> Just bring back the google from 5-10 years ago please

What you really want is the internet from 5-10 years ago (really even longer than that), and that's not coming back.

You can't go back to the way things were. The world moves forward and changes, and we have to adapt to it.

Web search has always been an extremely messy solution to many problems. Think about the premise: type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind, intuit who you are and what you really wanted, find the exact thing amid the morass of the whole web, and then give it to you?

That's impossible. So it uses tricks to make it seem like it worked. It uses information about you to refine results. It uses curated, human-edited search and result heuristics for the most common or difficult search queries. It uses a giant corups of data, and shows you things that are like what you wanted.

You don't notice that it isn't giving you the best result, because there are so many mediocre-but-acceptable results to look at. And it doesn't have to work perfectly every time, because we can "sift through" results and "refine" our search. Often we are flooded with results that are targeted at us, rather than what we want, because, remember: Google is an advertising company, and the entire Web is now a shopping mall, where either you're being sold-to, or you're just being sold.

You will get results, and they will sort-of seem like what you wanted, so you will just sort of sigh and accept it. Because what other option is there?

There are more intelligent, more accurate, more safe, ways to solve the problems people have, that are not "a search engine". It's time we start implementing them.

"seems like even some of the simplest searches are just packed with AI generated and SEO garbage"

I'll give you a concrete example of that and it is a right old pain.

Let's try upgrading Debian Bullseye to Bookworm. Search "upgrade debian bullseye to bookworm" - first hit from DDG is: https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes... - YES - Debian documentation, staid, verbose, stolid and correct.

Now let's try to upgrade a Raspberry Pi from Bullseye to Bookworm: Search "upgrade raspberry pi bullseye to bookworm". First hit: https://raspberrytips.com/upgrade-raspberry-pi-os-bookworm/.

There are loads more hits like the above and they are nearly all wrong. The RPI distribution is based on Debian Linux but has a few differences. Between those two versions of Debian, RPi changed things in /boot quite dramatically and failing to do that, you will end up with a weird chimera - I created several of these beasts until I fixed them: https://blog.scheib.me/2024/04/14/upgrade-raspberry-bullseye...

In this case it may actually be a blog matching the template of the AI clones! However, they do all look very similar.

I was searching for a uniquely named company by exact name (think: verizon), and it was 80% of the way down the results page. Google knew exactly what I wanted to see and flooded my screen with alternatives who had paid them.

> bring back the google from 5-10 years ago

Given Kagi's abysmal adoption rates, it's clear that good search isn't worth it for most people.

I still search Google and other search engines from the command line. There is no "AI" garbage in the results. The way HN commenters refer to Google search in this thread, one might conclude it is not possible anymore to search the web without a popular browser running Javascript (which is a prerequisite for this "AI" stuff). That conclusion would be incorrect. It is still possible; I am still doing it every day.