Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Kagi as a paid alternative

  • Many comments praise Kagi as the closest thing to “old Google”: relevant results, strong advanced search, no ads, and minimal, opt‑in AI.
  • Users highlight customization (domain boosting/ban lists, keyboard navigation, stats) and good multilingual support, though a few say it’s strongest in English.
  • Weak spots: local/business search and maps, shopping results, and a comparatively small user base. Some worry small scale could harm anonymity or long‑term sustainability.
  • Skepticism includes: needing an account, subscription cost, reliance on multiple external indexes (Google/Bing/Yandex/etc.), and concerns over using Yandex data given Russia’s war in Ukraine.
  • Some suspect astroturfing due to how often it’s recommended; others insist the praise is organic.

Other search engines and meta‑search

  • DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Startpage, Ecosia, Mojeek, Qwant, Yandex, Exa, Searxng, etools.ch and smaller engines (Uruky, seek.ninja, etc.) are all mentioned.
  • DDG is seen as “good enough” by many, especially with settings like ad‑off and no‑AI variants, but others find it mediocre, weak in non‑English, or lacking fresh Reddit content.
  • Brave Search is liked for its own index, “goggles” to filter out junk (e.g., Pinterest), and a Google‑2008 feel. Some distrust Brave’s brand or past ad experiments.
  • Meta‑searches like Searxng and etools.ch are valued for blending multiple engines, including niche ones like Marginalia.

AI overviews, LLMs, and search

  • Strong split: some love Google’s AI Overview/Gemini as a fast answer layer that bypasses ad‑bloated pages; others find it frequently wrong, dangerously authoritative, or hard to audit.
  • Broader worry: AI summaries siphon traffic and revenue from original sites, threatening the incentive to publish new content and degrading future training data.
  • Many already use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Mistral, or Gemini directly as their “search,” especially for complex queries; others say LLMs still miss key libraries, docs, or popular tools.
  • Some see AI‑first search as inevitable; others view it as enshittification and prefer pure “ten blue links.”

Google’s decline and workarounds

  • Widely shared view that Google’s core search quality has deteriorated over the past decade due to SEO spam, ad load, personalization, and query rewriting.
  • People use tricks like &udm=14, -ai, or custom extensions to get “web”‑only, no‑AI Google, but fear these parameters may eventually be removed.

Alternative paradigms

  • Interest in self‑hosted and decentralized approaches like Hister (personal full‑text index from browsing history) and ideas for shared or P2P indexes and “search stubs” to reduce dependence on big centralized engines.