I’m paying for kagi exactly because of all this BS. Results tend to be decent for the most part.
google was a perfect product. I’m talking early 2000s.
If it wasn’t for the need for endless growth it would have remained extremely profitable and competitive. but every quarter they have to show growth. Either buy making bs services they later kill, or buying profitable businesses then enshitifying them.
What’s the current product half-life? 10 years before enshittification starts or something like that.
Yeah, for a while there was really good progress on search results serving up the things you’re looking for, and not just by Google. I remember how impressed I used to be by the Amazon search engine. I could put a description of something that I didn’t know the name of into the search box and the first result was usually what I wanted. I could sort by user rating and usually get the best one on top.
Now there are pages of sponsored products that keep getting shown if you keep scrolling. The search engine has become completely enshitified, and so many bots have created positive and negative reviews that the ratings are way less useful.
also the bigger problem that the Internet is now a handful of websites. so search results are basically using Google to find a reddit thread.
Last night I just wanted a list of Marx Brothers movies and got a pop up of “Heyyyyy… why don’t you tell us what streaming services you subscribe to so we can help you better.”
“Why don’t you fuck right off with that shit?”
I changed all of my browser search engines to this and it’s been great!
Let me just sneak a tracking device on you too this will let anyone who pays me know where you are and where you’ve been and what you’ve looked at and your name and height and family members and friends and where you work and we’re working on finding out what you had for dinner last night too
Oh, that’s kind of helpful. I can never remember what I had for dinner last night
And what your eyes are doing. I’ll tell them about your eyeballsssss
And a whole stack of the exact same wrong answers despite you asking the question five times with the “-“ modifier to eliminate those wrong answers.
I had the f12 developer console thing open recently when I went to do a Google search and was blown away that a basic Google search has over 12 megabytes of network traffic flying around. My ad blockers and such blocked most of it, so it’s clearly not required.
What’s that? You want a program that’ll run AI slop lovally on your machine if you use our browser?
What’s that? You want our reCAPTCHA program that will force you to verify you’re using a closed-source Android OS to even look at a fucking website?
Would have been perfect if the last panel didn’t have the original web results anymore.
I always just scoot right by that AI at the top, when searching. I wish I could make it go away.
I’ve been using uBlock to get rid of it.
At some point the provided AI blocklist didn’t work, but element picker took care of that fairly easily.You can: https://udm14.com/
This extension makes it so google ALWAYS gives you web results first
Save the resources, use DDG instead
You can also use DDG, Startpage, spin up a SearX instance, or a number of other options.
Jokes on you. Google sunset the FAQs schema.
