No Stupid Questions

*years? Yes. It used to be the bleeding edge of search and now it's just profit driven enshittification like the rest of ai-ridden garbage tech wallstreet bullshit.

If you use Firefox you can add a Search Engine that removes the google cruft.

In about:config browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh Boolean, hit the plus sign to add. Exit out of that screen. Then go to Search engines in Settings and “Add” [ whatever name you want to call it ] as a new search engine. And paste this URL and save it. https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

You will see that it deletes everything but search when you use it. You can also just use the url but you must replace the %s with your search term, like red+espresso. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=red+espresso&udm=14

I'm sure this works for other browsers, I just use Firefox.

I was honestly getting so frustrated the other day at work when searching for something very specific and coming up empty handed. Tried DuckDuckGo and even fucking Bing and found what I needed in a matter of seconds. Google search is trash now. I have to go to the second page or further just to find something that isn't an ad, AI response, or reddit. None of which are helpful.

The results are usually the most clicked, not necessarily the factual links. Others have recommended kagi. I haven’t tried it yet. I remember when the internet started and you had to use them all!

I shed a tear when quoted strings stopped working

I recommend Kagi, I've been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.

Yes it's paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn't a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I'm either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I'm paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.

Now it's up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.

Google makes money on ads. They make $300-$400 annually per user by displaying ads.

They are motivated to tarpit you in order to show you more ads.

Giving you your results quickly and efficiently costs them revenue.

Use kagi, or another search engine.

SEO became too well known and is now filled with bullshit.

yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:

• ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
• duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
• any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
• marginalia.nu - specifically 'random' - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

Google Maps is utter crap lately too. It seems to be making up locations, and several times in the past month, it’s taken me to the wrong place. It’s getting almost as bad as Apple Maps

I used to a hater of Kagi but honestly its a damn good alternative search engine. They are doing some actual innovation and are very transparent. I still prefer a good searXNG instance but searxng is more for technical people who understand decentralized meta search instances. Here's my simple guide on search engine alternatives to help you get away from google best you can.

Google is finally collapsing under the weight of its own greed and lack of innovation. Now other companies are showing up to steal their lunch especial with the big monopoly case going on right now.

I stopped using it last year it got so bad, I ended up using DDG but that’s gotten shit and I’ve found myself back on Google. To me it feels 10% better than it was when I stopped.

Although everyone’s experiences with Google are so different we’re probably all being A/B tested.

Yeah, last month I finally had enough and DDG has been alright

They fucked it all up with that AI bullshit awhile ago and it hasn’t recovered. I use start page now and am much happier.

There are many factors at play here, some of which including:

• AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there's an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
• Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
• Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn't need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
• SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing "page ranking" algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. "Search Engine Optimization" is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
• Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.

That said, it depends on what you're searching for. If you're searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they're still online).

The internet has slowly become more and more useless over time since the pandemic. It's fucking impossible to find anything now. Half the time it's like I have better luck doing an lan search on my home network than looking it up on Google and I'm not even very deep into the self hosted everything rabbit hole.

It's like they want us all to be stupid, uninformed and not know how to do anything.

It is half okay, but only if they are not getting paid to screw up your results. It is a coup against democracy where freedom of information is freedom of the press and is an entire fundamental pillar of democracy. Google's entire business model has always been neo feudalism. A web crawler and search engine is like a library, it must be neutral, objective, and publicly funded as a non profit. Much the same with YT, it is our digital public commons and the most efficient form for information sharing in the primary form of human communication.

The internet has gotten worse in general, and it's accelerating.
The vast majority of online content is now AI-generated.

I've been using Kagi since ~February and it's changed my views on Search. Beforehand, if use a combination of Google, Bing, DDG, and Brave and rarely find what I needed in satisfactory time. Now I'm typically finding it in the top 5 without all the cruft + have access to a handful of LLM assistants to choose from for other tasks (when needed).

I've also heard good things about SearXNG.

HAHAHAHAHAH no. Google Search has gotten so much worse in the last couple of YEARS more like.

The reason behind this is not a bug but a feature. Google wants the trip from search to result to take longer as they can show you more ads that way.

I read on here (I think) a couple months ago that adding "before:2023" to your search terms improves results a lot. I've found it to be true. Unless I'm looking for something specifically from the last couple years.

It's crap.

You can use udm14.org though.

I have fully switched to kagi, it's not perfect but for the average case it's better than google.

Try finding old band photos. Basically impossible