You don’t have to put up with Google

I just read the headlines: "Google Search as you know it is over", "Google Search is dead". I initially thought it was overdramatic, but after reading it, it's kinda true. The good ol' page with search results has been pushed further and further down every year, and it's easy to see it going away altogether soon enough.

I don't think the "AI search" experience is inherently bad, what I dislike is the implementation. Google shows the AI overview by default on most (all?) queries, which pushes the real results further down. If you consider the poorly-indicated ads, questions card thingies, and whatever else Google decides to show in there, the results can already be really hard to find. So if you actually want to do some proper research, you gotta go through a lot of bullshit just to get to what matters to you. If your priorities aren't the same as the trillion-dollar company's (they never are), you gotta fight it on every step.

This would be tolerable if the results themselves (both AI and links) were actually good. I haven't used Google myself in the past 6 years, but you've probably heard a lot (or even said yourself) that search results have been getting worse over the years. This is not because the web got worse (it did) or because it's now filled with AI slop (it is), but because, if you consider Google Search as a product, showing good results is actually bad for business. Ads make the product profitable, and simply showing you the best results makes you click away from the ads faster.

Now, you might want to argue that the AI overview contradicts that: by showing an answer (even if a sloppy one) as the first thing in the page, they're actually making the ads below it less prominent. And that's true!

But consider the end goal here, which was revealed in the latest Google I/O conference: showing the AI overview by default has trained people to ignore the classic result links; now, people are used to getting the AI answers, and will be able to ask follow-up questions in a chat interface. This will take them further away from ads, right? Yes, but also will take them straight into much more valuable ads: ads that are inserted right in the middle of a conversation. They can charge businesses so much more to have this kind of targeted thing.

Which is very dystopian the more you think about it: imagine having a conversation with someone and this person keeps plugging in products and services for anything you say. You complain about your noisy neighbors to a friend and that friend replies "You're right! That sucks! Have you considered noise-cancelling headphones? There's the new Foobar 999-ZGX that is praised as being one of the best noise-cancelling headphones in the market, with great reviews and it's a steal at $299 on Amazon right now". On a chat about music, that friend could just plug in the same product but praising its sound quality instead.

The existing ads can already do some adapting depending on your search terms, but they are still elements on a list. An option for you to click. Ads injected into a conversation interface (that are meant to mimic the same interface you use to talk to your actual friends) suddenly are not just an option being shown to you, they feel like a suggestion from a friend. That has some weird implications in our brains, even if we're aware they're happening. We tend to anthropomorphize robots that behave or talk like humans, and there's no shortage of people using them as friends or confidants.

With that rant out of the way, let's get to the title of this post: you don't have to put up with all that. If seeing Google go in this direction annoys you even a little bit, but you keep thinking "but what am I gonna do, not use Google?", the answer is yes! Google hasn't been a "mandatory" part of using the web for over a decade, and it's arguably not even been the best way of searching for many years already.

I speak from experience. I stopped using Google Search around 2020, because the results just weren't good for me anymore. It was way before the AI overview thing, and I never felt like I had to go back. I tried many alternatives, and if you're reading this, you probably know some of them: DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Brave Search, Startpage. They were all at least just as good for the type of stuff I usually searched for, though I gotta admit the local results (for Brazil, specifically) were really lacking. All those examples are also free and ad-supported, which is not ideal but makes sense - they gotta stay afloat somehow.

Kagi

Since 2023, though, I've started using Kagi. It's a paid search engine, which might be an immediate turn-off for some people, but of the subscriptions I have, it's the one that's worth it the most.

It is a "classic" search engine in the way that, if you search something, it'll show you a list of results and that's it. But it has so much more! It's not one of those cases where you're paying to get less, in this case you're paying to get at least just-as-much, but all that works better!

First of all, the results: they're actually really good. In my experience, it feels like searching the web a decade ago, when you were still able to find things. And it's not just me, usually the biggest feedback I see from people who use it is that the results are really good, often better than Google's. Plus, you can control them somewhat. You really like a specific site? You can tell Kagi to rank its results higher. Hate getting Pinterest results? You can outright block it from appearing in results altogether (fun fact: Pinterest is the most blocked domain in their public stats page). I didn't even remember Quora existed since I blocked its results 3 years ago.

But what if you actually like to have your questions answered by an AI based on the results? You can, just by clicking on the "Quick Answer" button in the results page (or finishing your question with a question mark). I actually like the way they do this better, as the AI is clearly set up to only use content from the search results and nothing else. It links the source of every single sentence it outputs, and many times I've had it just flat out say that it didn't know the answer, because it couldn't find it in any results. An AI that can admit it doesn't know something? That's a bit more trustworthy.

You can even ask follow-up questions about a query, something Google added just now but Kagi has had for a while. All the follow-ups are sourced only by search results too, making the risk of hallucinations way lower.

They offer a bunch of other cool services too, which I think are available for non-subscribers too, like Translate, News and Small Web.

Wrapping up

I'm sorry if this section feels too praising of Kagi and has that "sponsored vibe" to it. I promise I'm not getting paid by Kagi. Quite the opposite, actually, I'm paying them. It's just one of the few tech things I pay for that I still pay with gusto (the other being Fastmail). It is still a for-profit company and if recent history has taught us anything, is that companies can't be trusted. But so far they've been doing an excellent job and the fact that it's a paid subscription guarantees that their incentives are aligned to mine, at least for the time being.

The point is, Google Search is not unbeatable nor irreplaceable, and it hasn't been for quite a while. You don't have to put up with its bullshit. If it's not good for you anymore, dump it. Before Kagi, I was still having a pretty good experience with the other search engines and would likely still be using any one of them had I not found Kagi. There's plenty of competition around.