Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Yeah, it's so tiring. Search for something, entire first page is useless aggregator sites, containing nothing about the actual topic other than keywords. Waste of time
Agreed, and for the moment the "AI experience" is better than what Google Search was a couple of years ago... but I have faith, they'll sell this one out too, after all: users are the product.
I degoogled as a Covid project. Mostly it just made me feel a little bit better... and then GenAI hit. Hopefully I'll go my whole life without ever having used Gemini. And hopefully, if they ingested any of my pre-pandemic emails, photos, docs, etc to train with, pulling it out of cold storage will at least have cost them extra time and money.
Google Search has long since diminished from it's peak. 15 years ago we used to play a "game" by describing something as vaguely or strangely as possible and would be entertained to find it still on the first page of search results.
SEO and paid ranking caused a steady decline in Google search performance, and LLMs are the kill shot.
Indexing and ranking were already a solved problem, and conventional algorithms accomplished it much better than LLMs do. Unfortunately, LLMs need to find uses to justify investment, so now they must be used for any task that they can be used for, even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
even if its worse than the solutions that we already had.
Like Gemini replacing Assistant. Holy shit, what a dumpster fire.
The other factor is companies, interests, paying the Google and their ilk to not include things in search results. And only include what they choose as an alternative.
Then you might have different interests gaming the search results to bury something they don't like.
This is only amplified by LLMs
At the moment, I do find that the LLMs bring me more of what I want to see than the basic search engine used to a few years back... 15-20 years ago the basic search engine seemed to be much better then slowly deteriorated from there.
I have confidence, they'll sell this version to the highest bidder faster than they did the last one, then it will be just as bad as listening to radio advertisements as a way to find a good local restaurant to eat at...
SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.
are you aware of any instances that have lasted longer than a few months?
searx.garudalinux.org
I have it set up on my own home server. Before that, I had it set up on individual PCs. It's super easy. I guess you mean public instances. I've never used one because it is so easy to set up for yourself.
Is that such an issue? If so, I could set up an open instance.
I wouldn’t know because I mainly use DuckDuckGo and haven’t had a reason to use Google in a long time.
DuckDuckGo is just Microslop Bing with a different front-end.
Yeah, whatever bias and censorship Micro$lop’s search index has, except supposedly without the tracking. It’s a step up from Google and Bing, but not the perfect solution.
What do you recommend?
I recommend DDG as the first line, and kagi free tier if you can't find it on DDG.
I, as of yet, haven't really explored any alternatives, but I see a lot of others mentioned in the comments here.
Kagi and Startpage are my go-to search engines these days.
I have a paid Kagi account and feel it is very much worth the investment.
Too much AI with Kagi.
What makes it worth it to you over something like Ecosia?
Also, I’m on the fence about startpage. They were Dutch but were bought by an American advertising company.
I do not like the vibes of Startpage's owner, System1.
If you're using Startpage because it uses google on the back-end, Ecosia does much the same nowadays (you can toggle between that and bing).
If I wanted a conversation I wouldn't be using a search engine to get answers.
Ugh, damn post title. I went through the whole article looking for the alternatives before realizing the title of the article says nothing about alternatives.
Didnt bother with the article but
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Is an option
It's gone to shit since Bing jacked up the price of API calls
Sorry, it was in the post body. Will update post to make this clearer.
Big business is the enemy.
Capitalism sucks:
- Private property fetishism (erodes the commons)
- Free market fundamentalism (prioritizes the freedoms of the biggest asset holders over the rest)
- Accumulationism (incentivizes hoarding far beyond where most people would have liked to stop hoarding if the system didn't demand it)
- Consolidationism leading into economic royalism (mergers leading to monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, a two-tiered "justice" system, rules for thee but not for me)
- Transactionalism (no sense of society or priciples, but instead a system of backscratching where things only get done for their exchange value and for no other reason)
Eu-first index, you say? I might wanna check that out!
I use Vivaldi with Startpage instead of Chrome, etc; because I hate getting the AI results that are wrong half the time because they pull off of what some idiot on Reddit said (or just hallucinate)