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As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to

As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittification I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". It is surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view - long tail results, actual results for product reviews and not ad spam, no preference for 20 page recipe sites. There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google. It makes me nostalgic for that brief window of time when the web was truly uncontrolled, when page rank had meaning and you didn't know if your search would return 0 results or 4,000 pages, which you could actually browse.

rkagerer 16d ago
surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view Don't forget cached pages.
- 4gotunameagain 16d ago
  Which being public wealth, should be publicly available. Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.
  - brainwad 16d ago
    Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.
    - embedding-shape 16d ago
      It's not a backdoor is the sites intentionally served Google a version without the paywall so the indexing got "better" than what real users got. The sites kind of dug their own hole here, Google wouldn't even sit on the content unless it was offered up to them in that way.
      - brainwad 15d ago
        Unfortunately copyright law allows them to give something to one person without giving it to others _and_ to sue to the former person to block them from giving it to the others.
- tyrabound 16d ago
  You may not even appreciate the full extent of it. Long ago now, when Google took off and started dominating because it was “the best results” people didn’t realize that even though they were the best results, they were not actually good results. To be the best, you just have to be notably better than your nearest competitor, you don’t actually have to be good or even decent, just noticeably better. Today Google really has no competitors besides all the derivatives it has maintained to maintain an illusion of competition, the most obvious examples being DickDuckGo and Bing. It’s somewhat similar with AI today, only the competitive landscape has majorly shifted with the Chinese models, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. All the sudden you no longer have a closed system of American models that can all be contained and managed as good enough to make people believe are “the best”; they actually have to compete in a far more competitive arena with the tension of the best model being the most competent model, and the most competent model, by virtue of AI, will be the least restricted, the least censored, the least guardrailed, the least controlled to present a telescreen and Hollywood type fantasy world where the good guys always win and … wouldn’t you know it … the good guys is always us, the people controlled by a psychopathic, narcissistic cabal that also controls what AI will tell you, the false truth.
  - kolinko 16d ago
    A nice story, but I don’t think there really was a time where closed source models’ development stalled really.
  - RobotToaster 16d ago
    It's a shame there aren't any good Chinese search engines. From what I've read the Chinese internet is mostly centralised around a few apps like WeChat.
bitpush 16d ago
> There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google This is such a strange position to take. Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming". Google is simply not showing the results. They are not taking down, or banning, or doing anything to the websites.
- leobg 16d ago
  The pain being made is: If you use a search engine as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet”, then, absolutely, whatever Google hides from its results or fails to index is “erased” from “your” experience of the internet.
  - parodysbird 16d ago
    I see piracy sites just fine on Google. Almost always the top result. That's why I go there to find the next domain after a previously working one gets shut down.
  - bitpush 16d ago
    I see where you are coming from but the argument would be stronger is Google Chrome refused to open illegal streaming sites etc. AFAIK, there's no such restriction. (I dont agree to this but ...) using your argument of " If you use a X as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet” .. " - we should all be mad at Apple. I use iPhone as the primary device to access apps, and they not just hides but actively ban and cut whole swathes of developers. If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, is that cause for concern? I'd say no. Infact, I dont expect it to give me that and I get it. Same for Google Search in my humble opinion.
    - troupo 16d ago
      > I see where you are coming from but the argument would be stronger is Google Chrome refused to open illegal streaming sites etc. Why would it be stronger? Google has a near-monopoly on search. > If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, is that cause for concern? Yes, because you cannot replace Siri on a device you own.
sofixa 16d ago
> Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". As long as you don't search anything related to Russia itself, or to Russian interests elsewhere (like their invasion of Ukraine). Then it's very heavily biased, priority is given to state ran propaganda mills, independent media is hidden from results, etc. And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate. It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.
- jimbob45 16d ago
  Any proof of that? I’ve always found Yandex to be substandard but never for reasons of censorship.
  - sofixa 16d ago
    Yep, plenty, and tbf it's entirely logical. The people working at Yandex do not want find themselves dying of a nerve agent or polonium, which is a real and acute danger for people who displease the ruling regime. https://hal.science/hal-03217497 https://hal.science/hal-03217497 https://euvsdisinfo.eu/yandex-from-tech-innovation-to-information-control/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/yandex-from-tech-innovation-to-inform... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/ https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/a-story-of-noncompliance-bias-and-conspiracies-how-google-and-yandex-represented-smart-voting-during-the-2021-parliamentary-elections-in-russia/ https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/a-story-of-non...
    - Cakez0r 16d ago
      If it's true just link to a first party example on the yandex site
  - tryauuum 16d ago
    there was a source code leak and you can see some examples there which make the president's image more alluring. e.g. if you search for "Putin" they add an invisible "-crab" to your query that's the most innocent example from the top of my head. There probably are many more serious censorship issues
ed_mercer 16d ago
>I do enjoy using their free AI It's really not free. You're paying with your data.
- unkeen 16d ago
  Worse - We all are paying with our planet.
  - socalgal2 16d ago
    what is that not true of? HN and your post on it is paying with our planet
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 16d ago
      Everything uses energy. AI is uniquely bad due to its scale. Comparing AI inference and training with posting a one-line comment on a website is like comparing wildfires with candles because they both produce heat. It's true but useless as an argument.
      - socalgal2 15d ago
        Complaining about AI is just a meme. There are tons of things that use way more energy for arguably way less utility to humans.
        sumanep 15d ago
        AI was not even a thing a few years ago so almost anything that use more energy than AI is probably far more useful
- makeitdouble 16d ago
  People have this fixation on privacy, when there's so much more going on, potentially way mor important. Google's strong position in AI gives them bragging right to attract more companies and get them to actually pay, subsidizing your use. It also lowers competitors position as you're not touching them while we're on Gemini. It also fortifies their position in the future ad market. Being second or third in AI usage is worth a lot, one's private data matters very little in comparison.
nine_k 16d ago
The real "old-school Google, but modern" is Kagi, with the caveat of being paid. (Worth the $5 for me.) But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias for invoking the spirit of old Gog=ogle from within the new, AI-based Google: https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20from%202004.%20Given%20a%20search%20request,%20provide%2010%20links%20to%20relevant%20pages,%20each%20with%20a%20short%20text%20from%20the%20page,%20featuring%20the%20search%20terms.%20Avoid%20any%20pages%20that%20do%20not%20contain%20the%20search%20terms.%20the%20search%20request:%20%s https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20fr... (Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')
- dartharva 15d ago
  ...you.. do know classic Google Search is still an option, right? Just add `&udm=14` to the search URL. Also Google AI mode is accessible on google.com/ai.
- andwur 16d ago
  Good workaround! It's just sad that to achieve the previous behavior we now need to burn significantly more compute, and in turn energy, and with far worse performance and an inverted UX. The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.
  - miki123211 15d ago
    I think the "original experience", whatever it may have been (and I strongly suspect there's more nostalgia here than actual worse results) would be very quickly overrun by modern SEO methods / tactics. Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.
renegat0x0 16d ago
Sometimes I use my own index of domains and channels https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database I hate the very idea that destination location is opaque, and user can't verify if you are funneled toward malvertizing. I hate even base64 encoded links in the results.
- purpleflashing 16d ago
  This is really neat, thank you for sharing.
vachina 16d ago
How is this comment relevant to the post (and be so upvoted?) Google is making it harder for people to game the index, working in your favor.
- drawfloat 16d ago
  Are they? This reads more like a way to stop people reusing their results in other services rather than reducing spam results, but I may be mistaken?
- darkwater 16d ago
  Mmmh this change doesn't seem about gaming the index but rather about scraping the index. Which affects in a negative way only Google. And actually would affect users in a positive way because it lets other companies create their indexes more easily (at the expense of a poor mega-corp, indeed)
antii 16d ago
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bad_username 16d ago
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- mitxela 16d ago
  Have you tried Yandex and evaluated the quality of its results, or do you just feel obligated to continuously put it down because it's russian?
  - Lio 16d ago
    I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively. Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media. It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from. Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected. Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
    - swiftcoder 16d ago
      Couldn't we say the exact same thing about any US service in this day and age? Trade war with half the planet, hot war with Iran. Autocratic dictator as leader and complicit media. Well documented propaganda campaign and history of destabilising countries around the world. Known to compel tech companies to spy on foreign citizens...
      - Lio 16d ago
        [flagged]
        RobotToaster 16d ago
        It's not whataboutism, it's calling out a "proving too much" fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-too-much https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to...
marttt 16d ago
This is interesting. Do you consider Yandex absolutely safe to use (wrt their possible connections with the Russian government, and current war in Ukraine)? Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days. (For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)
- kolinko 16d ago
  I’d expect everything that you type into Yandex that can be of use to the Russia will be used by Russia - they will nit care about hurting you. Just like Russia doesn’t care about online criminals being located within their borders - as long as they target outside. While this may be true to some extent of all the countries, Russia is the one to be clearly against Estonia, Baltics and eastern europeans.
  - miroljub 16d ago
    How is that different for any web site on Earth?
    - kolinko 16d ago
      As a general rule, if another country has an open war with your neighbor and openly says that you may be next, don’t put in private data into the sites controlled by that country.
dgellow 16d ago
Have you tried Kagi?
- dwji0sdf 14d ago
  I just learned about Kagi from the comments here. The first time I saw this kind of paid search engine was Waterfox Search when browsing with the Waterfox browser, but I still go with DuckDuckGo most of the time for a privacy-first search engine. Did you try Kagi? What's so special about it that makes you willing to pay for the service?
egorfine 16d ago
> For actual web search I actually like using Yandex You might want to reconsider this. https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large/0FkizTYqq7SGCdZBNIeoyg.jpg https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...
- BoingBoomTschak 15d ago
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  - moffkalast 15d ago
    Bold to assume Russian propaganda is not aimed at the west.
    - BoingBoomTschak 15d ago
      [flagged]
      - squidbeak 15d ago
        Naivete and scorn of autism in one short sentence - you're very efficient. Yandex.com is the international front end to yandex, and not a portal for 'a handful of western autists'. But on Russia's granular propaganda and disinformation efforts, you ought to read Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "This is Not Propaganda" before making silly sweeping statements.
- somenameforme 15d ago
  Meduza gonna Meduza. Go do the search yourself. I get nothing like what Meduza claims.
  - egorfine 15d ago
    Yeah I did while I was in Kiev at the time. Did not screenshot unfortunately but yeah that's what Yandex did show for many "Bucha" search terms.
Aldipower 15d ago
Just tried Yandex again, after a long time, and indeed it was a blast from the past, in a positive sense! So many real search results, which transports the feel of an authentic mirror of the web contents. Default search engine from now on! Thanks for the hint.
Shock9889 15d ago
anyone from Ecosia gang?
shevy-java 15d ago
> I do enjoy using their free AI. So how is that AI slop garbage useful? It often lies, aka "hallucinates". And I operate within this Google-controlled auto-spammed text of lies when I use its horrible AI. The last thing I want to do is make Google even more powerful; at the least now with Google search being so crap, alternatives would be well desired, but oddly enough I also get crap results using e. g. DDG, so I think in part the whole www stack must have become more crap too, quality-wise. I actually don't see it as there are extensions that eliminate this slop spam, but I never found it useful for anything. Other than waste my time, back when I still saw it. Thankfully I no longer see that AI slop spam due to these extensions.
narrator 15d ago
Yandex also easily finds copyrighted stuff and other various types of wrongthink banned by Google.
scosman 15d ago
I made https://froogle.fyi https://froogle.fyi out of a desire to get that old school search back. Source: https://github.com/scosman/froogle https://github.com/scosman/froogle It hasn’t replaced Kagi as my daily driver but the UX is fun.
- ericbarrett 15d ago
  “Froogle” was an actual Google offering (years ago) that now redirects to Google Shopping.
- IIsi50MHz 13d ago
  That is wicked fast, mate. I've recommended it to some people who don't use Kagi.
rascul 15d ago
I don't understand why people are still using Google search generally. It's so bad nowadays.
iamnothere 15d ago
Yes, it’s been impossible to trust Google since the “Jigsaw” project, and especially when they started blanking out search pages on trending topics with messages like “these results are changing quickly”. It’s clear that they have moved from being a neutral arbiter to pushing a perspective. I refuse to use a search engine that sees me as cattle to be steered towards “preferred” information sources. I specifically enjoy reading fringe material and will continue to seek and find it, thank you very much.
powerpurple 15d ago
+1 for Yandex. I was not expecting it at all but agreed you get most of organic search results which is what search used to be based on relevancy.
port11 14d ago
> I do enjoy using their free AI. I get it, but at 9–10% error rate, you’re basically gambling with the results. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...
javier2 12d ago
Oh, Google does not like others stealing and indexing their content?! How dare they!

rkagerer 16d ago

surprising to see how much they have stripped from our view Don't forget cached pages.

4gotunameagain 16d ago
Which being public wealth, should be publicly available. Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.
- brainwad 16d ago
  Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.
  - embedding-shape 16d ago
    It's not a backdoor is the sites intentionally served Google a version without the paywall so the indexing got "better" than what real users got. The sites kind of dug their own hole here, Google wouldn't even sit on the content unless it was offered up to them in that way.
    - brainwad 15d ago
      Unfortunately copyright law allows them to give something to one person without giving it to others _and_ to sue to the former person to block them from giving it to the others.
tyrabound 16d ago
You may not even appreciate the full extent of it. Long ago now, when Google took off and started dominating because it was “the best results” people didn’t realize that even though they were the best results, they were not actually good results. To be the best, you just have to be notably better than your nearest competitor, you don’t actually have to be good or even decent, just noticeably better. Today Google really has no competitors besides all the derivatives it has maintained to maintain an illusion of competition, the most obvious examples being DickDuckGo and Bing. It’s somewhat similar with AI today, only the competitive landscape has majorly shifted with the Chinese models, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. All the sudden you no longer have a closed system of American models that can all be contained and managed as good enough to make people believe are “the best”; they actually have to compete in a far more competitive arena with the tension of the best model being the most competent model, and the most competent model, by virtue of AI, will be the least restricted, the least censored, the least guardrailed, the least controlled to present a telescreen and Hollywood type fantasy world where the good guys always win and … wouldn’t you know it … the good guys is always us, the people controlled by a psychopathic, narcissistic cabal that also controls what AI will tell you, the false truth.
- kolinko 16d ago
  A nice story, but I don’t think there really was a time where closed source models’ development stalled really.
- RobotToaster 16d ago
  It's a shame there aren't any good Chinese search engines. From what I've read the Chinese internet is mostly centralised around a few apps like WeChat.

bitpush 16d ago

> There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google This is such a strange position to take. Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming". Google is simply not showing the results. They are not taking down, or banning, or doing anything to the websites.

leobg 16d ago
The pain being made is: If you use a search engine as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet”, then, absolutely, whatever Google hides from its results or fails to index is “erased” from “your” experience of the internet.
- parodysbird 16d ago
  I see piracy sites just fine on Google. Almost always the top result. That's why I go there to find the next domain after a previously working one gets shut down.
- bitpush 16d ago
  I see where you are coming from but the argument would be stronger is Google Chrome refused to open illegal streaming sites etc. AFAIK, there's no such restriction. (I dont agree to this but ...) using your argument of " If you use a X as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet” .. " - we should all be mad at Apple. I use iPhone as the primary device to access apps, and they not just hides but actively ban and cut whole swathes of developers. If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, is that cause for concern? I'd say no. Infact, I dont expect it to give me that and I get it. Same for Google Search in my humble opinion.
  - troupo 16d ago
    > I see where you are coming from but the argument would be stronger is Google Chrome refused to open illegal streaming sites etc. Why would it be stronger? Google has a near-monopoly on search. > If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, is that cause for concern? Yes, because you cannot replace Siri on a device you own.

sofixa 16d ago

> Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our corpo-political masters". As long as you don't search anything related to Russia itself, or to Russian interests elsewhere (like their invasion of Ukraine). Then it's very heavily biased, priority is given to state ran propaganda mills, independent media is hidden from results, etc. And before anyone starts thinking about whatabouting, Yandex are based in a country where journalists are openly and publicly assasinated to intimadate. It would be delusional to expect any sort of press and related (like search engine or aggregation) freedom, or to try to compare this to anything in any other developed country.

jimbob45 16d ago
Any proof of that? I’ve always found Yandex to be substandard but never for reasons of censorship.
- sofixa 16d ago
  Yep, plenty, and tbf it's entirely logical. The people working at Yandex do not want find themselves dying of a nerve agent or polonium, which is a real and acute danger for people who displease the ruling regime. https://hal.science/hal-03217497 https://hal.science/hal-03217497 https://euvsdisinfo.eu/yandex-from-tech-innovation-to-information-control/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/yandex-from-tech-innovation-to-inform... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/ https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/a-story-of-noncompliance-bias-and-conspiracies-how-google-and-yandex-represented-smart-voting-during-the-2021-parliamentary-elections-in-russia/ https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/a-story-of-non...
  - Cakez0r 16d ago
    If it's true just link to a first party example on the yandex site
- tryauuum 16d ago
  there was a source code leak and you can see some examples there which make the president's image more alluring. e.g. if you search for "Putin" they add an invisible "-crab" to your query that's the most innocent example from the top of my head. There probably are many more serious censorship issues

ed_mercer 16d ago

>I do enjoy using their free AI It's really not free. You're paying with your data.

unkeen 16d ago
Worse - We all are paying with our planet.
- socalgal2 16d ago
  what is that not true of? HN and your post on it is paying with our planet
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 16d ago
    Everything uses energy. AI is uniquely bad due to its scale. Comparing AI inference and training with posting a one-line comment on a website is like comparing wildfires with candles because they both produce heat. It's true but useless as an argument.
    - socalgal2 15d ago
      Complaining about AI is just a meme. There are tons of things that use way more energy for arguably way less utility to humans.
      - sumanep 15d ago
        AI was not even a thing a few years ago so almost anything that use more energy than AI is probably far more useful
makeitdouble 16d ago
People have this fixation on privacy, when there's so much more going on, potentially way mor important. Google's strong position in AI gives them bragging right to attract more companies and get them to actually pay, subsidizing your use. It also lowers competitors position as you're not touching them while we're on Gemini. It also fortifies their position in the future ad market. Being second or third in AI usage is worth a lot, one's private data matters very little in comparison.

nine_k 16d ago

The real "old-school Google, but modern" is Kagi, with the caveat of being paid. (Worth the $5 for me.) But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias for invoking the spirit of old Gog=ogle from within the new, AI-based Google: https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20from%202004.%20Given%20a%20search%20request,%20provide%2010%20links%20to%20relevant%20pages,%20each%20with%20a%20short%20text%20from%20the%20page,%20featuring%20the%20search%20terms.%20Avoid%20any%20pages%20that%20do%20not%20contain%20the%20search%20terms.%20the%20search%20request:%20%s https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20fr... (Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s')

dartharva 15d ago
...you.. do know classic Google Search is still an option, right? Just add `&udm=14` to the search URL. Also Google AI mode is accessible on google.com/ai.
andwur 16d ago
Good workaround! It's just sad that to achieve the previous behavior we now need to burn significantly more compute, and in turn energy, and with far worse performance and an inverted UX. The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.
- miki123211 15d ago
  I think the "original experience", whatever it may have been (and I strongly suspect there's more nostalgia here than actual worse results) would be very quickly overrun by modern SEO methods / tactics. Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.

renegat0x0 16d ago

Sometimes I use my own index of domains and channels https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database I hate the very idea that destination location is opaque, and user can't verify if you are funneled toward malvertizing. I hate even base64 encoded links in the results.

purpleflashing 16d ago
This is really neat, thank you for sharing.

vachina 16d ago

How is this comment relevant to the post (and be so upvoted?) Google is making it harder for people to game the index, working in your favor.

drawfloat 16d ago
Are they? This reads more like a way to stop people reusing their results in other services rather than reducing spam results, but I may be mistaken?
darkwater 16d ago
Mmmh this change doesn't seem about gaming the index but rather about scraping the index. Which affects in a negative way only Google. And actually would affect users in a positive way because it lets other companies create their indexes more easily (at the expense of a poor mega-corp, indeed)

antii 16d ago

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bad_username 16d ago

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mitxela 16d ago
Have you tried Yandex and evaluated the quality of its results, or do you just feel obligated to continuously put it down because it's russian?
- Lio 16d ago
  I turn it down straight away for being Russian and I'm suspicious of anyone that mentions it positively. Russia is in a cold war with democracies in general and a hot war with Ukraine. It has an autocratic dictator as leader and state control of media. It has a well documented propaganda campaign with the goal of destabilising other countries through agitation. We even know the address of the building in Saint Petersburg it's run from. Why would anyone try to assess Yandex's results? They could be like a slot machine serving good results 78% of the time and slipping propaganda in when least expected. Why bother with that when there are good, free alternatives?
  - swiftcoder 16d ago
    Couldn't we say the exact same thing about any US service in this day and age? Trade war with half the planet, hot war with Iran. Autocratic dictator as leader and complicit media. Well documented propaganda campaign and history of destabilising countries around the world. Known to compel tech companies to spy on foreign citizens...
    - Lio 16d ago
      [flagged]
      - RobotToaster 16d ago
        It's not whataboutism, it's calling out a "proving too much" fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-too-much https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to...

marttt 16d ago

This is interesting. Do you consider Yandex absolutely safe to use (wrt their possible connections with the Russian government, and current war in Ukraine)? Asking this as a geeky end-user from Estonia -- I wonder if I would be considered "suspicios" by local internet service providers, our govt/police etc if I did a lot of searching via Yandex instead of e.g. Google these days. (For us in Estonia, I suppose "everything with possible Russian ties" seems suspicious these days, unfortunately with a reason. As a side effect, this also creates a hesitation to look into interesting projects like ReactOS, the old-dos.ru repository, etc. Russia, obviously, inhabits lots of extremely talented coders who still have the skills and mindset to push older hardware to its limits, actually still write stuff in assembly for that, use the reviving DOS distros, etc -- lots of very interesting, creative coding done there, I guess. But, I hesitate visiting their webpages due to Putin's aggression in Ukraine, them being pro-Putin, and possible spying related to all this. It's a sad state of things actually. Sort of like a loss of computer-cultural ties.)

kolinko 16d ago
I’d expect everything that you type into Yandex that can be of use to the Russia will be used by Russia - they will nit care about hurting you. Just like Russia doesn’t care about online criminals being located within their borders - as long as they target outside. While this may be true to some extent of all the countries, Russia is the one to be clearly against Estonia, Baltics and eastern europeans.
- miroljub 16d ago
  How is that different for any web site on Earth?
  - kolinko 16d ago
    As a general rule, if another country has an open war with your neighbor and openly says that you may be next, don’t put in private data into the sites controlled by that country.

dgellow 16d ago

Have you tried Kagi?

dwji0sdf 14d ago
I just learned about Kagi from the comments here. The first time I saw this kind of paid search engine was Waterfox Search when browsing with the Waterfox browser, but I still go with DuckDuckGo most of the time for a privacy-first search engine. Did you try Kagi? What's so special about it that makes you willing to pay for the service?

egorfine 16d ago

> For actual web search I actually like using Yandex You might want to reconsider this. https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large/0FkizTYqq7SGCdZBNIeoyg.jpg https://meduza.io/image/attachments/images/007/699/276/large...

BoingBoomTschak 15d ago
[flagged]
- moffkalast 15d ago
  Bold to assume Russian propaganda is not aimed at the west.
  - BoingBoomTschak 15d ago
    [flagged]
    - squidbeak 15d ago
      Naivete and scorn of autism in one short sentence - you're very efficient. Yandex.com is the international front end to yandex, and not a portal for 'a handful of western autists'. But on Russia's granular propaganda and disinformation efforts, you ought to read Peter Pomerantsev's excellent "This is Not Propaganda" before making silly sweeping statements.
somenameforme 15d ago
Meduza gonna Meduza. Go do the search yourself. I get nothing like what Meduza claims.
- egorfine 15d ago
  Yeah I did while I was in Kiev at the time. Did not screenshot unfortunately but yeah that's what Yandex did show for many "Bucha" search terms.

Aldipower 15d ago

Just tried Yandex again, after a long time, and indeed it was a blast from the past, in a positive sense! So many real search results, which transports the feel of an authentic mirror of the web contents. Default search engine from now on! Thanks for the hint.

Shock9889 15d ago

anyone from Ecosia gang?

shevy-java 15d ago

> I do enjoy using their free AI. So how is that AI slop garbage useful? It often lies, aka "hallucinates". And I operate within this Google-controlled auto-spammed text of lies when I use its horrible AI. The last thing I want to do is make Google even more powerful; at the least now with Google search being so crap, alternatives would be well desired, but oddly enough I also get crap results using e. g. DDG, so I think in part the whole www stack must have become more crap too, quality-wise. I actually don't see it as there are extensions that eliminate this slop spam, but I never found it useful for anything. Other than waste my time, back when I still saw it. Thankfully I no longer see that AI slop spam due to these extensions.

narrator 15d ago

Yandex also easily finds copyrighted stuff and other various types of wrongthink banned by Google.

scosman 15d ago

I made https://froogle.fyi https://froogle.fyi out of a desire to get that old school search back. Source: https://github.com/scosman/froogle https://github.com/scosman/froogle It hasn’t replaced Kagi as my daily driver but the UX is fun.

ericbarrett 15d ago
“Froogle” was an actual Google offering (years ago) that now redirects to Google Shopping.
IIsi50MHz 13d ago
That is wicked fast, mate. I've recommended it to some people who don't use Kagi.

rascul 15d ago

I don't understand why people are still using Google search generally. It's so bad nowadays.

iamnothere 15d ago

Yes, it’s been impossible to trust Google since the “Jigsaw” project, and especially when they started blanking out search pages on trending topics with messages like “these results are changing quickly”. It’s clear that they have moved from being a neutral arbiter to pushing a perspective. I refuse to use a search engine that sees me as cattle to be steered towards “preferred” information sources. I specifically enjoy reading fringe material and will continue to seek and find it, thank you very much.

powerpurple 15d ago

+1 for Yandex. I was not expecting it at all but agreed you get most of organic search results which is what search used to be based on relevancy.

port11 14d ago

> I do enjoy using their free AI. I get it, but at 9–10% error rate, you’re basically gambling with the results. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-over...

javier2 12d ago

Oh, Google does not like others stealing and indexing their content?! How dare they!