Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first *ten* screens of results:

pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-…

3/

Even after all that payola, Google is wildly profitable. So profitable that they were able to do a *$80B* stock buyback. Months later, Google fired 12,000 tech workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

4/

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the…

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are *so good* that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

5/

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel *The Bezzle*, I crashed with my pals @pnh and @tnh. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops - just like old times! - and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

6/

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know - both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them...

I tried it. It was *magic*.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated *pages* of spam in Google results? Fucking *pristine* on Kagi - the right answers, over and over again.

7/

That was *before* I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to *sorcerous*.

The catch is that Kagi costs money - after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

kagi.com/settings?p=billing_pl…

8/

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read @jasonkoebler's @404mediaco report on his own experiences using it:

404media.co/friendship-ended-w…

9/

Friendship Ended With GOOGLE Now KAGI Is My Best Friend

I replaced Google with Kagi, a search engine that has no ads and costs $10 per month.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

> When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see.

10/

So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: *Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google*.

The implications of this are *stunning*. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a *choice*.

11/