Twenty years ago, there was more than a dozen websites that people went to.

At this point, what percentage of searches are just end up with the user clicking on Amazon, Reddit, or Wikipedia? So much of the other content is low-effort slop, even before AI.

I miss the days of personal blogs made by professionals. They didn’t really want to impress the general public but instead their peers. Such a great time. No long prologues, no dumbing down, no politics, just pure facts and opinions about their own field.

Try https://www.startpage.com/, https://search.brave.com/, https://kagi.com/ or https://github.com/searxng/searxng.

You.com used to have really good search, but it looks like they have veered off into the AI chat space instead.

searxng is a self hostable meta search engine that allows you to basically just use the best search engines and easily switch between them.

You should give kagi a whirl I rarely need to go past page 1 or even the first result for most queries.