[orangesite]

2010 low tech Google is _exactly_ what I'm looking for.

Everyone else in the search space (even paid search - kagi I'm looking at _you_!) seems to be under the impression that it was abandoned because it didn't work but I'm pretty sure it was only abandoned because it didn't drive ad revenue.

Moar power to you mate, if I wasn't busy with other things right now I'd be beating down your door!

[topicseed]

But it's no longer possible to operate that way as they were getting gamed by SEO's.

Today may look bad for searchers like us but it could be a lot worse. It's a constant battle.

[traverseda]

Kagi seems to be returning pretty good results, from what little I've tried it

[blep_]

I tried it earlier today, after seeing it mentioned in another thread. I gave it some queries where Google had recently frustrated me by returning nothing but affiliate marketing listicles.

It returned the same results, but with some of the listicles helpfully sorted into a "listicles" section. The rest of the results were also listicles.

It's entirely possible the content I'm looking for doesn't exist, drowned in a sea of SEO spam, but then I have little motivation to pay for a search engine to find it.

On that note, does anyone have a good site and/or strategy for "I would like to buy a [product] with [two features that are uncommonly found together]" searches? Those seem to be the hardest ones to get good results for, because of the number of "BEST [product] OF 2023" lists that aren't filtered to what I actually asked for.

[cshimmin]

When I get listicle spam I tack "site: reddit.com" onto my query and usually get pretty organic, opinionated results. But of course you might come up dry if what you're looking for is really obscure.

[Rastonbury]

Be aware reddit is being "astro turfed" as they call it too

[marginalia_nu]

Really, are you sure?