So what about open source self hosted search engines? If it requires some hardware I'd gladly team up with a small group of people to finance a bigass server that just gets us our personal search engine

Any good ones out there?

You only tested Google and Bing.

Qwant and DDG both use the Bing architecture.

I agree though, search engines have become noticeably worse the last 2 years.

It's intentional.

Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.

A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.

PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.

There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.

Kagi is great. It’s a paid service but you can try 100 searches for free.

You can use the Orion browser on iOS and set Kagi as the search engine.

You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that's just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.

• Dead Internet Theory

It becomes more and more true every day.

Whats funny and kind of sad, is that they know exactly what you're searching for, and don't give any fucks about showing you that, and instead will show you this cool other thing that they're getting their beak wet on thats like, eh... kinda related to what you typed in. Google didn't get dumber, they just don't have any meaningful competition which would force them to deliver high quality results, and instead of enshittified their results to the point where they're practically useless.

Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.

Infinitely worse. I barely use search engines for issues these days and no longer recommend that people "Google" things.

It's not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

I just use chatGPT to search now. I have a super-prompt in its memory telling it how to search and to cite sources and provide links and it is so much better than Google even though it's using AI, too.

*The future is now, old men!

Kagi is pretty awesome

It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.

I agree with you. It has gotten worse.

Brave has their own search. There is also meta searches such as metager, searx and mojeek. I hope more search engines enter the market

It's not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.

Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every "product" they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It's not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.

The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there's not much good content left to find (in % of the total)

theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.

It is, and it's not just the search engines to blame.

The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn't pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.

The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.

Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.

Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.

My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?

4get.ca

Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!

they're pretty bad, but ddg at least feels like I'm getting actual results.