For the last week, Google has very generously been offering me an entire page of sponsored results, and I have to scroll down the page to find what I’m looking for.
And guess what? Before I do that, I click on at least one of the sponsored results because they look like real results. And google makes money!
I’ve tried kagi and it doesn’t work for me. I keep coming back to Google, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Probably because it’s useful for local search. And because kagi doesn’t work well on the iPhone.
I know this is probably a stupid question, but what other options are there? (Not just search sites, ad blockers, other …)
use an Adblocker. I use ublock origin. Even ublock lite on Safari is really good IMO.
As much as people criticize Google, there is nothing close to Google in terms of quality, integrations, speed, availability, price.
The one option you have is Kagi, which is paid. I tried it, but it’s still not as good as Google. Then there’s Bing, Brave Search, Yandex Search and Yahoo Search, which are, for lack of a better word, bad.
However, I find using targetted (specific, Boolean etc) searches via Google Advanced works well, and I rarely see ads or AI crap (I have AI assistance turned off, but sometimes see summaries, etc.).
I’ve set my default to ecosia, for their marketed reason of helping to plant trees. I don’t do a ton of heavy research, so I’m not a great data point, but I rarely have to go to duck duck or google or Kagi. And almost all my searches start from Alfred anyways so if I suspect I need to use something other than my default, the other options are right there.
