Technology

• Dead Internet Theory

It becomes more and more true every day.

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.

EXPONENTIALLY worse.

I agree with you. It has gotten worse.

Kagi is working very well for me! and honestly i like that it's a paid service.

You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that's just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.

It's not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

Funnily enough I've found using an LLM to parce the data, then cross checking it's source as well as my own sources to be superior to previous searches.

It's annoying to change the way you just mindlessly search, but if you're upset by it just mindlessly search, end of discussion.

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

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.

Kagi is pretty awesome

4get.ca

Has been very refreshing to use. It’s a bit slow, and you need to do a captcha periodically because they get hella bot spam. It’s got a clean interface, no sponsored results and other junk, and so far it’s felt like “old google” more than anything else. Plus they have my preferred color scheme as a built in option!

I feel it is intentional. They are god damn good at hearing my talking about a baby and shoving all baby videos and social media post in every corner for ad revenue; yet when I search about something trivial I cannot get an answer.

Even AI becoming useless the last couple of weeks compare to a few months back where it gave details answers.