It's hard to overstate the sharp drop in search result quality over the last year or so.
How AI is making my life worse in small ways:
Me: I wonder if I can put this Pyrex snapware in the office air fryer?
Me looking at pages of search results: oh this is all AI SEO for a few sites.
Me redoing search with site:reddit.com: aha, r/airfryers
May 5, 2025 16:37As a big fan of paleontology this has genuinely rendered most search engines wholly unusable when looking for specific paleoart
You legit get better results by adding reddit to whatever you need 9/10 times.
Search engines were vastly superior for the user 20 freakin years ago. And the engineered degradation of them has vastly enriched their owners. What a time to be alive.
For non-commercial search (i.e. you're not trying to buy something), I'm finding the Marginalia search engine quite interesting for the occasional quirky result (sometimes good quirky). But your point remains that we had excellent search and we don't have it anymore.
Kagi to the rescue!
