A storefront for robots: The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other.

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Technology@beehaw.org – 220 points –
The store is for people, but the storefront is for robots
theverge.com
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I think Google peaked about 6-8 years ago now and then started slipping at an ever accelerating rate.

It’s almost useless for me when searching anything remotely technical or otherwise niche.

I almost consistently need to go to the second page of results now, something I don’t remember doing since like 2009.

I find Bing acceptable. Brave search works well. But I’m actually using Kagi now since I’m hoping their paid model will actually mean I’m not the product.

I tried searching for a comprehensive list of rule changes to the NBA in its history - something that DEFINITELY exists on a webpage. I near exclusively got news results from a recent rule change

duckduckgo is my go to now, but not out of lack of usability. haven't used google for ~4-5 years for privacy concerns

Brave search works well.

Does brave index data on it's own or is it pulled from Google/Bing?

They do have their own crawler and I believe supplement from bing only when necessary. Something like 98% of results are from their own index across all users. They actually have a breakdown for every search.

I think they actually have the largest independent index outside of Google/Bing right now.

Others that exclusively use their own index are:

Mojeek (results aren’t great)
Kagi (result are pretty good imo)

I use Kagi too and it's great, but I think we will move more and more to chatgpt-ish search engines in a year or two.

I imagine they will attempt to put ads in those too.

AI starting out so corporate friendly is a really bad sign imo. Early internet was the wild west (good and bad) but it took time for money to tame it. AI feels like it's coming out of the gate pre-tamed by corporations. Not looking forward to that era.