What a way to run a rodeo

Search Engines

published:

tags: [ #unweb ]

Search engines are the absolute easiest thing to switch away from when you get fed up with one. Here are some easy steps:

  1. Just stop.

First: Why not Google?

Google became a verb because they did search better than anybody else for a very long time. This is no longer really true, at least in terms of the user experience, in my opinion. Getting fed up with plain old Google search was an early moment in my decision to unweb.

First, and this will obviously be a subjective thing, but I feel like the search results have gotten poorer. The joke used to be that I would search XYZ on Google as a quick shortcut to get the XYZ pages on Wikipedia, Reddit, and maybe an official site or Stack Overflow thread if applicable. The results are so bad that in comparison that I found one of the best uses of their LLM was to summarize something useful out of their terrible mid search results.

This is more or less working as intended as far as Google is concerned; there are receipts. The conflict of interest is even worse now. As long as you are just using Google's AI summary to find answers, you aren't wasting your time doing something awful like visiting a page that isn't Google dot com and maybe even seeing an ad that isn't from Google dot com1. And how long will it be before we can weaponize your trusted agent with even more revenue extraction?

Another big motivating factor for me is actually the tracking/privacy issues. This was not always the case for me, personally. I'm not coming at it from a need for absolute anonymity. If you really need to care about anonymity, then you really need to level up your game beyond the scope of what I'm doing here.

It's probably worth its own post some day, but suffice it to say I increasingly loathe advertising in its modern form. I used to think this sort of thing was water over a duck's back to my savvy media-trained millennial brain. And yes one can run ad blockers and so on and then fight with the odd page that breaks and then try to ignore all the embedded algorithmic content that no ad blocker can prevent from seeping into your brain and so on and so forth. Today I think that advertisement is poison for the soul. It's our generations lead paint chips that is driving us all batty. And targeted advertising is the difference between mere food poisoning and bad dates.2

One thing I've learned is that many of the "alternative" search engines are effectively relying on Google's (or Bing's, etc.) index of the web in the backend. At least as far as generic web-crawling goes, anyway. This annoys me, but the scale of the task means this is probably not going to change any time soon. This is where we should all remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

Onto the alternatives

Here are some options I've played with. I'm currently using Kagi.

This is probably the simplest go-to to recommend for casual use.

  • They do not track your search profile
  • Privacy is the selling point, so that probably won't change any time soon, or you will hear about it if it does
  • There are ads, but at least they aren't targeted

I'd been using DDG for quite some time until recently. I will admit, I do not find their search results very good either, even in comparison to Google. This is especially when I'm looking for technical answers, for whatever reason. But on the whole, if I'm talking to a random acquaintance about search engines (as one does) then I would usually point them here as a quick starting point.

DuckDuckGo also has a web browser; browsers are worth their own post later. I played a bit with it on desktop and had some issues, but it at least works as advertised. I get more mileage out of it on my Android phone3.

This one I don't have much practical experience with, but I have played around with it a bit. It's also fine. I have the same issues with search results as I had with DDG; probably because of the underlying reliance on Bing.

I also don't have much experience with this one, but it's the same idea as DDG and Startpage, from what I can tell. I mention it because I am also (softly) trying to shift away from USA based services. Qwant has the benefit of being a European company.

I would normally say something like, "this is the option for real sickos," but uh, that might not be the best way to describe a search engine. You know, because of the implication.

This is your option for a self hosted search engine. Self-hosting is also worth its own post. At this rate, expect that one in mid-2027.

I might tinker with this on the side in the future, but it's pretty low priority for me.

Kagi (link)

First off, to get it out of the way: Kagi is a paid search engine. I pay a monthly fee for search. This sounds crazy to most people I talk to, like it's the most ostentatious kind of luxury to throw money at4.

I was going to write up a whole long screed about how my mindset changed on this, but the short version is: searching the internet for stuff is something that all of us do over and over again most hours of almost every single day of our modern lives. Insisting it's silly to pay for search is like calling someone crazy for paying for an internet connection when you could just be using the free wifi at McDonald's all day.

Of course, Kagi themselves have their own sales pitch. I find it convincing, though I will note that if they ever changed their mind they would not be the first service to pull the rug on an ad-free experience once they need to find new revenue.

On the subject of revenue, one downside is that they are a USA company. However, I guess they registered their corporation as a legal entity known as one of the good ones, honest, so you can take that to the bank.

I tried Kagi (there is a 100-search free trial available) back around the time that they launched (2023) and their name popped up on various podcasts I listened to. At the time, I was intrigued, but the search results really weren't very good for whatever I was doing at the time. I didn't pull the trigger on a subscription. When I started this whole ordeal earlier this year, I decided to give it another go. My joke has been that it wasn't so much that the Kagi results got better than that the Google results have gotten so bad, but a few months in now and I don't think I was giving Kagi enough credit; I am really happy with what I'm getting.

For a typical search, instead of 500 pages of crap, I get like two or three pages of useful links. Why so few pages? Well, they'll tell you it's on purpose, which sounds like something I'd say even if it wasn't necessarily true. But the more I use it, the more I believe them.

Anyway, I'm going on too long about it, but I'm starting to sound like a cultist about them these days.

  • No ads, because they want you to pay them
  • They don't track you, because they want you to pay them
  • I really do believe they care about how good it actually feels to use the thing, because they want you to pay them

Capitalism, baby. Exchanging money for goods and services. We're so back.

  1. Even then, the ad is probably still an AdSense thing, to be fair. ↩

  2. Yes, I know the irony of continuing to link to YouTube on a series of posts complaining about Google. YouTube is a problem. ↩

  3. Ibid but for Android. ↩

  4. At the same time, I don't want to imply any kind of judgment on anyone who really can't necessarily spend money on a service for which there are (ahem) serviceable free alternatives. ↩