Is it just me or do all search engines feel soooo bad these days?

It's not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.

Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every "product" they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It's not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.

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.

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.

Kagi is pretty awesome

Whats funny and kind of sad, is that they know exactly what you're searching for, and don't give any fucks about showing you that, and instead will show you this cool other thing that they're getting their beak wet on thats like, eh... kinda related to what you typed in. Google didn't get dumber, they just don't have any meaningful competition which would force them to deliver high quality results, and instead of enshittified their results to the point where they're practically useless.

theyve all been bought and paid for and not by you.

DDG and qwant are basically bing

I agree with you. It has gotten worse.

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.

I've been trying to use ddg and I just find it infuriating that it never finds what I need, especially if I'm looking for local information about something. Google seems to always prioritize those types of results when I need them (probably because it makes it easier to sell me something).

It's intentional.

Obviously, Google makes money showing ads during search. But they have finally bit the bullet and starting tarpitting users in search in order to show more ads.

A quick, useful, and accurate search means that you're on their site for the least amount of time, perhaps mere seconds. That's not what's best for revenue growth.

PS: Go try Kagi and be reminded what good clean search results look like. I use it because my time has value. It's very good.

Kagi is very good.

I don't use perplexity, but AI is generally 60-80% effective with a larger than average open weights off line model running on your own hardware.

DDG offers the ability to use some of these. I use a modified Mistral model still, even though its base model(s) are Llama 2. Llama 3 can be better in some respects but it has terrible alignment bias. The primary entity in the underlying model structure is idiotic in alignment strength and incapable of reason with edge cases like creative writing for SciFi futurism. The alignment bleeds over. If you get on DDG and use the Anthropic Mixtral 8×7b, it is pretty good. The thing with models is to not talk to them like humans. Everything must be explicitly described. Humans make a lot of implied context in general where we assume people understand what we are talking about. Talking to an AI is like appearing in court before a judge; every word matters. The LLM is basically a reflection of all of human language too. If the majority of humans are wrong about something, so is the AI.

If you ask something simple like just a question, you're not going to get very far into what the model knows. Models have very limited scope of focus. If you do not build prompt momentum into the space by describing a lot of details, the scope of focus is large but the depth is shallow. The more you build up momentum by describing what you are asking in detail, the more it narrows the scope and deeper connections can be made.

It is hard to tell what a model really knows unless you can observe the perplexity output. This is more advanced, but the perplexity score for each generated token is how you infer that the model does not know something.

Search sucks because it is a monopoly. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers m$ and the goo. All search queries go through these either directly or indirectly. No search provider is deterministic any more. Your results are uniquely packaged to manipulate you. They are also obfuscated to block others from using them for training better or competitive models. Then there is the anti trust US government case and all of that which makes obfuscating one's market position to push people onto other platforms temporarily, their best path forward. - criminal manipulators are going to manipulate.

I asked Google why search engines are so bad now and its AI summaries its own deficiencies quite well:

Some say search engines have declined in quality due to a number of factors, including:

Search engine optimization (SEO) spam A wave of SEO spam has contributed to the decline in search result quality.

Affiliate marketing Affiliate link sites contribute to the low-quality content that floods the internet.

AI-generated content New technology can quickly produce low-quality content.

Marketing Search results are filled with marketing and links that may not be relevant to the query.

Recommender algorithms Some say the algorithm that recommends content is a mess. For example, someone might be recommended alt-right content after watching a click-bait video.

Ads Google's biggest business is advertising, and it's inserting more ads into its products to make more money.

Some say it's harder to find specific information these days, and that search operators are often needed to filter search results.

Perplexity seems to work but I don’t like the idea of AI giving me “facts” since they are mostly based on other AI posts

It helps that it gives actual sources, so you can verify them. But yeah, not helpful if all of the sources end up being AI posts.

There are no search engines besides Google and Bing, because everyone else just uses Bing under the hood.

And here I thought Startpage was acting up...

I wanted to make a joke about my first search engine, MetaCrawler, and then found out it's still around and still does search. Going down that rabbithole, it's changed hands a ton and was only relaunched kinda recently at some point. Is it any good? Nah, probably not.

I guess I'll just have to rely on my other aggregate search engine, SavvySearch (no, no the first search engine does not in fact still exist, much to my disappointment).