| ▲ | zeroq 11 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English. And I occasionally got surprised seeing someone trying to find something online and spending minutes, if not hours to get to the right place. Last couple of years I found it to be way, way harder. And it's noticeably getting worse almost on a daily basis right now. Recently I've tried perplexity and it was absolutely amazing. I know this may sound like a sales pitch, but I was really blown away by the user experience. Except it sometimes says "results cannot be found or I am not suppose to show them to you". Well, fair game, I wouldn't be able to find these results on google either. I've seen a lot of change in the industry last 30 years, things we took for granted or thought would stay there forever. I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet. Perplexity is close tho. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | thecopy 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Try DuckDuck Go, it performs significantly better than Google for me | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | benhurmarcel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I find it's still not that difficult to have that "special power", but you have to adapt your tools. Before the only tool you needed was Google, now you need to know which one to use for each type of request. I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | DecentShoes 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Google deliberately made search worse so users do multiple searches for each query so they can profit off showing more ads: https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | alanh 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | daliusd 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I have found both perplexity and Claude.ai good enough. Since I pay for claude because of development, why not use it as search engine as well? So maybe the future is multi provider? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | WhyNotHugo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English. You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either. I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | imiric 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more profitable to corrupt their results page and deal with any negative feedback, than to deliver clean results like they did decades ago without the profit. This is a carefully planned, tested, and executed design decision, just like anything they do on the SERP, and not some arbitrary sign that they don't know what they're doing anymore. The possibility of a new player disrupting the dominance of a trillion-dollar corporation that has built a highly optimized index of the entire web over decades, by leveraging technology that requires vast resources to run, is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Google could improve the search UX tomorrow if they wanted to. > The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet. Sure we do. Kagi offers a much better UX, and I haven't had the need to rely on external results for nearly a year now. I haven't tried Perplexity, but I imagine it could be good as well, depending on the quality of its index. But these are relatively niche services catering to an audience that cares about these things. The sad reality is that most people simply don't, and will use whatever search engine is set as default in their browser. Which is why being the default is worth paying millions, and is literally keeping companies like Mozilla alive. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||