Everything That's Wrong with Google Search in One Image

But I'm in Europe. Perhaps that affects results? I wouldn't be surprised if the Google experience were more ad-heavy in low-consumer-protection nations.

Don't get too greedy. There must be examples... 37Signals?

Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.

Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.

The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.

The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.

Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.

We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.

I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.

It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.

The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)

I'm in India and it works well. I can even search in Hindi and get good results.

The only thing that doesn't work are local points of interests (restaurants, hotels, local businesses, etc). I still have to use Google Maps to look these up. Then again, even Apple doesn't have good local results for PoIs in India, so I don't expect Kagi to get this right either.

That said, I often turn off localized results completely and just use the international results. Those tend to be more diverse and more useful, at least for the sort of searches I tend to do.

There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.

You'll still need Google Maps though.

Well, except for local shops and pois in Taiwan. Which is reasonable. Google map also sucks for less-populated Taiwanese areas. I kind of have to rely on my good old legs for that.

I just did a quick test: local search for a specific law term. Kagi, Google and DDG all found the roughly same relevant sites in the top five. Each has a different top result. Google's and DDG's are a private law company. Kagi's first is an official government site. (With a suspicious non-government domain, so I had to check, but yes it's prominently linked from the main government site.)

You can easily change the country in the results page, which is useful for people who speak multiple languages. With DuckDuckGo, I sometimes had to resort to !g to use Google, but I haven't done that in Kagi for ages.

I pay for Kagi so that I'm not being peddled ads or junk when I'm trying to be productive, as my ADHD-riddled brain can get easily distracted. It gets quite upsetting when I've wasted non-trivial amounts of time on those distractions that I subconsciously fall into.

I absolutely cannot use Google because of their seemingly endless attempts to distract me from what I'm searching for.

The final nail in the coffin was their actions to get rid of uBlock and other effective ad-blockers. It's a serious anti-pattern, and (I strongly argue) is effectively discrimination for those who struggle with ADHD.

I hope that Kagi can one day effectively filter out GenAI slop websites that look like legitimate content, but I can understand the significant technical challenges in such a feature.

I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).

It’s why ads in gmail look increasingly like normal messages.

The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.

With the ads it really feels like Apple is playing all sides, they almost always show the competitor first. When you search the competitor it's a different competitor at the top. You can keep going until you terminate at some app that presumably pays top dollar to appear as an ad for themselves right above their app in the search results. The only thing I'm surprised by is that they even allow people to put ads over their own first party apps

However, it is also faith based. In e-commerce the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team. Same goes for their organic SEO counterparts. Their metrics rarely include the metric that matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.

I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.

In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.

Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.

And a mistake that might hurt them with security and certainly cost and functionality.

And in a core, security-sensitive function like "what third party apps should I have on my personal device?" This is not searching for fun memes on Reddit!

Imaging if PepsiCo paid grocers to shelve cans of Pepsi right beside cans of Coke, sharing the same inventory tag that just says “Coca Cola”. Coke would definitely be able to sue for something about that, right? Well, isn’t this the same?

Pardon? I’ve never heard a human call a browser “firefox” (as a generic term), or “chrome” for that matter (though people do assume you use Chrome by default now).

In fact, the results are so bad that most of the time I go through Google.

I can't think of a single online store that's good at search and it seems like it's because the thought is "don't miss anything that might come close to the search terms".

Whether it's Amazon, IKEA, the supermarkets where I live, etc, any search I make comes back with what looks like spray and pray SEO.

Maybe it's actually a hard problem to solve, or maybe the goal is "sell anything!" (including better placement the seller pays for) rather than "give the user what they want".

~10 years ago I would do this all the time. It's fun, kind of like surfin' the net was back in the old days, but in a walled garden of applications.

Just how supermarkets are designed, IKEA is the most egregious, they try to force you to look at and tempt you with a whole load of other products on your way to getting what you came for.