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.

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

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)

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

yeah, my first thought on seeing this headline was "well, i don't trust androidpolice anymore either".

Artem Russakovski was a great blogger back in the day, and androidpolice was a good site. it's since been sold on to new owners who are trying to milk it for all the money they can get, and fearmongering about google seems to be one of their surefire methods for getting some ad impressions. (not that google doesn't deserve the criticism. but this article isn't valuable criticism, it's just gripes with questionable truthfulness.)

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

What did you most recently look up?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.