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Is it just me, or are search engines getting worse? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/nostupidquestions

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My main focus isn't on quality of results.

The real problem is, whenever I type a query that's even the slightest bit out of the ordinary, I get no results. Google, Duckduckgo, Startpage, Searx, all of them.

It strains credibility that these advanced pieces of technology could not find anything among billions of websites, when in the past, less-advanced versions of these engines could find results for similar queries among smaller numbers of websites.

To reiterate: My problem is not with SEO, or spam, or AI-generated websites, or irrelevant results. My problem is getting no results much more frequently than in the past.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's been going downhill for about a decade in my experience. These companies put profits above their founding ideals. Google, bing, yandex and baidu are the only major search indexes out there, and they still use each other's data.

But for none of these companies search is a priority. It's just a means to an end. Google wants to sell you ads, bing wants to sell you ads, yandex and baidu are under the thumb of Russia and China.

It's unfortunate their goals and motivations aren't what they used to be. I explored alternatives. And although not perfect, I've got something decent now

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What about Kagi? I know almost nothing about it but I heard good things about it on Lemmy. Is it just a paid, slightly better google?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

A heck of a lot better than google. It's what I use