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It has been intentionally vandalized.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

This implies that someone else could just do what Google used to do, create a better search engine, and eat their lunch. They might not make as much money per-user, but for all search engines other than Google, their biggest problem is not revenue per user, it's how to get more users. "Have a better search engine" is a pretty good advantage there.

I use kagi exclusively now except for shopping and images. Anytime I use Google, now I'm disgusted with how bad the results are. The bar seems really low to supplant Google search.

The secondary problem here - one that is both larger and not something Kagi can solve - is that so much content on the internet is just low quality garbage. Even supposedly crowdsourced info from Reddit is astroturfed to hell by social media marketing firms.

So what good is it finding something that’s highly relevant to my search query if it’s just garbage anyways. There are just so few sources of meaningful information, and essentially no way to reliably differentiate them from drivel.

In the linked article they talk about how Google reverted their crap detector to intentionally feed users low quality results.

But you're still right that there's so much garbage out there. Google had it largely under control though.

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