I Just Want to Search

I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here.

Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.

So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

While the article is more about specialized search (videos, shopping) for general web search, Kagi has to be mentioned. It's been so long since I've used another search engine (years), I'm generally shocked to see what they look like and how they behave now. It makes web search just work, including things like exact phrases with quotes, logical operators, etc. which are mentioned as generally rotting capabilities.

Tbh I too have experienced the same but I think that is just what we are moving towards. I mean everything is now shifting to semantic search and it is better for natural language yeah it sucks that literals dont work as good now but "Optimization".

If I quote a search terms, every returned result must contain that string. Even if that means showing zero results. Anything else is madness.