commented: One thing I unfortunately noticed is that Google actually puts some of the best links in the AI overview panel, and they usually are better than the top results. I just googled "what is a linked list" for reference a the side panel inside the AI section shows fa Reddit thread on top, and then the corresponding Wikipedia article (not great, I still think Wikipedia should be #1, but, anyway...). The top search result is a GeeksForGeeks article, and I mean no shade on GeeksForGeeks but it is very SEO'd and it ranks very high despite better content being available on the web. Wikipedia is also #2 in this case. Even if LLMs do a better job at picking the damn links (and I don't think they do, this must be carefully designed), this is a prime example of enshitiffication. They nest some good links in <div id="slop"> and, if you click them, the metrics will count you as a happy slop consumer, because at this point you know the actual search results will be dogwater anyway. commented: I mean no shade on GeeksForGeeks By all means shade on that damn website. It is very good at SEO and rarely actually has the information I am looking for. It was slop before the word slop became widespread. It is one of the websites I have blocked in my search results. commented: There's the &udm=14 self-titled "disenshittification Konami code", which always redirects to the "Web" search tab (normally hidden under "More"). I've enabled it across my devices a while back and been very happy to have a "dumb" search back. Still has all the flaws of SEO and ranking gaming, but it gives me back some agency that I feel like the AI overview stole. commented: I mostly use DuckDuckGo, but thanks a lot! I went to check their bangs list for something that uses this flag and they don’t have it yet. They have a bang for something that they call “Google Accessible” but it uses Google’s programmable search engine and I’m not sure if this maintained by the DDG team of if some user just decided to submit it as a suggestion. It looks much better, though. I’ll investigate, but, for now, I’ll keep away from it. commented: This has been happening for a while (I blogged an example last year) and it is extremely annoying and must be deliberate so that people stay on Google sites longer. I consider the bargain between Google and web sites almost null and void - if they are not prepared to show links to my site, why should I allow their bot to spider my site? commented: I just googled "what is a linked list" for reference a the side panel inside the AI section shows fa Reddit thread on top, and then the corresponding Wikipedia article (not great, I still think Wikipedia should be #1, but, anyway...). For me the biggest revelation was to minimize my use of "general-purpose" search engines in cases where there was obviously a better more focused engine I could use. Like why bother doing a google search for linked list when you already know that the wikipedia page is likely to have what you want? In Firefox I've added shortcuts so @w linked list would go straight there. There are plenty of other more focused, specialized searches you can do, like the Arch wiki, MDN, Stack Overflow, IMDB, etc. Honestly the whole idea that one company can be trusted to operate a service that finds any piece of information in the world is very suspect to begin with. I wrote some about this last year: It's tempting to wax nostalgic about how things used to be. "It was amazing," you might say, "you could just put a few keywords into Google, and if it existed, you'd be able to find it!" The problem is that was never true. In exchange for saving us from a chaotic web where you bounced around and couldn't find what you wanted, we allowed Google to change our very definition of what the Web was. "If it's not in Google, it doesn't exist," we said. Of course, we were wrong. But we're only now starting to see how wrong. The problem, of course, is that this objective gods-eye view of the Web fundamentally cannot exist. Indexing something as big as the Web while resisting abuse requires making thousands of judgment calls; some large and some small. Whenever you search—no, whenever you abstract—you must accept a certain simplification of reality. Just as the map is not the territory, the index is not the Web. https://search.technomancy.us/why commented: As mention in your blog, if you did not yet, just try out Kagi. It is well known that they are using the crawled data / search index of another large search engine. But only the data and they are doing their own ranking for the search result. I am using it already for more then 2 years, and I am happy with it, I did even find stuff where DuckDuckGo failed. And there are a lot of more features like to raise, lower or block sites from your search result or doing Redirects (URL Rewrites). What I also like about Kagi is their open communication, like a public Changelog with links for each ticket out of Kagi Feedback (which also functions as their issue tracker) and their Status page. Regarding your idea doing a link page on the own site, I guess the Kagi Small Web is a somehow similar idea, visit a random site at Kagi Small Web website. Even John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic) are using it, see e.g.: Seriously, Give Kagi a Try Another Periodic Suggestion to Try, Just Try, Switching to Kagi for Search Tim Bray: ‘Mourning Google’ The Talk Show: ‘A Professional Internet User’, With Kagi Founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac Tag: kagi (pluralistic.net) There is a Trial with 100 searches, and depending on your search amount you may get away with the Starter for $54 / year (annually paid) or higher depending on your needs, see Individual Pricing overview. They have also offers for Duo and Family which then would be even less per person, but only available as Professional. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time; your unused balance will be pro-rated and applied to your new plan. commented: It is well known that they are using the crawled data / search index of another large search engine. Actually, they’re aggregating multiple sources. I agree they’re great though, just renewed my subscription. commented: 1: DuckDuckGo, to my understanding, does let you block sites from results. I don't think it lets you uprank or downrank sites, or at least I never tried. 2: It should be noted that Kagi was started as an AI company before pivoting to search [https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/kagi-ai.html]. That is not to suggest anything in particular, but I don't know how many people were aware of this so I am sharing that. More directly, I suggest others to be wary of your advice since you seemed to phrase your entire comment as an ad. commented: Regarding 2:, I may have seen this before I started to use Kagi, and in some cases I did like their "Quick Summary", which is using AI with the content of the first few results. In my opinion a good use of AI, as it is not generating new content but just a summary, with references from which result it is. It was not my intention to sound like an ad, I am just a happy customer so far, and I like to support alternatives where I am the user of a (paid) service and not the product. commented: ddg's "block sites from results" has a limit of like 10 websites or so (don't remember the exact number) which makes it effectively useless for accumulating a large blocklist of slop websites commented: But Kagi is using Yandex, so paying them is indirectly supporting Putin’s regime. I don’t want to knowingly support killing Ukrainians. commented: I agree that we should not support Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. I disagree that it's possible to use a search engine without supporting atrocities. To quote from the UN Human Rights Council, "Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM [are] central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction." I am not aware of a commonly used general-purpose search engine + index that doesn't use data from one of those companies (shoutout marginalia, though!). Brave doesn't qualify as an ethical search engine, for obvious reasons. I disagree with a lot of Kagi's decisions and their stance on AI, but I don't know how I would improve their search engine. They do build their own index and run their own crawler, which must be even harder now that everyone is locking their sites down against the flood of scrapers. commented: Your argument for not avoiding Yandex, is that other companies are no saints? commented: I disagree that it's possible to use a search engine without supporting atrocities. I don't think that merely using data from those companies is supporting them. If you use Google but have a proper adblocker like uBlock Origin, you are costing them money and not driving revenue. If you use SearXNG and it pulls data from Google, you are even further removed from supporting Google. The data isn't the issue, it's the revenue. commented: I suspect President Zelenskyy would give you a pass on such a de minimus impact. commented: Oh, I was not aware of that, and so I did some research. In the blog posting Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi (January 21, 2026) they do mention, that they also have licensed from Yandex, but not with Google and Bing and so are not able to use their data directly and mention this: "Because direct licensing isn't available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page)." As Yandex was also not mention in the link given from @diktomat, I looked in their Feedback forum and found Reconsider Yandex integration due to the geopolitical status quo (Nov 20, 2024) with an answer from Vlad (the founder) and there seems to be only a very small amount going to them. But sure, I also would like to be able to exclude them for my searches completely. commented: Yet, after 2022, DuckDuckGo terminated it’s relationship with Yandex instead of pumping more money into Russia. commented: I've heard a lot of praise for Kagi, but I haven't had the same luck with it. That's not to deny your experience — I rather suspect that I've been "holding it wrong". So I'm curious as to what kind of searches that you've been putting into Kagi? The benchmark I've been using was "sesans spin echo length formula". Under DuckDuckGo, the first link is the Wiki page for SESANS, which doesn't contain the formula I'm looking for, but the second link is a paper that has the formula. With Google, the first link is a conference proceeding with a lot of the mathematical basis for SESANS, but not the formula I'm looking for. Again, the second link has a paper with the formula (and a better explanation of the constants that the second link under DDG). Under Kagi, it wasn't until the sixth link that I found the relation I was looking for. So, under my benchmark, Kagi is doing worse, but I suspect that it's just a bad benchmark. What sort of searches should I be doing to see Kagi at its best? commented: I am mostly searching for IT technical stuff, and sometimes for everyday things in my area. I did had some issues (error messages from my IMAP server) where back at the time DuckDuckGo was not able to give me useful results. When I started to use Kagi, I did the same search (line out of the logfile) again and Kagi did find the corresponding bug report, which pointed me to the real issue why it happens, and I could fix it. The relevant information was already in the bug report when I had searched with DuckDuckGo. I just tried your sesans spin echo length formula search, this is a shared search result, so see for yourself. For me the summary and first link is Wikipedia, and the second link is pointing to "Spin-echo small-angle neutron scattering for multiscale structure analysis of food materials" at www.sciencedirect.com. commented: Those were the same links that I found when I did the search. While both of them introduce spin-echo small-angle neutron scattering, neither of them give the specific formula for calculating the spin echo length. I needed to go the [https://webster.ncnr.nist.gov/programs/sans/pdf/Seminar20090304.pdf](the sixth link) to find the formula I was looking for in equation one on page 7. commented: I have tested Duck Duck Go, Startpage and Kagi extensively, on many different search terms. On average, Kagi is the best, and on average Duck Duck Go is terrible, at least for the kinds of searches I do. Startpage is quite decent, better than DDG, and like DDG is can be used anonymously over TOR. Kagi is not always the best. Sometimes I get zero results in cases where Startpage will find a few results. In these same cases, DDG just gives me an avalanche of garbage. DDG prioritizes showing me a large number of hits over showing me the specific niche thing I am looking for. If I search for a very niche thing using the correct spelling, in quotes, then DDG will instead show me a large number of hits for a popular thing with a slightly different spelling. I assume this behaviour is driven by doing whatever produces the most clicks and ad revenue. commented: afaik Kagi searches aren't logged (at least officially) so the anonymity shouldn't matter, but they also offer Kagi privacy pass which is an extension to let you perform searches with Kagi's TOR service (link) without logging in. commented: Kagi has an interesting concept called "lenses" which apply a certain type of filtering on search results. One of the built-in lenses is called "Academic", and with that filter, the first result I get is this which contains the formula for the spin echo length. commented: I liked Kagi, but stopped using it when I learned they're pouring money into Russia. Recently I've picked up Uruky, and I gotta say I like it a lot. It's not perfect, but better than what google has become. I haven't dug too much into how they source their data though (just verifying it's not Yandex), so I'd be interested if anyone knows more. commented: In 2024 Google and Reddit made a $60 million deal to use Reddit content for Google AI training. For this reason, doing a Google search today is like using site:Reddit as prefix. Good old websites are hidden behind irrelevant and low quality results. commented: The degradation of search engine capability is fairly undeniable at this point. Am I the only one who has not noticed this? I still search for things and find them... commented: I've wondered if a human-curated directory, like Yahoo's original site, is the way to go these days. That, plus a way to search those sites. I think marginalia is somewhat like this, but I don't see a directory. commented: Kagi is often recommended but AFAICT relies on the 3 providers mentioned above. I don't know if this is true but it literally doesn't matter. Kagi search is absolutely brilliant and I'd probably still pay for it if it cost double. I make on average 1,432 searches a month, totally worth it. commented: I think of basically persistent caching everything and indexing for full text search. Especially since some things seem to fall out of web or I just can't find them. Projects like that were shared here before. My basic idea is SQLite with FTS5 for everything. Need to explore this space. .