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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:11 Sponsor: TuxCare
02:29 Google is getting really bad
04:31 Improve Google
05:54 Duck Duck Go
07:34 Ecosia
08:20 SearXNG
10:05 Brave Search
11:23 Kagi
12:27 Mojeek
13:16 Others I don't trust personally
14:41 Search has become complicated
17:20 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
So, I don't think I'm teaching you anything when I say that Google Search has been getting worse and worse. What Google Search is losing, is accuracy. The pre-made snippets that they display? often don't refer to what you're looking for, they're generally related to, but not exact when searching for specific things. The AI summaries that they want to add? Well, we all know AI isn't exactly reliable, and that you have to fact check literally everything it says, so it doesn't quite save time compared to a regular search.
There's also the fact that consumer reviews are now pretty much garbage, generated by review farms. The fact that SEO "hacking" has made trying to appear in top results a game and an industry, and much like regular hacking, Google can only play catch up, and never really beat the manipulations website engage in.
it's all a mess, and this results in having to type "reddit" at the end of your query to get some actual answers written by some actual people, however dabatable these answers can be, depending on the topic.
So, if you want to fight the AI onslaught that is ruining most searches, there's something you CAN do.
Google started adding AI results to the top of your searches, which pre-digest answers that loosely match your query, often adding some nice little hallucinations and misinformation in there.
So, if you still want to use Google Search because everything else is, in your use case, not as good, you can at lest create a shortcut that removes a bunch of the crap Google adds.
To do so, you need to add a custom search engine, most browsers let you do that. In Firefox and its forks, you can go to sttings, then search, then at the bottom, you can add a search shortcut that uses this URL: http://google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s
You can also add that to Chromium based browsers by entering another string in the search sttings as well, as a new search engine.
{google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s
You can make that new engine the default in your settings, and when using that, it will remove all AI results, and default to the "web" tab instead of the "all" tab of Google search, so you only get webpages and not all the extra crap.
The engine I currently use is Duck Duck Go, it's the search engine that at least, in French and english, tends to give me the best results.
It also has a slew of options that let you disable a LOT of stuff you don't want.
DDG has AI built-in, but you can remove that. Ads? You can disable them in the settings.
Don't like the stylesheet and look? You can change that easily enough as well.
You can even disable the "instant answers" that provides pre digested snippets, even if these aren't AI generated.
Another one I used extensively in the past is Ecosia, it also uses Bing quite a lot for their results, but the engine is nice, gives accurate results, and if you have ads turned on, they'll plant trees with the money they get, although how efficient this is depends on who they contract that out to, so not sure if it's a big benefit or not.
If you like the concept of the Fediverse, mastodon, Peertube and the like, you might also like SearXNG. It's a federated metasearch engine, meaning it's decentralized, and hosted by several instances, either private, for your own use and no one else's, or public, where you can access the engine, but you'll need to ensure they don't log stuff, so you kind of have to trust the person or org hosting it.
If you use the Brave browser, you might also know about their search engine, which is an interesting one, because it's a very rare occurrence of an engine with its own Index: they don't depend on Google or Bing for results, they use their own index entirely, including for images and videos.
They do have the AI crap baked in, so that's a drawback, but you can disable that in the engine settings if you don't want it.
