi accounts if I want. I’m saving a beetle for you.
Exactly. A paid search engine is a privacy nightmare, and you have zero guarantees that they don’t monetize you one way or another in addition to the subscription fee.
You want to compare the hard evidence on abuse between paid search engines and unpaid search engines? I’m happy to work through that data with you.
I’m a shitty product because I block any ad that tries to display on my browser.
The search problem is largely due to not being the actual customer.
Look at me. I’m the customer now.
If I use ublock or whoogle I may not be customer. But the customer wont get anything from me anyway.
And you won’t get good search results in exchange.
Same results as any other metasearch engine, like kagi.
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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.
Last time I checked they admitted just being a metasearch engine. That their own search index was unusable. Which would be reasonable as a reliable proper search index is incredibly expensive.
I just checked their website, I don’t find references to their only using their own search engine. In fact they seems to be switched development to AI tools (that I would bet that they are just chatgpt API wrappers).
They also stated having like 20.000 customers. With that money and based on California there’s no way they have the ability to do any core development besides API wrapping other commercial services.
Some people asked for source: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Fron their own web:
Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide,
They try to downplay it as their whole bussiness model is “we are not google search” though it’s pretty obvious that they don’t have the resources to create a functional search index of the whole web. Most of their results are filtered metasearch and that can be self host without paying a subscription.
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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.
This x100. Obviously anyone who has fun using well crafted tools to explore a vast frontier of information is a shill. /s
Seriously!? You enjoyed surfing the web? Accessing the information superhighway, a completely novel and unprecedented advance in our ability to explore what is effectively the database of all human knowledge? Statements like this reinforce my incredibly niche but deeply held prejudice against “people” like you.
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.
