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.

I wouldn’t know because I mainly use DuckDuckGo and haven’t had a reason to use Google in a long time.

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.

SearXNG. I will never understand why it doesn’t get used more. It is so easy to set up.

Google search as I know it shit the bed over a decade ago.

google being useful for search has been over for at least a decade

Ecosia.org ⬆️

If I wanted a conversation I wouldn't be using a search engine to get answers.

Yay, worse search

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.

Ecosia

Startpage

DDG

Qwant

Brave Search

Even Yandex actually doesnt suck, if you're cool to use it.

Anyone still using Google needs to be in a home.

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.

Eu-first index, you say? I might wanna check that out!

I haven't used Google search since 2008, when I starting using Linux and Duckduckgo was the default search engine for Firefox.

is that as profitable as search?

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)

Been a kagi subscriber for about a year now. Right when they wer implementing ai overview. It’s been a very refreshing way to internet

Is searching with -AI not going to work?

4get.ca