Google GOOG 0.00%↑ search gets worse and worse and worse and worse. Remember when “to organize the world’s information” was their mission statement?
If your revenue model is ad-based, then I suppose it’s inevitable that you will have to do the exact opposite of what I want. If I got great search results, I would only need to search once, click once, and then go on with my day.
Google wants me to search multiple times and click on sponsored or amazing ad-laden sites like Fortune or Forbes. This general deterioration has been documented elsewhere, but the situation became impossible for me. I do research all day long.
I’ve tried other sites like Duck Duck Go and browsers like Brave, but they generate poor results.
Kagi to the Rescue
Then I discovered Kagi. To my great relief, you get excellent results without all the sponsored links and advertising sites!
I’ve used it for a few weeks and just changed it to my default search engine on all my computers. You can use it for free, but I was happy to pay the small subscription amount to support their work. (I have no affiliation.)
But it doesn’t stop there. They enable you to customize your search experience in different ways. You can decide how many different types of content you want to get back and how they should look. You can also use and create new “lenses” to filter the results that come back.
You get a huge win immediately with better results and another because you can begin to tailor your results and customize your experience.
There is a developer angle here, too, but I’ll leave that for another post. I wanted to get this out so that you can begin to enjoy the vastly superior search experience they provide.
P.S. - They are working on their own browser, but it’s not ready for use. Start with installing the Kagi extension in Chrome, and you’ll be happy enough.