[deepakarora3]

I have been using Google search for many years now and for the past few years have been wondering if the search has really gone bad or is it just me. I remember the days when searching for something used to bring up a few sponsored links separately and I could go page after page with different results on each page allowing me to access a wealth of information and extending my reach deep into the internet. Now, it is all sponsored links and the same ones page after page. It is so sad to see and the worse part is that I am not seeing any alternative. Bing is equally bad, DDG only marginally better. I hope there comes an alternative soon but I also realize coming into this space is certainly not easy.

[distances]

Kagi is that alternative I suppose, at least for those who use search enough to pay for it. HN has a lot of testimonials on how good Kagi is.

[1024core]

Until Kagi becomes popular. Then the same "SEO" bullshit that plagues Google will bite Kagi too. Right now Kagi is too small to make it worthwhile to spend resources "optimizing" for it.

[noirbot]

Perhaps, but isn't the value of Kagi that it's user-tunable? If you open a page and it's distasteful to you, you can remove it from future searches, and you can uprank the sites you find useful. Related, no idea if they actually do it, but presumably, Kagi is getting signal from that about what people find useful, and integrating that into their rankings.

If I run into SEO crap on Google, I'm not sure they ever know I hated it and went elsewhere. They see that I searched and I clicked, and they got their money and don't care.

[barfbagginus]

The alternative is using tool enabled LLMs. GPT4 can drive Bing and filter results better than I can, and it hallucinates less than I do when pile driving through spam.

If you haven't read up on modern prompting strategies and still feel LLMs are stochastic parrots, you should read the foundational prompting papers (chain of thought, react, reflexion, toolformer, etc) and update your views about llms. They're very close to being the kind of autonomous search agents that the characters in classic cyberpunk novels would unleash on the real world to compile results.

It's actually made me excited about information retrieval again, for the first time in a decade. And the cool part is that autonomous search agents might become free and open source before the corporations manage to enshittify the experience.

Very fun times ahead!