I hate that search engine degradation is what’s lead me to use AI more. Instead of searching past pages full of 8 ads for a waffle recipe, I ask Copilot or something: “Give me a basic waffle recipe”.
So much computation to go back to what the web used to be great at.
I knew Google started ignoring double quotes for required text years ago, but I found out yesterday that it doesn't even think "site:xyz.com" needs to be followed.
I was researching something and saw some Reddit posts. Clicked below it to view results from Reddit and a third of them were other websites.
Google has always respected my double quote and site: searches. Please share a screenshot of it borken, I looked online and don’t see examples. If you have the time for a silly little thing :)
I’m liking $0 SearXNG: lots of instances if you don’t host your own (for max privacy I think)
Germany/Spain hosted instance with all the checkmarks (Vanilla, IPv6, 100% uptime): https://searxng.site
If you fancy paying for a decent cause, don’t see a problem with the paid option sometimes suspiciously mentioned on Lemmy. Free trialing it saw a pleasant experience.
Kagi has a really neat feature that if you phrase your search in the form of a question and add a question mark to the end of it, it'll summarize all of the top results and give footnotes to the pages that it evaluated. It saves me tons of time!
This post article goes REALLY into why. I am in no way a techie nor do I really care too much what goes on in the tech sector. I will never build a PC. Regardless, that article is extremely well written and worth the time despite the length.