Google doesn't work anymore ?

tantedante@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 292 points –
the current state of search engines (music video)
youtube.com

What's your opinion? Does google really "not work" anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it's own way i feel...

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Google is absolutely useless now, nothing but SOE farmed rubbish.

It’s become completely unusable.

I’ve moved over to Kagi 100%

It’s well worth the money for the amount of control I have over my experience. Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome

I like the idea of Kagi a lot, but the pricing structure is not yet the right one for me. I fully support the idea of paying for search - I paid for Neeva and now that this has shut down I pay for Brave Search Premium. But I despise having limits, that's a mental burden I don't want. And with Kagi that would mean I have to pay $25 a month, and that's not worth it for me.

You're not limited to a set amount of searches if you pick a cheaper Kagi plan... the plan is just for how many are pre-paid. You'd have to do six times the pre-paid number of searches on the $5 plan to get billed $25, so there's no point in paying $25 monthly unless you're actually doing thousands of searches every month.

But either way, there is no limit.

Idk, that might even be worse imo. I don't want to go back to the days of surprise bills like you'd get because you went over your alotted minutes/texts/GBs, or to have to think about whether or not a particular search is worth $.

The typical surprise bill would still be a lot less than your monthly payment for the infinite searches option. You probably aren't going to unknowingly perform several thousand more searches than you normally do without noticing it.

Anyway, your other option is to scroll through infinite ads trying to find the few actual search results.

Pick your poison.

You can set a price point you get a notification, and another price point where there's a hard cap. So I've started on the $5 a month plan which is 300 searches plus 1.5c per additional search. Then I set a $5 limit on the extra searches, so I'll never be billed more than $10.

Never heard of Kagi but it does sound I intriguing.

You will love it. I switched about 6 months ago and it's wonderful. When I was using duckduckgo I had to use the !g keyword to search Google sometimes. With Kagi, it's basically switch and you forget Google exists.

Set it as default and you will see what I mean.

I’ve tried Kagi several times and the results for me are not good. I’ve pretty much gone back to Google unfortunately.

Can I ask what kind of searches you're doing? I don't find google all that great, so I'm curious what you're searching for where google gives you good results.

But it's paid 😭 I spose I could try it for a month.

But it’s paid

Unfortunately it's looking like that's going to be the future of things that aren't shit on the internet, whether it's paying for search, or donating every so often to your Fediverse admin to help keep the lights on.

Yup try it and set as default in the browser. You will start to see a lot of sites that never showed up in google also. They have these "listacles" in search results where they group relevant sites into a small list, which makes it super simple to go to them for results.

If you want a sample search, try "best tv shows 2023" or something like that.

is this an ad?

The way you can blacklist listicles and similar garbage is worth the asking price in the face of it

I haven't done that but yes, it's pretty much unheard of that the user can actually control what shows up in search if you come from Google-land.

I've also used Kagi for two months and can really recommend it! I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo a few years back, but Kagi is just so much faster and also generally has better results.

Being able to black list, downplay or uplift specific sources is awesome

I've never heard of Kagi, but yeah, those features sound like a godsend. I'd love it if you could have that on a search engine that isn't pay to use.