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Comment by broodbucket | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.

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Like, today, or the pre-chatgpt age where all the common questions have been spammed to death by SEO farms?

Google's search has been frustratingly awful for quite some time now, long before AI.

Today I googled "emacs" to get the download link.

Top of the search result page: "Did you mean: vim"

Felt like I was being trolled.

That's an Easter egg. It goes the other way too (vim -> did you mean emacs).

Back in the day, more people might have seen something like that as a clever easter egg.

These days, we default to

"Day 3,449: google's still broken. what was i thinking?"

Back in the day, GG search was so reliable that when stuff like that happened, people think it's intentional

It's an Easter egg. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25371017

You were.

Back in 1998, I specifically started using Google because it somehow managed to avoid spammy search results, unlike its competitors. Today, unfortunately, I find that a lot of Google's search results are spammy, useless information that is there for clicks and advertising only.

That was Google's whole selling point and reason for existing: "other search engines suck. We invented this algorithm to make one that doesn't suck."

They have obviously been in an arms race with spammers and scammers since then. In 1998 it was relatively easy to stay ahead, but to keep winning for 30 years?

Googles quality issue seem to be, in part, a market driven choice. Services like Kagi use a large part of the Google data base but with all their additional capital extraction sorting on top.

Google can do it, but they must appease the share holders.

I fail to see how driving users to competitors and crippling the search experience appeases the shareholders. Can you elaborate?

I'd argue that Kagi serves a niche of power users who knows what they want from their search engine and RTFM to get they want the way they want.

Google works like an automatic black-box which tries to deduce your intention from 4-5 words you typed in hastily.

I believe any ordinary user is still pretty happy about Google search in its current iteration. My mom doesn't get a YouTube premium account because she says she likes the ads, for example.

So, from our bubble, Google might be regressing, but the picture might be very different for the majority of Google users.

Mostly driven by time horizons. The short time horizon of shareholders.

Every complaint about Google is evidence of someone who still uses Google.

Is Kagi the solution?

Duckduckgo and brave search are definitely not. It's always g! after a wildly fuzzy first pass.

I havent used google in years.

I use duckduckgo, mostly by habit at this point, and if i fail to find anything i go to claude and ask it.

Im getting closer and closer to just defaulting to the AI model search every day. Especially when I want to find something that I can list off 5+ semi accurate details about but cant remember the name of.

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