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I still remember when Google launched, the uncluttered homepage was the real differentiator, other search engines, especially AltaVista, were just as good at the time, but they would load their homepage with as much extra stuff as they could think of to attract people. Then Google came along with a quirky name (for the time) and a uniquely minimalist look that broke all the established rules, it wasn’t necessarily better search at that point but it really looked different. Different times of course, a search engine was just another website, no different to your own personal page.
As far as I remember Alta Vista was ok at the beginning, but soon people figured out that you can get to the top result if you just repeat your top keywords multiple times in the meta Keywords tag. Another trick was to just add “free, mp3, sex” to each pages meta keywords to get more traffic. At this point Google was better, and also would load much faster on dialup than the image heavy sites like yahoo or Alta Vista.
So where do I go for my free mp3 sex now?
I liked dogpile back in the late 90s because it would aggregate from several sources and wasn’t terribly cluttered comparatively. I think I swapped to Google around 2000ish because it was so minimalist.
The 2007 acquisition of Doubleclick is the watershed moment that converted Google from a competitor into a monopoly of the Internet ecosystem.
If google were just a search engine still, there wouldn’t be a problem. But they are much much more now. Plus they suck at doing the thing they were supposed to do, i.e. searching.
I read something that said they are PURPOSELY bad at search now because if users have to click multiple pages, they see more ads. Like, how evil do you have to be to purposely corrupt your main thing just to sell more ads.
Well the main thing for them now is to sell more ads…
Search never made them money. Ads do. Ads are their thing.
We need to figure out a way to host content on the web that is just part of the network, without needing servers or big tech companies.
It’s not really possible I know but we need to anyway.
Yup, I know. They are, first and foremost, an advertising company. If they can integrate advertising into their products, you can bet money on them doing so. Which is all the reason i need to never use google again.
I2P. You can host a simple web page on your own router, only accessible to other I2P users. We could bring back web rings.
Well that aged like milk. Google is primarily an advertising company now.
Capitalism cannot allow good. Good is not profitable. We must extract, squeeze, enshittify until the very end.
I dunno. Milk can age into cheese if done right.
I’d say it aged like a badly discarded biohazard container.
Aged like a used condom
maybe if it was a one time purchase.
I hear you - a one off purchase (or a $50-100 for 5yrs) would be a selling point. Hell, I’d even buy credits like I do for USENET.
https://stephango.com/quality-software
Just let me pay in one lump sum. Not a fan of rolling subscriptions; never end up using the whole quota, so unless there’s a rollover it gets wasted.
Self hosted SearXNG is an option but it’s going to be pulling from Bing, Google etc, so the result quality ceiling is capped by those engines. Kagi is trying to be a better search engine overall and not just a private wrapper around existing ones, IIUC.
Personally, I find myself not really searching much any more. I sort of know which sites I need and go there directly. Anything low value goes thru ddg-lite or (gasp) my LLM.
EDIT: Huh…my LLM just told me to sit down
“Kagi supports PayPal and OpenNode (Bitcoin) as alternative payment methods. Crucially, these do not create a subscription. They top off your account with credits, which then fund your Kagi membership. That’s essentially the lump-sum/credits model you described”
Well then…I sit corrected.
Eh, their home page is still very clean, as described in the picture.
