Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.
Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.
Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.
Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.
Yea but it’s not the case today. I get as good or better results out of duck duck go, and bing is good too now. The only reason to continue using Google is if you love ads.
Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn’t matter as much with how the space is now and how Google’s being better in the past wasn’t necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.
Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but “free” markets go brrr.
For me it’s still hit or miss when you’re searching for specific troubleshooting error codes or programming. Sometimes Bing or DDG will miss the point entirely and show me things with no relation for my search query at all.
Interesting. There was a time when I noticed that DDG didn’t scan as often and so wouldn’t have the very latest news, but now they are functionally identical to me. If I don’t find something on one, I’m pretty surprised how I don’t find it in more or less the same way on the others
“disrupted” 🤢
Annoyingly, Google has gotten so bad over the past year, that I basically give up trying to find a good result half the time. And the other half, I have to spend 10 minutes retrying search terms to find anything that either isn’t an ad, an embedded side-scrolling bullshit thing, and irrelevant websites.
I’ve tried Kagi search a few times this last couple of weeks and was reasonably impressed. If it works out I’d be happy to pay a few pennies for better product recommendations
Microsoft never stopped trying. They made a reasonably good product and even had some monopoly power behind it. But still couldn’t succeed.
To be clear, when referring to a reasonably good product, which iteration of their attempts are you describing?
I was informed about Kagi through one of the posts here and tried it out. It’s quite amazing how much better it is compared to even DDG. I didn’t mind DDG but it felt “old” but Kagi seems to prioritize user experience over everything else. It may not be free, but it’s worth the cost for me.
I used the trial and then just started paying for it. So far, it is much better results, and I like that they do not track you. Also, their small web lens has been fun to play around with.
Another Kagi fan here. I pay $10 a month.
I’m a reasonably heavy search user, but have never hit the quota.
It’s wonderful to have relevant results again.
The one thing it doesn’t work for is shopping. From time to time I use Google. I should probably switch that to Bing, as the lesser of two evils.
I dunno… if someone came around and made a site that works like Google did originally, I think they’d have a shot at taking over. Google has changed so much over the years, it’s barely even recognizable anymore. One of the things that is pretty common with them, too, is taking something a lot of users like as-is, and then completely reworking the UI/UX until nobody wants to use it.
kagi.com - I think they are taking their shot!
Yes, the other part of the sucking is because of direct Google involvement.
timing is everything. always has been.
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Brave search has been a good alternatielve so far which does not rely on other search engines to get results.
During the 2000s at least, Google was king and very few people did not see much harm in Google running the search engine market.
