> Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.

I haven't asked Google a question it has failed to provide a more than adequate answer to in ... months? years?

And on all my devices, I run google search with &udm=14, so I am not talking about AI summaries. I also have search personalization disabled.

I see a lot of people complaining about this on HN. It simply doesn't match my experience at all, in any way.

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mancerayder 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe because you have the personalization disabled. My complaint isn't the SEO stuff; that hits me when I search on a tech item I want to learn (I get slammed with crappy vendor blogs), or food recipes (long story about a Sicilian Grandma before the recipe at the end). My complaint with Google is it fights me on keywords, and I have to constantly add quotes, add minuses, and it seems to silently override it.

It's easier to add Reddit at the end to get a more accurate question repeated, and skip the sponsored SEO crap.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So why have personalization enabled?

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JKCalhoun 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.

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PaulDavisThe1st 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results.

And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.

If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.

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MostlyStable 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent to a product would be almost nothing but SEO garbage. Non-product related searches were better, but I also think they had noticeably degraded over the past several years to a decade.

And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.

(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether. firefox: keyword "g" configured as google search plus &udm=14 firefox: keyword "a" configured as google search without &udm=14 works for me!

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JKCalhoun 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have found search lacking for some time now).

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You stated that you did not want a list of links. I am not sure what other alternatives there are, but AFAIK, they will all involve LLMs in some way and be a quite different way to present the results of a "search" than traditional search engines. So, if not that, then what?