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.
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.
There was something bad with Kagi.
You’re linking to a halfhearted attempt at an exposé written by someone who acts unreasonable towards any attempts at clarification.
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.
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.
