Hi, do you have a minute? I would like to talk about https://kagi.com as the solution to all your problems.
Google will always try to squeeze more and more ads into your life, just like Microsoft and all the other big tech shitfarms.
While Kagi uses some Google search results, they are avoiding most of the SEO crap you get in Google while also giving you the option to completely remove or prioritize whatever sites you want in the search results.
It really makes the web feel very fresh again because you discover sites you never see on Google or Bing.
Duck Duck Go already exists.
It’s slowly getting worse though. Trust the market to ruin every good thing there is for profits.
People have always been saying duckduckgo is bad or worse than google but it's always worked fine for me, and still does.
same. haven't had to 'google' on google in years.
Yep, the circle of the internet:
10 Create new awesome service
20 Get a lot of users
30 Build a great community
40 Start running ads to offset costs
50 Get VC funding
60 Add new features that enable increased monetizations 70 Make old core feature more annoying to use.
80 Push users to new features
90 Kill important old core feature
100 Push old users out
110 Increase monetization of the service
120 See user numbers dwindle
130 See new competitors start
140 Count of existing userbase to keep service alive
150 Slowly move into obscurity 160 Become a joke brand that is forever tarnished.
170 Never really die
180 goto 10
It's not even comparable in quality… When I was using it, I had to resort to Google search every day to get good results.
I won't lie, I was really dubious on the idea of paying for search, but after the demo I really came around and signed up for the year. Kagi results are far and away better than anything else on 90% of my queries. The only thing I miss is, when you use google in your searchbar, you can use it as a calculator. E.g. if I type "13 * 42", the top suggestion is "= 546", you don't even have to press enter… So I got really used to using that as my default calculator. But Kagi just blanks you, so I've had to start keeping a desktop calculator open all the time lol
They can probably fix that, they are very open to suggestions, unlike Google. Mail them about it :)
In my experience the quality is just fine on duckduckgo.
It's a bit different because they aren't tailoring based on all the data google has about you but it's still good.