How to get Google search results without the AI garbage. “It’s essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads.”
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Or… just use Kagi. At this point it’s a much better web search product. You can add weight to results from specific sites, remove sites from results altogether, and there’s even a filter to favor non-commercial and indie websites in results.
Do you pay for that service? Search has been so abysmal for so long it's hard to imagine paying for it.
I finally broke down and started paying for Kagi. I'll be honest: I used Duck Duck Go off and on over the years, but I would all too often fall back to Google to find what I needed. With Kagi though, I find the results noticeably *better* than Google. I don't know where search is headed, but for the moment Kagi is fitting my needs, subscription be damned.
I signed up for Kagi after Cory Doctorow's post about it, but have since read a number of disturbing things about it and its creator:
I've gone back to DDG, personally.
Ugh, really? I just (like two days ago) signed up for Kagi on a friend's enthusiastic recommendation. Is there nothing out there that isn't a festering heap of bad faith? Well I'm not going to back out of this immediately, because I've got other parts of my life to un-enshittify, and it's probably still better than Google. Gah.
I'm finding it increasingly tedious to do research on everything that seems good to figure out if it's secretly run by some flavor of Nazi. Especially because so much of what's out there is, in fact, infested with Nazis. Maybe I'm especially salty about this because I love Black Metal (the music genre), which turns out to have a terrible Nazi problem.
It really looks like "visiting web pages via a search engine" is going to be a niche activity, like searching for books in the library using the card index (and not just asking the librarian). And I think I'm OK with that. If the front door to the commercial internet is no longer "people clicking on webpage links" but some AI / app nonsense, then the SEO industry vanishes and we can get back to rewilding this place?
Rewilding is such a great term for this.
There's already an exodus of the platforms beginning by gen alpha.
(Credit where credit due: https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/ )
A lot of the "non-web" stuff is good, though. For example, when you search for "Knicks-Pacers", it's good that it gives you a box with the score of yesterday's game, and then links to news stories about the game. What we really need is a way to filter out *just* the AI-generated nonsense.
I am sorry, but I do not need to see the score of yesterday's Knicks-Pacers game again anytime soon. 😭
For MLB you _used_ to be able to subscribe to a simple ".ics" file with your team's schedule and which was updated after every game with the score. You can still subscribe to a calendar but it appears they do not update it with the scores, and it is a little more complicated to subscribe as well. A case of over-delivering causing bad UX
I use a combination of StartPage (Google results without the spying/tracking) and DuckDuckGo. Google's "Don't be evil" motto ceased to be aspirational and traversed into satire long ago.
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