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the current, Very Bad, No Good State of Search Engines
2025-05-27
It's been awhile since I've done a proper blog entry - probably because I've been paying more attention to the now page more than anything else - I've been pretty good at keeping it updated lately. I think that is a better format anyway, the 'journal' style entries going into the now page and the more long-form things I want to yap about finding their way to the blog entries.
At any rate, it's been a pretty good last few months since the last time I wrote a proper blog entry. I was talking to someone about 'normie' search engines and how badly most of them suck with a friend earlier today, and it inspired this blog post. I want to go over the current, Very Bad State of search engines, and look into some of the options I've been using and how they might improve your time on the internet.
I can remember back when I was in school in the late 90s and early 2000s. Google was the place to go for searches back then. It had a simple, no-nonsense homepage: A Google logo and a search bar. You asked it what you wanted, and it returned relevant results. There was nothing better than Google at the time, and it paved the way for how modern search engines would begin to behave.
Unfortunately, as well all now know, Google got a little "too big for their britches", as my grandpa would say. The corporate rot began, and a million products unrelated to search would be started and killed. Of course, Google has several big projects that it maintains besides it core search offering these days, including Android, Chrom(e/ium), ChromeOS, and now, more and more AI stuff.
This is mostly fine for a company as huge as Google. They have the manpower and the funding to be able to handle these huge projects. However, it goes back to the 'corporate rot' line I used a few minutes ago. When people think of Google, they still think of the search engine, not Android or Chromium. Google has become the name in web searching, to the point where the company name has become an actively-used verb ("let me google that real quick"). Despite all the other projects Google has started (and killed off), search is still Google's main bread and butter - and this is where the problems arise.
Google used to be a great search engine. It was the only real game in town. Over the last decade or so, though, maybe a little longer, things have begun to be not so great with Google. The search results are worsening in quality, with AI summaries spitting out random, rarely helpful nonsense when you begin looking something up. This is a newer phenomenon, of course, and a more well-known issue with Google search over the last few years has been the continued rise of scams and sponsored results on the top of the results page. People will click on the first result they see thinking it's a legit link to a well-known website or brand, and will instead be made a victim of a scam or just click on an advertisement thinking it's a real result. This is Not Good, as all the user should be seeing is relevant links to what they requested - not ads or scams.
The rot hasn't just set in with Google, either - the 'big name' search engines are all doing something similar in some way or another. Bing is well...Bing, and has always had this sort of "corpo" look to it, with some of the most egregious things there being those silly links to MSN that nobody wants to read (speaking of which, I recently saw what the default "New Tab" page on Microsoft Edge looks like...how do people deal with this stuff?). To top it all off, Google and Bing are not exactly good stewards of your privacy.
There are, of course, privacy-respecting search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and a handful of others, but the issue with most of these is that they are not fully independent. I like and use DuckDuckGo quite a bit, but there is that knowledge in the background that it's just a nicer frontend to Bing, as Startpage is a nicer frontend to Google. Search engines such as Brave and Mojeek get this part right, as they operate with their own search index and aren't beholden to Big Search on the backend of things.
~ I will say this much - Google still has the best image results. I use Mojeek and Brave Search quite a bit, and both of them need some work on the image results front.
Given the state of the current search engine landscape, how privacy-unfriendly most of them are, how bloated with advertisements and scams they tend to be on the first page of results - I choose to try to avoid corporate search engines as much as possible and use more indie options.
With that in mind, the best search engines (for me) currently are Mojeek, Brave Search, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo. Let's take a quick look at what I really like about each one.
~ Mojeek
Mojeek is a great little indie search engine. It is a completely independent search engine that is not reliant on Google, Bing, or any other search provider. It has its own index, giving it independence from most of the rest of the pack who rely on sourcing results from those other, bigger engines.
Mojeek is also privacy-friendly, another one of my (major) requirements. It has no tracking, thus no focus on manipulating search results to be tailored to your ad profile. It is minimal, with no AI stuff thrown in. There is a search section, an images section, and a news section.
Mojeek also wins points with me because it is the fastest search engine I have ever used. I live way out in the sticks, and use satellite internet for everything, so I don't always have the fastest connection. My searches on Mojeek happen pretty much instantenously, whereas with other search engines I might be waiting a good few seconds for the results page to load up in my browser.
As a bonus, Mojeek can be used (with all functionality intact) with Javascript turned off, if that's your jam!
~ Brave Search
Brave Search comes to us from our friends on the Brave team, who make the privacy-respecting and open-source Brave Browser. Like Mojeek, it is fully independent and has its own index. It also comes with its own niceties, such as an AI summarizer that is actually decent, unlike the Google offering of the same idea (Google's AI summarizer made some news for telling people to eat rocks and make pasta with gasoline). You can have an ephemeral chat with it if you want to dive deeper into your search results, or you can completely just turn it off if you don't want to use it. At least, from what I've noticed when using it, the information it gives is normally pretty good.
Brave Search also has "rerank", a nice feature which allows you to personalize your search results how you would like them. You can give domains you trust higher prevalence in the search rankings, remove sites you don't trust from results completely, and more. This is a pretty handy feature to remove some of those 'slop farm' type of sites from results when you're looking for information. For example, when looking for gaming pages, it is handy to go ahead and remove results from Kotaku, IGN, Gamespot, etc. You can do this kind of filtering on just about any kind of search you can think of, and it's a very handy, oft-overlooked little feature that I wish more search engines had.
~ Ecosia
Ecosia is a search engine with a mission that I care about - planting trees in places that need them and helping the planet.
Another exciting thing? Ecosia is teaming up with another search engine, Qwant, to build an index of their own, making them much more independent and losing their reliance on Bing for sourcing search results. This is great news for search engine diversity, placing Ecosia and Qwant in a new league with Mojeek and Brave Search, who already have their own search indexes.
~ DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is one of the original names when it comes to privacy in search engines. DuckDuckGo has built their platform around privacy, and they're pretty good at backing it up. DuckDuckGo has a 'lite' mode as well, so if you are on slower internet, you can easily still use the search engine.
DuckDuckGo also has what's called 'bangs', where you can insert different characters in your search in order to target where you want it to look. For example, prepending your search with !g will search google. Bangs have become quite the popular concept, and have even been adopted by other search engines lately.
DuckDuckGo doesn't use tracking cookies, doesn't save or share search histories, and claims to have no way to tie any information to any user. If you want to easily search from the terminal, there is also a little ddgr tool you can use if you wish:
doas apt install ddgr -y
DuckDuckGo is a very good search engine when it comes to privacy. It only gets one ding from me - the fact that it's still using Bing to serve results. Hopefully, at some point in the future, DuckDuckGo will have its own index, or will be able to share with the index that Ecosia and Qwant are building together, perhaps. Time will tell, but in the meantime, at least DuckDuckGo is serious about its commitment to privacy, despite this one little issue.
This week, I have been reading The Machine Stops by EM Forster.