Unlike the common opinion here, I find the AI search results on top really good. 50% of times it appears it answers my question and I don't need to scroll past it to get to the actual search results.
I switched to DuckDuckGo about seven years ago, added Marginalia when it became available, and then moved over to Kagi three years back. I made the change because I was utterly fed up with Google trying to be cleverer than me.
Looking back, I’m increasingly glad I became an early adopter - Kagi has proven to be as much of an improvement over Google as Google once was over its older rivals.
We used to have private bridges and private roads, and that was an expensive travel situation for everyone. Now, internet search is kind of like a bridge that leads clients to businesses and Google is deciding on the tolls.
Government-controlled Internet search would definitely be horrible. But I'm thinking if there is a path towards more competitiveness in this landscape, maybe the ISPs could somehow provide free search as part of the Internet service fee? Can we have more specialized, niche search engines? Can governments be asked to break up the Google search monopoly?
I remember reading a book on web usability well over a decade ago, and one of the things it pointed out was how Google ensured that the links you wanted to click were "above the fold" --- not ads, but honest-to-goodness search results.
Recently, after they added AI-generated search responses (which seem to be wrong a considerable percentage of the time, at least for things I search for), and the inlining of ads to the search results page, I've found I have to scroll at least a full screen height to actually get to the search results a significant portion of the time.
The level of blindness to user experience at Google that has allowed the state of search to get to this level is staggering.
It seems like a lot of "agentic features" these days don't really require LLMs. The dinner reservation agent is basically just Kayak for dinner reservations. They're even working with the reservation vendors to ensure compatibility. I suppose it's easier to describe the restaurant type you're looking for in a chat window than a dropdown menu?
Finally made the switch to DuckDuckGo a few months ago after they introduced a feature that lets you hide AI images. They still have AI features and summaries, but you can at least easily opt out.
The blog post has so much noisy, duplicate content and slop, it's like wading through treacle. This is Google. Supposedly an advertising and marketing company, describing what used to be their core product. Such a disappointment.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 46.0 ms ] threadLooking back, I’m increasingly glad I became an early adopter - Kagi has proven to be as much of an improvement over Google as Google once was over its older rivals.
Recently, after they added AI-generated search responses (which seem to be wrong a considerable percentage of the time, at least for things I search for), and the inlining of ads to the search results page, I've found I have to scroll at least a full screen height to actually get to the search results a significant portion of the time.
The level of blindness to user experience at Google that has allowed the state of search to get to this level is staggering.
I use chatgpt, Google, and my own indexes, like
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database