

I know it’s not the thing you likely want to hear, but… At this point, I’m glad I switched to a paid search engine (Kagi).
Theoretically, there’s nothing stopping them from enshittifying down the road. But at least for now (and hopefully the future) they are a great search engine.
They have their own index (so no relying on google/bing), and it actually works as I remember Google working 7+ years ago. Minus the ads, and plus a ton of flexibility permanently boosting/removing sites from your searches, auto-grouping/ignoring listicle-type articles in results, flagging sites as AI slop and punishing them for it,…
They even have a fediverse search “lense” that actually works really well to search Lemmy/mastodon/…
I just realized I sound like a paid shill. Sorry about that. I’m not.




…oh. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Looks like only their “small web” initiative is 100% self-indexed, and everything else is indeed a mixture of sources.
Oof.
I guess tue point still stands: the results are a lot better than plain Google, all the bullshit is stripped out and you get to customize your results in actually useful ways.
Still sad though.