Same! And lemmy has provided the highest quality answers on the internet in my opinion.

Due to how important search is, it is not a stable solution to place the trust of the technology, your data privacy, and fair pricing to a corporation. Kagi so far seems great don’t get me wrong! But enshitification from monetary incentives almost always occur. Open source search is the only stable long term solution.

Conflict of interest is the best explanation. The goal of search engine companies is not to provide information as efficiently as possible but rather something else entirely.

A lack of competition is another factor as well with the monopolization of Google, Microsoft, etc. There may exist better search engines, but the average joe, and even some of us, have trouble finding them. The quality search engines don’t get a chance to expand and or are bought out like with Altavista (Regarded as the best search engines from the golden age). For example, crowdview.ai is the best search engine (outside of kagi from what I’ve heard) but I’m unsure if they will be able to stay afloat for a long enough time to get a chance to expand and take shots at Google.

The enshitification has been a gradual process. Think of it as slowly boiling a frog. I’ve observed the quality of search slowly degrading over the past 2 decades. Just recently, it has gotten to such a severe point that searching has been useless.

I found the original GPT-4 to be great at technical search questions! Though unfortunately the quality has been getting worse ever since.

Wiby is great! I love using it to discover sites. It’s very similar to spirit of search engines from the early internet. Though it’s not a general search engine it has its specialized uses so I thought I’d mention it

Thanks! Search results have recently been so bad that I found Yandex sometimes offers better results than Duckduckgo/Google/Bing etc. It’s quite sad actually