It's become apparent to me over the last few years that Google is increasingly useless as a search engine. This seems to be borne out in its internal documents, confirming that they've tweaked the search according to warped incentives:
>For searchers, it doesn’t matter how much you refine your query, you’re still going to get crummy search results because there’s an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.
>Prabhakar Raghavan was made Head of Search a little over a year later in June 2020, and it's pretty obvious how big a decline Google Search has taken since then. Results are filled with Search Engine Optimized spam, ads and sponsored content are bordering on indistinguishable from regular results, and the disastrous launch of Google's AI-powered "summaries" produced results that ranged from hilarious to actively life-threatening.
When I was younger, Google was still extremely efficient in finding exactly what I wanted it to. It paid attention to Boolean operators, it cleverly parsed different parts of my search query, it would find obscure results based on descriptors alone. I took for granted that a search engine like this would exist forever, a permanent feature of the internet. I didn't understand that companies could make money by making their output worse.
Another issue is that other search engines are also modelled on Google, to varying degrees; some even use Google results as training data. Even finding an alternative is difficult.
Having used all of the search engines, I'm fairly convinced that the problem isn't search, it's the internet - you get crap results because the quality of content is declining, not because search engines are getting worse.
I use DuckDuckGo for navigational searches (e.g. finding the DVLA page to renew my car tax), but for informational searches I mostly use Perplexity.
An interesting observation I saw somewhere else is that most information now is on social media, which isn’t indexed by search engines. Now that the internet is just five websites consisting of screenshots of the other four, it’s much harder for any search engine to scrape hundreds of websites for results. Consider then that Facebook posts and Instagram and TikTok don’t show up in Google searches, because of how they are set up, and there just isn’t as much information for Google to find any more.
I'm 90% certain DuckDuckGo are using AI summaries instead of a small preview of the website on your searches. Who the fuck wants this shit? Fuck off already!
If you want to look for copyrighted things aren't filtered out of your search results at the behest of the corporatocracy, Yandex is your best bet. If you want a reverse image search that isn't totally borked, then it's Yandex again. Being so repressive that you foster a potent culture of sharing things for free is probably the Soviet Union's greatest gift to the world.
You beautiful bastard. Kagi is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. The only minor annoyance is that it asks for an e-mail address/sign-in, but I used a Protonmail account.
Now that OP is satisfied, I have another complaint: I wanted to know who that skier was who died in horrific circumstances, where he crashed and was basically torn apart as he went down the hill he was skiing on. Not only has this information been scrubbed from Wikipedia (however, it does sound like I’m thinking of Gernot Reinstadler), but when I search Google, it autocompletes with “unfall” or “accidente”, but not with the English word, “accident”. There are search results with photos and possibly even a video, but I know what it looked like and I don’t want to see it again. I just wanted to know his name, and great steps have evidently been taken to stop people finding this out. But not so great that you can’t see the horror once you know what to look for, which makes me question the purpose of any of this.
>>29017 No; this one died. As I recall, he hit a slalom flag and it impaled him and he got all his intestines ripped out on TV. That didn’t happen to Gernot Reinstadler, but he did get one of his legs almost torn off according to perplexity.ai, and that sounds like it would have been enough to result in the photo I remember of a giant long streak of blood going all the way down a ski slope.
Michael Schumacher just had a similar experience to Sonny Bono, or that actress.
>>29019 I just did an image search (a Yandex image search, no less) and while I didn't see the picture I was thinking of, Gernot Reinstadler's skiing accident in 1991 definitely left a similar trail of blood.
The accident I'm thinking of definitely had - or used to have - a Wikipedia page, so I found Gernot Reinstadler's name by looking at the pages for all of these skiers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_skiing_deaths
If you find anyone else on that list whose Wikipedia page describes their death in grisly detail, you can go from there and see if they have any images or videos. Or you could probably type "gernot reinstadler 1991 skiing accident" or something like that into YouTube, because I have certainly been offered a few videos of whatever happened to him.
>>29033 That's their entire business model. The thing that sets it apart from other search engines is that it's one you need to pay for. They give you freebies at the start, but did they not tell you? (I haven't used it myself and I only heard about it from this thread, presumably at the same time you did).
I admit I liked the sound of it, but I wasn't even willing to create an account so I certainly wasn't going to pay.
