I'm very happy with kagi at the moment. Just crossed one year using it as my main search engine last week and don't see why I would go back.

It is, and it's not just the search engines to blame.

The content out there is incredibly spammy. It doesn't pay to create good content. It pays to make a pool of AI gunge based on what people search for and then stick ads on it.

SEO spam has been a problem for a long time, but AI has allowed it to be accelerated to a whole new level.

Not just you.

DDG has deteriorated to absolute nonsense, I’ve used it for years and years.

Recently gave startpage another go - maybe marginally better but still really poor

I feel like it’s especially bad if you are searching for anything related to a marketable product. I tried searching ddg for information about using a surge protector with halogen bulbs and all I got was pages and pages of listicles on “best halogen lights 2024” full of affiliate links.

The whole internet is in the process of being filled with garbage content. Search engines are bad but also there's not much good content left to find (in % of the total)

My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?

It's not just you. At some point, search's primary purpose went from "finding the information you're looking for" to "getting paid to put links in front of you". Then they kept iterating on it, quarter by quarter, for a very long time.

You might want to try SearXNG

It's an Open Source search aggregator:

• Licensed under AGPL-3.0

Its not AIs fault, its advertising based SEOs fault. Search has been broken for years for many topics.

Kagi is good. I’m very happy with it.

I'm going to be honest with you. They feel no worse today than they have for the past ~5+ years or so. SEO blog spam with a dozen paragraphs to tell you exactly one line of information have been around for quite a while. Many of these articles felt generated either from crappy writers or "AI" tools predating the LLMs we have now.

The other day I googled how long should I broil a ribeye steak and the google AI told me to broil it for 45 minutes.

Broil is the hottest setting on the oven and you’re supposed to broil the meat as close to the burner as possible. This would probably burn down your house.

they overengineered it. they now give you results they think most people want instead of what you searched. for google, it helps to switch on verbatim mode and set your country to something weird like Azerbaijan

DDG and qwant are basically bing

There's an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you'll never see another Quora article again.

Idr the name of the extension - I'll check when I get home and follow up.

I've found that using Kagi, then DDG, then Google always gets me the results I need. But 95% of the time, Kagi gets it.