They're perfectly capable of implementing all the same search operators as 1990s Yahoo and 2000s Google. It's a solved problem.
The issue is that they don't want to. They'd rather be a middleman offering you "useful recommendations" (that they or may not sell to the highest bidder) instead of offering you value.
Agreed. So many times I have to put Wikipedia or Reddit behind my search to get anything useful out of google. So it can work. Google is clearly prioritizing junk over value
I've been using it for a while now. It is marginally better, but not exactly night and day. It seems to struggle with intent at times, and others I just get the same bland results as the free engines. The privacy is a big plus however.
Probably because it costs money and it also likely also will quickly succumb to sloppification by experimenting with their own ai and having an unstable founder…
I'm using it for about two years and i haven't seen any sloppification. I see it as a feature that it is a paid service because i hope it will be a sustainable model for them to keep it as it is. I think it's a no brainer to pay for it instead of all the suffering people describe here. The founder remark i don't get
Right now Kagi is a better search engine than Google. Why should some eventual demise in the future discourage anyone? There is no cost of switching and you can start using it right away
Would recommend to just try their 100 free searches.
Their results are good, but it’s hard to have an objective measure. For me, it’s the little features that make it worth it (and that they have a forum for feature requests, and a proper changelog).
I've been disappointed with pretty much all recent SEs (DDG being among the very worst). Having been an early Scroogle user, ixquick (startpage) and a few other ones I dearly miss, I've been using https://freespoke.com/ lately and find it tolerable.
I was using searx instances with reasonable results but many of them started failing recently.
Anyway, I hope everyone finds a good one. I fear things will only get worse though.
The biggest reason SEO is profitable is because low quality sites run display ads. That is the lifeblood, and intrinsic motivation, for these sites to even exist.
Google operates the largest display ads network. They literally *pay* websites for SEO spam, and take a very healthy cut off the top.
I wish people would stop acting like Google has been in a noble battle against the spam sites, when those sites generate Google billions of dollars a year in revenue.
The obvious question is, why would they ruin search for display? The answer is greed combined with hubris. They were able to double dip for years, but they killed the golden goose.
Everybody with a brain knew this would happen when they bought Doubleclick, and it took longer than expected, but here we are.
I think the search and ad code base may not be explicitly co-mingled, but they are implicitly co-mingled. And return worse search results than the early 2000s code base.
Both are explicitly related to the web at large. Google sells ads on more than two million sites, and those mostly aim to be the kind of sites that feature in search results. I'd say that the two code bases are related, by virtue of operating on the same data structure.
You remember the pagerank paper? It described how Google classifies each page on a scale from "something that links to good pages" to "informative page". Google and other search engines produces links to the latter. And since then, web site operators have had strong incentives to be on the "informative page" end of the range. Today I don't think the 2000s code can find a lot of pages of the former kind (well, outside Facebook).
It produced very nice results back then. It was/is good code, but good results need more than just good code, it needs good input too.
I loath products like Facebook, Messenger, Google Photos, etc. are turning their traditional "search" page/feature into a one-stop AI slop shop.
All I want to do is find a specific photo album by name.