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0 pointsgnyman2y ago0 comments

...because I wasn't sure if this was just nostalgia or fake memories so I went down the rabbit hole of trying to refresh my memories about why I switched from AltaVista to Google

I had some memory of AltaVista being full of SEO (as I recall it was mostly a keyword search engine) spam.

And that was probably true, but I also came across this Quora page https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Altavista-search-engine-lose-g... and it reminded me about two other things stand out to me as true

1. AltaVista was slow and you needed to know your syntax to find things 2. AltaVista was cluttered. Google had very clean results.

I think on 1 google is still fast, but 2. not so much. Google's results are far from "clean", instead it feels like the main goal is showing you as much ads as possible and preferably getting you to accidentally click on one.

This in and the fact that Kagi results are as good or slightly better (and much more customisable) than Google is probably the main reason I'm so happy with Kagi.

After all, Kagi sources results from Google so it's no surprise the quality is similar https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

0 comments

gspencley2y ago

> instead it feels like the main goal is showing you as much ads as possible and preferably getting you to accidentally click on one.

This is an interesting observation given Google's roots. Although it is a different era, where we have ad blockers now, it would be really weird and neat if Google were displaced by a new search engine that did literally the exact same thing Google did in 1998: clean, no-bullshit page that just gives you search results + page-rank.

digging2y ago

Unfortunately that's pretty improbable due to Google's dominance and the changes in the tech landscape. When non-computer-literate people are making Google searches every day on their phones because it's pre-installed as the default, that's a difficult fight to win.

carlosjobim2y ago

They will stop using Google because of the disastrous quality. The question is if they'll pay for another search engine or just search within Instagram, or install an AI agent.

eitland2y ago

People said almost the same about IE I think.

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