I can’t stress highly enough how important it is to me to have access to a decent search engine.
In the early days of the internet, it was down to individuals to publish dedicated Links You Might Like pages, or really go to town with <a href>s on their web pages. At one stage, I printed out a list of URLs (on A3 paper via a noisy dot matrix printer) that claimed to be “all the web sites in the world.” There were just over 6,000 entries – mostly government organisations and academic institutions.
Early search services like Yahoo! and Alta Vista were terrible at everything apart from serving adverts. Ask Jeeves had a cool logo but little else particularly memorable. And then Google came along, with its mantra of not being evil and giving everyone access to everything on the then-nascent worldwide web.
Google was cool, it worked, and if you published your own web pages, you could submit them to Google to be indexed. Them were the days! You could also stuff your pages full of tiny, white text with phrases like “Phoebe Cates and Michael J Fox in sex romp free pictures” to get much needed traffic to your blog, apparently.
However, it all went tits up over the course of the next few decades, and here we are with the verb Google in everyday vernacular as a verb to mean “show me loads of ads and AI slop that promotes a multinational’s interests, and here’s all my personal data, cheers!” Most other search engines are trying to be as shittily useless, but they lack Google’s resources to achieve the degree of turd-polish that the mother of search has achieved.
If we consider a search engine to be the entrance hall to a really, really big library, then it’s important that there’s good signage. Visit google.com in 2026 and you’re presented with a range of shops you can visit (most of which Google owns or has a vested interest in), there’s a moron who tells you lies about what you’re looking for “in natural language”, and a shifty-looking bloke slides up behind you, nicks your wallet and drops tracking devices into your back pockets.
This is not my local library where a nice old lady points me to six books that she knows may contain the information I need. Google search used to be like that.
Interestingly, Google still employs the old lady, and the helpful signs to the bogs, reference section, magazine rack and fiction shelves are all still there. They’re just hidden under pictures of gurning idiots on YouTube and ads for stuff you mentioned in conversation down the pub.
To get to the old Google (to see the library lobby before it was ‘redesigned’ by Avarice Interiors Inc.) there are several options, each with varying levels of paintwork obscuring the old signage. Each also has different policies on letting the ‘natural language results’ moron speak up first, and on how hard the security guard works to keep the kleptomaniac-spook out. The better known include DuckDuckGo and StartPage.
As an alternative, you can visit a different library. The staff may not be as knowledgeable, but there’s as little of the smell of Google about them as possible. Searxx springs to mind in that bracket.
What has changed my online life for the better is a paid-for search engine called Kagi. This is not a paid-for promotion in the traditional sense, but rather something I pay for that I’m promoting here. Which I’m sure is the wrong way to earn money.
I’m sure that many of its features are available elsewhere, but the ones I like are:
- Search result quality – as good as I remember Google being once, back in the day.
- The ability to utterly block references to sites that are proven to be shite.
- Seeing which sites other users have had the good sense to block, and steal their ideas to add to my own blocklist.
- Redirecting sometimes useful sites’ URLs to less shitty alternatives (like defaulting to showing me old.reddit.com pages, not the new-fangled version).
- Promoting cool stuff I know will be useful up the search results list (like the so-called ‘small web’).
Kagi costs 12 quid a month. Money well spent – it saves hours each month that would otherwise be spent scrolling and sifting. Mostly though, it removes the tornado of enraged internal voices that pipe up whenever I stumble over the ‘new internet’ in all its monetised horror. If hearing those voices every time you want to find something on the internet is troubling (it troubled me), it’s worth the dough IMO.