I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore

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76 pointssundaybsunday101 comments

I had a very very hard time to make the jump to Kagi passing the steps of "paying", and "setting kagi as my default browser" because of inertia, and also Fear Uncertainty and Doubt of change.

But once I did it, that was very great, and a source of joy in my life. No regret at all.

I was concerned that I would still be semi-reliant on Google Search for things like local business opening hours etc. While it's true that Kagi doesn't return that stuff at the top of a search (I'm outside the US so YMMV), in practice it's been a non-issue because the top result—rather than an ad or some AI nonsense—is just that business' website. So at most it's one extra click.

I don't think I've deliberately done a Google search since I signed up, apart from to check that the !g option works as expected with the Safari extension (c'mon Apple, support custom search engines already)

That's actually one of the main reasons I don't join... Where I live, many shops, bars and restaurants have opening hours in Google but don't even have an actual website.

Is it easy to launch a Google search from Kagi if you need this kind of functionality?

Yes, Kagi supports the !g bang to do a google search. Even better, you can make custom bangs that do anything you might want that doesn't have a default bang.

I subscribe to Kagi but I keep using other search engines for some specific searches. It’s really easy to do using “bangs”, or configuring them in your browser directly.

For local businesses I always search on Google instead, that’s the main topic in which it is clearly superior still.

Same. I assumed it would be a marginally better product. I was wrong - it's a substantially superior product.

I didn't realize Google had gotten so bad. They've been cooking their frogs for a long time

Seconded.

I signed up for the 100 search free trial, and in that, Kagi was as good as, or better than, Google.

I then began also to use the filtering Kagi offers, and that simple feature makes a big difference.

I'm currently on the starter package (5 USD/month for 300).

Kagi also provide an Onion service - but of course you do have to be logged in, so your searches can be logged and be known as coming from you in particular (as you provided payment method), which is the downside of paying.

Much as anonymous payment systems are abused, they have utility for ordinary people.

I find it difficult to trust these (recurring) Kagi is so much better comments. Because a) no one I personally know ever mentions it and b) everyone seems satisfied with Google.

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+quality+reddit (the irony is not lost on me, still better than reddit search)

https://gizmodo.com/google-search-results-are-getting-worse-...

I have had people in my network mention it directly as worthwhile.

Anecdata, and I have yet to switch myself, but Google has gotten noticeably worse over the past few years and I’ve been considering it.

Good is completely good enough, in the same way that broadcast TV networks are good enough you don’t have to pay for premium content.

It only falls down if you care about taste and quality.

I’ve introduced it to a small number of friends who do more research-oriented search (programming, law, building code, etc.) and the response has been positive. Paying for search is a difficult hurdle even for me as Google is just so deeply ingrained. Those who reached a tipping point with Google recently, thanks in large part to the terrible AI answers, are the ones who’ve stuck it out with Kagi. If you’re going to try it I recommend sticking with it for a week or so before fussing with any settings.

I have exactly the same a) and b) experience and thats ok with me sitting here wearing my free Kagi t-shirt.

They recently gave out some 3-month free trial vouchers for users to give to friends. I have a spare one that I’d be happy to share with you if you’d like. Though I don’t know the best way to get it to you since I don’t think HN has DM functionality. Username is dperrin.01 on Signal if you’d like it.

I also believe I have one or two trial vouchers left. Happy to spare them to someone (my email is in my bio).

EDIT: Two people have emailed me, so if you are reading this you are too late.

And yeah, to the GP: Understand that fans of paid services like Fastmail and Kagi aren't shills... we're just... enthusiastic about stuff that's just... so much better. And yeah, there's probably some sense that for paid services to take hold for things like this, more people coming to it is a good thing.

Because you think the Kagi boosters are shills?

As far as I understand Kagi displays results based on calls to Google and/or Bing. How can it be better than those then?

It just filters out crap.

And lets you determine what counts as "crap", by telling Kagi which sites you prefer and don't prefer to get results from.

As said in another comment, first there are particular filters builtin or that you can setup. To the point that you can even customize with css the way that results are displayed.

Not having half page of the results with ads is also great.

And in addition, results are not only from Google/Bing and other sources but they also use their own index.

I find it difficult to grasp than someone on HN would take anyone’s word for it instead of trying it out themselves…

"mentions" and "seems satisfied" may not be sufficient sources of data, as (a) is easy to believe, (b) is much, much harder to believe.

That might be because Kagi currently has "only" 43,508 members, according to their live stats. That number might be too low for you to be able to expect someone in your personal circle to already be using and talking about it. The number being this low isn't a bad thing, though. Kagi is already profitable and the number is growing, that's all that matters for now. There's a free tier that gets you 100 free searches (I'm testing it myself right now, haven't used it enough to really have an opinion on it yet).

Regarding your point b: Heavily disagree. Even ignoring HN's seeming love for Kagi, surely you must have noticed the narrative about how AI is fixing search? People asking ChatGPT or Bing instead of googling things? Why would they do that if they were satisfied with Google? Also, Google search quality worsening has been a common news headline for years now.

I feel bad mentioning Kagi so much. But it’s a better product and I also want other people to use it so that it sticks around.

Honestly it was odd to read an article about leaving Google search as if it was a momentous thing. $10/month or whatever is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

I felt the same way. Tried it for a week or so and decided to buy. That was over a year ago.

Are you implying people are shilling for it? You can look at my account here to check I've been around for more than a decade and I'm one of those praising Kagi whenever I can because it's a much, much improved experience than I was having with Google until I switched.

It's been over 18 months I'm a paying customer and have absolutely no regrets, I cannot stand Google search anymore after being used to Kagi's results and tools.

Just being able to block all Pinterest and Quora results forever makes it worth the purchase price.

I recently switched to Kagi and it didn’t take me very long to get accustomed to it, surprisingly. Which is probably a good thing, since mostly “It Just Works.” Also I found it surprising that I apparently do like 400-500 searches a month.

Id consider using their browser too if it worked with Private Relay, but alas.

My problem with Kagi is the AI junk. I get that people want it, but I do not, and I don't want to pay for it. In other words, if there is no "zero AI" plan that is cheaper than the equivalent one with AI, then count me out.

And it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so.

That said, a lot of people want it, so I hold no grudge that they do it. It certainly is reasonable use of AI compared to others.

> it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so

Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan?

> it doesn't even have to be that much cheaper. Maybe 15% or so

Isn’t this the $10 versus $25 plan? Are you saying you’d feel better if they charged you $9 and turned off quick answers? (Which are totally optional to use.)

The $10/mo. plan is technically not "without AI". You still have FastGPT (quick answers), meaning any query ending with "?" aggregates an answer based on the scraping of the top search results, rather fast. And you have Kagi Translate, and Universal Summarizer. So there isn't a "no AI Kagi subscription".

But the search itself is worth $10/mo. if you ask me.

I subscribed a year before I bought into AI, and I was very happy with it.

I believe you're funding a free tier more than you're funding AI product research.

The AI stuff is mostly easy to ignore, just don't end your queries with a question mark. Image search is more annoying, though, because you have to click a button every time to remove AI results. You can't set a persistent preference.

I should be able to go into my settings and just say “don’t ever show me AI search results unless I ask, which doesn’t mean using a normal, commonplace punctuation mark”.

It’s very frustrating that “turn it off” is a fucking afterthought to “turn it on” for a service I pay for.

You can do that https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/ai.html

> “turn it off” is a fucking afterthought to “turn it on”

Kagi is an AI-oriented company from the start, not an “… and AI!” gimmick. AI-curated search results are believed to eventually replace normal search results.

If I just want a factoid on a website, I might as well have a program crawl and scan for it.

If I want the summary and I don’t bother reading the long version, I might as well have a program crawl and summarise.

If I want specific details in a big document, and I am not familiar with the wording to look for, I might as well prompt.

It’s like complaining about shellfish at a seafood restaurant. :-)

Kagi was not, to my memory, positioned this way early on when I started paying for it. It was "search but not dogshit because we're not being sponsored by the search results".

If I want a factoid on a website, I want to see it with my own eyes, not filtered through some non-deterministic shit machine that might tell me the right answer. To each their own but me getting what I want doesn't get in your way at all, so we should both be able to use Kagi the way we want to.

I know the feeling. I made the switch a few months ago, and haven't regretted it at all.

It's funny in a way the reluctance people have to part with relatively small amounts of money like $5 or $10 a month for something so core. Given the amount of complaining online about being the product instead of the customer, you'd think more people would jump at the chance to establish the proper relationship with their primary source of information on the internet for the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee or a fast-food meal.

Just that alone is easily worth the cost, not to mention the drastically better search results, and the ability to customize things intentionally, based on what you actually want, versus what Google thinks you should want, or more like what their actual customers, the advertisers, think you should want.

how does it compare to brave search? I switched a few years ago and am pretty happy with brave search but always looking for even better.

Too true.

I've been using Yandex and Baidu recently.

Sure, they censor as well to their usual audience. However, The quality of search respectively is actually quite good. I usually get at least 4 relevant results, whereas google is 0.

The caveat is US based searches google still works best in, like 'where is restaurant or business'.

But for general material, google lost me 2y ago. I grew tired of the dumb games and bad irrelevant garbage shoveled instead of search results.

It’s been two years since I googled anything.

They’re superior at finding shops on Maps.

But for common search, they’re mediocre and untrustworthy, hiding real results way down below irrelevant spam.

Who trusts an advertising company with search?

What do you use?

Kagi

I feel like Google is using a lossy backend for searching now. Sometimes I'll search some rare phrase that I know must exist somewhere, and Yandex (and often Bing) will turn up exact matches from some random blogs/forums, while Google will return zero results. If it's some kind of LLM-style memory it'd explain why Google can't find some rare terms. Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?

There have been several posts on HN about Google no longer indexing the entire internet. My understanding is that AI generated content has become so common that Google has become selective about which content it will index. If low traffic sites don't put effort into getting their content indexed then it won't appear in Google results.

It's not only a problem of not indexing.

Sometimes I search for a whole sentence, e.g. the title of a video I know to exist, and it doesn't find it. Then I look for a vague sentence related to the video, and with some luck it finds it.

> Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?

It can't be quite that, given that I've searched for exact phrases I knew exist on StackOverflow, and that Google no longer brings them up, but other search engines do.

> Or maybe Google thinks it's better to show no results than results from low traffic domains?

Google's poor search results drove me away years ago, so I wouldn't know if they changed this since then, but one of the many things that drove me away was that Google search refused to admit when it had no results and would instead just start including blatantly irrelevant results.

I wonder how much of the general sentiment about Google search sucking around tech sites is due to tech-savvy people turning off personalized search.

I have a feeling that turning it off is the greatest source of bad search results

I have it turned on and I subjectively find it pretty bad still.

Tech-savy of the paranoid breed.

If I search "flights to australia prices" I'm fine with google using my location for that, otherwise they show worse info

The primary source of frustration of Google being terrible at search these days is its penchant for ignoring search terms you use or giving you results for words that are spelled similar to what you searched for.

Google has an extreme bias towards giving you search results based on the most commonly available search results for a query that sorta-kinda-maybe sounds like yours.

That has nothing to so with personalization being turned on or off.

Basically a common StackOverflow problem: "Well, you asked for X, but I don't know how to do X, so here's how to do Y instead."

Except more often then not the info I'm looking for does exist and is available with generous use of double quotes to direct Google to do literal string searches. Except yesterday I encountered Google refusing to honor even that for a search of a cultural event that sounded like "Dante's Inferno" but with a slight misspelling. Even encapsulating the phrase with the spelling I'm looking for in double quotes - Google still gave me matches for "Dante's Inferno" instead.

Oddly enough Google gave me what I was looking for with a literal string search on mobile (followed by a confirmation that I wanted what I typed in and not what Google autocorrected it to).

On the search results screen there's a "Tools" dropdown that lets you change "All results" to "Verbatim", sounds like that's what you actually wanted.

I did that. Even my query searched within Verbatim was ignored in favor of an autocorrected one with no means available for me to direct Google to search for my original query on my Desktop.

The case I recently ran into was trying to find information on the format of resource entries for New Executables (which is the executable file format for the Win16 era). Precious few of the results were even about NE in the first place; like half of them were on the ELF format (the Unixen file format), which doesn't even have a concept of a resource table, so you have to throw away most of the search string for the result to be even plausibly related.

You have not been able to trust any single search engine for a long time since all of them have their biases, their quirks, their blind sides, their errors and other reasons for not relying on them as sole search engine. This also goes for Kagi which so many around here tend to push with the same fervour they push Apple. Just because you pay for something does not make it good, just because you paid more than the person next to you does not mean you get the better product.

What then, you ask? Well, that is for you to decide. Choose a few search engines - real ones which create their own index, not only re-badged versions of Google or Bing - and use those in a round-robin schedule or search whatever you want in all of them. Use a meta-search engine like SearxNG [1] which submits your query to a select set of engines and shows the results from all in a single page (this is what I have been using for many years). Install YaCy [2] and create your own index for sites you frequent. Pick and choose, don't rely on a single source. This has been true for as long as web search engines exist.

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

[2] https://yacy.net/

"Google absorbed my life from an early age"

When I read these stories complaining about Big Tech failing them I never perceive the problem as what the author is claiming it to be: e.g.,changes to Google search.

Instead, for whatever reason, I perceive the problem as the author's reliance on and even "trust" in Big Tech.

(Granted, the Google worship here makes sense considering he is working at "Android Police")

For example, the author's chosen title refers to "my search engine" rather than "a search engine".

Maybe I am just the wrong audience for these stories. Born into a world with companies making physical products and selling them for money instead of a world with intermediaries "selling" intangible "products" that are comprised of public information and performing unwanted surveillance on the "buyers".

Search is effectively an openly solved problem, not something privately held onto by a few with secret technology.

I haven't missed a single aspect of Google search having switched to Duckduckgo 2 years ago. As others have commented here, where search fails often LLMs step up.

> As others have commented here, where search fails often LLMs step up.

Injecting LLMs is half the reason Google Search is shit.

The "Google is getting worse" trope is popular with a certain anti-mainstream segment but there's almost never examples of how something is wrong or bad or worse. This article has a few examples so I googled them myself:

- "release year modern love roadrunners" -> 1976 (not 1995 as claimed). This article was posted 5 hours ago. Why am I getting the correct results then? For the record, the search "roadrunner modern lovers" (as per the screenshot) also says 1976;

- "brian jonestown massacre anenome" -> lots of links including a video and lyrics (article claims was unknown or no details)

I really don't know why there's so much reality-bending to make this story true.

Google results are customized based on location, profile, ad settings, what random experiments you happen to get enrolled in, etc. Reality is indeed being bent, but only inside the personal search bubbles that you, the author, and every Google user lives in.

Because they've re-indexed since then and different hallucinations will exist.

If a given fact is relatively new, I would expect (and forgive) search results to not necessarily reflect that.

But in this case we're talking about ~40 year old song. The reddit thread mentioned in the article is 10 months old.

I've also checked this logged in and incognito and get consistent (and seemingly correct) answers.

So what are we left with? Is the author in some experiment giving bad results? Were there bad results that got corrected between the time of writing and now? Did some Google search quality engineer see this and correct it?

All of these seem like a stretch. I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that Google has become worse but there are rarely conrete examples. It all just comes down to vibes. And when there are examples (as per this post), it doesn't match my experience. Can I really be that lucky? That seems to stretch credulity.

Probably the most egregious example of bad search results I've personally seen is how an astroturfed propaganda site was the top result for the Armenian genocide for literally years [1].

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...

I feel like 'vibes' is being used to dismiss anecdotal evidence, which, amalgamated across an increasing swathe of technical users, approaches actual evidence.

The very fact that it was clearly wrong in the example shows you that Google is capable of building a flawed Knowledge graph. This is not vibes, this is either a bug or, frankly far more likely, the inevitable problem of trying to compress all of human existence into a LLM model.

Given that LLM training is an imperfect storage mechanism, is it really hard to believe that a given iteration of the model will just not "know" arbitrary facts.

My personal anecdata on this is that searching for the 'ephemeral port range' the Google AI summary was wrong, even though the Wikipedia reference it used was correct.

I feel like we're in year 10+ of this topic coming up to front page of HN with dozens of comments a couple of times a week. I've personally not noticed the degradation but I guess I'm a light google user, mainly just use it get to sites I already know about, I feel like the problem for all these people that are passionate about it is the vast majority of people not on HN are like me.

It's been well known for a long time that Google extensively customizes search results per individual based on dozens of unknown factors. It's entirely possible they get those particular search results right for one person and wrong for someone else, and nobody will ever know why.

Which makes things worse in a way - just like with LLM AIs, you can never be sure that what they give you is actually right unless you already know, so there's much less point in using them at all.

I'm not entirely sure what to say to someone who genuinely hasn't noticed that Google search results have gotten a lot worse in the last 5 years or so, regardless of whether any individual search result was right or wrong.

It really is bad though. I search a lot daily, and every search seems to be 50% pages of this sort: yoursearchterms.info

I had an interesting experience with the google search AI yesterday.

note: nerdy stuff ahead I was playing MTG with my son.

I asked google search a MTG question "Does the commander come in with summoning sickness"

The AI answered NO, but the link below suggested it did. I accidentally clicked back which means I had to ask the question again if i wanted to look at those links.. so i did

This time the AI answered YES to exactly the same question I just asked a moment ago and got a NO answer for. It was worded EXACTLY the same way.

This really highlights the lying bullshit factor to AI. You just cant trust it.

I find it almost unusable for anything with the slightest nuance in the search query.

Especially, for instance, trying to qualify a search such as (a real search I failed at recently): heated bathtubs without jets

The "without jets" part of my string was just totally ignored, and yet that semantic snippet is the kernel of what I'm looking for.

I just got pages of ads for whirlpool tubs with jets.

I'm not sure if this is related to using "AI" in parsing the search string, but basic semantic analysis just seems to not be performed.

This is definitely a regression from previous years.

Google Search is now "the new Lycos", dated, spammed, more and more useless web search engine, used only because there wasn't anything better.

AI chats will probably sank Google search quickly, although it seems it is evolving in the direction of AI chat, that, hopefully will not pass to us wisdom of Quora, spammy Q&A sites, spam blogs, infomercial materials purchased by corporations, as regular search does.

Kagi… its better than google. I tried for years to replace google and always came back, but with Kagi, I’ve never looked back.

Maybe this is, because more and more websites fight back ai-crawlers and also ban google. However, meta search engines like searxng or ecosia might be an alternative. Diverse search results with the cost of prioritising them yourself.

Google search is not the product. Alphabet stock is the product. I'm in the market for a recently printed encyclopedia, a copy of the yellow pages and a subscription to a newspaper... Those were reliable products.

Not to go off on a tangent, but I recently invested in a physical copy of the World Book Encyclopedia. It's nice to have a high probability of expertise, if not peer review, behind articles that pertain to facts that tend to change slowly. I learn faster and retain information longer when I receive it in physical form. Plus I don't have to contend with logins, ads, or the sort of interruptions/distractions that appear several times in online articles nowadays.

What did you most recently look up?

Information on opossums to identify the ones in my backyard, and their differences from Australian possums.

Oh… possums.

But isn’t a hardback encyclopaedia gigantic?

It's only about one shelf in a standard bookcase.

Even online I’ve noticed Britannica is much more fair on politically controversial topics, whereas Wikipedia is well understand to be a command post to control to influence public opinion.

I have been considering subscribing to Britannica's online version! At the price point it is probably a no-brainer, but I haven't pulled the trigger. Do you subscribe, and if so, do you find that the value justifies the price?

I do not, I just often compare their free online content to Wikipedia.

Google became so bad that here in Spain I've heard several different people say they now ask things to ChatGPT instead of googling them.

the inability to make the horrible integrated shopping experience go away forced me to Kagi about a year ago. So much cleaner.

I've been using Brave Search for quite some time, and to be honest, their AI is okay. I rarely use Google anymore.

so... is it realistic to self-host a search engine yet?

what's the napkin math on this?

The challenge is the indexing. There's probably something to be said for making a personal search engine that just ingests sources you yourself are likely to want and need, but antitrust enforcers have gone as far as considering forcing Google to share it's index with competitors to give them a chance, because the data moat is so big. Even Bing, which is likely behind large chunk of third party searches, is likely primarily sourcing its data from settings in Edge that spy on your Google searches.

Relevant : https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl

Yeah, feels like I increasingly just want an index of

* stackexchange

* github

* the top 10,000,000 blogs

* major recipe sites

* english Wikipedia

* abstracts of all scientific papers

* very much don't want Reddit

Everything else I'll probably punt to ChatGPT

Maybe I can ping Common Crawl and just index that and call it good.

I find the last one ironic because many people prefer to search Reddit over the web for answers to things. I remember there was a time using site:reddit.com on every query was popular before Reddit started selling search access.

ChatGPT has replaced that for me mostly. Not worth the noise/gamified junk in the Reddit results.

True spirit of HN!

Yes: https://yacy.net

"Hacker complains about a free product and also wears a tinfoil hat"

It's becoming quite trite, you searched for a game and google didn't show live results, move on.

search isn't the biggest pain for me. The biggest pain is seeing how google maps has gone to total crap for routing. It still has the best data by far but the routes I get out of it are often total nonsense (taking me through some rando residential for no reason, doing the staircase left/right turn for several blocks, etc). I end up using google for looking up a real address and then putting that into magic earth for much better routing results. Now if only magic earth had all the updated place data google maps has.

All the Google bullshit did not made me switch the search engine, until recently when Trump external policy made me start replacing more and more USA stuff with non USA alternatives.

To me the question has become somewhat moot - mostly because none of my serious knowledge searching questions are going via search engine anymore.

Search-enabled LLMs fill that role better and google isn't the only game in town for that.

..and if using LLMs you have to assume at least some of it is dodgy so my guard is naturally up already.

Doesn't leave a whole lot of space for "trust".

Google gives you the wrong answers and your LLM gives you the wrong answers. Seems much of a muchness and either way worse than what we had before.

You ever done any boxing? You can keep your guard up always but you'll still get hit in the face every time you go in there.

Interesting how this site talks about the bad experience using google and while I scroll through it I'm shown more than 10 advertisements.

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