On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage.

I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.

Checkout Kagi SmallWeb !

Well, just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people,

and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,

why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?

Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhammer 40K lore (written by unpaid volunteers anyway)? instead of just asking ChatGPT what the fuck Globriznaroks is/are.

Why should we support shady companies by sitting through their ads on YouTube videos for minute topics instead of just asking AI for the shit I want to know about?

Why should we submit to the whims of 3 mods on a subreddit deciding what thousands should get to see (fuck /r/AskScience) and then getting low-effort answers or outright trolling anyway? instead of just asking AI?

Bury me, I am ready.

This is fascinating. I haven't really kept up with SEO for years, but was recently helping an academic publisher setup their web presence and ran into exactly this issue: Google was/is refusing to index the actual journal articles on the new site and they were moved into this liminal "Crawled, not indexed" state before vanishing entirely. Comically, it's now easier to get your content indexed and served with a visible link by ChatGPT than it is Google...

> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.

Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.

Kagi is not immune to this (it's the substrate itself that's losing quality, not just search) but it's a decent antidote.

A lot of the time I use Kagi to find the Reddit post or Wikipedia page I need. There isn't much else.

They only repackage what Google et all returns.

Or have they started own indexing?

Kagi can’t solve the fact that the internet itself has gone to shit. The independent forums are largely gone, the mainstream social media’s have all locked down and been spammed with AI slop.

That reminds me - my wife had a friend who was killed by a shark (no joke). There were newspaper articles, but Google has completely forgotten about this and the newspapers are often behind a paywall, changed their URL's or simply the article vanished from those sites as well, which certainly doesn't help.

Unsurprisingly all search engines seem to be struggling with AI content sites as well. It's rare to get human articles, sometimes rare to even get authorative websites. It's frequently a bot site with a plausible enough name like, potterspainterly.com or medhealthdirect or something with oddly specific articles written in the last year.

How is Kagi indirectly Russian?

Probably what is happening here is that in the race for AI, which, whether we like it or not, means power and control, Google crafted things in a way that it does not do "self-competition" by their old search engine. Idk, just throwing ideas aloud here.

Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.

Kagi is not russian. The founder is from Serbia and the company is american.

PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.

That's certainly the goal, to drive more users to AI by making the other option worse. The real question is when do you put a stop to it. When brain implants are 2x as productive are you going to say nah? It's times like these were you are supposed to take a step back and consider what you are actually producing and why.

> there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products

Why not?

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