| I grew up in the 90s, in the fourth grade we spent a whole week learning how to effectively use search engines and what research even is. So I have some pretty solid opinions on what makes a functional search engine. A good search engine shows you the results for exactly the query you entered. A good search engine does not discard your entire query to show you what it thinks you meant. A good search engine supports and respects modifiers and advanced queries: AND, OR, NOT, quoted strings, plus and minus. It gives you advanced parameters like publish/retreival date, categories, origin. If there are no results for your exact, specific query, a good search engine shows you zero results. A good search engine does not waste your time with literally infinite fake results tangentially related to what the engine decided you meant instead of honoring your query. I gleefully pay for Kagi because it's a good search engine. It does all the things a good search engine should do. It does not do the things that bad search engines do. Kagi has put great effort into designing a search engine that maximises your ability to find the thing you're looking for. Because I pay Kagi with cold hard cash, I do not have to instead pay Kagi by consuming thousands of fake "sponsored" search results. I enter a query, and Kagi gives me precisely the results for that query and nothing more. It's really that simple. I pay for Kagi because it's a good search engine, and most other search engines are not good. Google isn't even a search engine anymore. It's a heuristic ad delivery mechanism that happens to also surface indexed web content. Your query is a suggestion and is usually disregarded completely and replaced with a more lucrative query. Google hasn't supported advanced search in over a decade. No plus or minus or quoted strings make any difference. I heartily encourage you to learn about search engines and try one. I doubt very strongly that you've ever used a proper search engine. You've most likely only engaged with heuristic ad machines before. Try a search engine, you'll never want to go back. |