cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11393245
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Marginalia is interesting because it attempt to search non-commercial contents. this might unearth some contents you can’t find on google. If you search something on google and the result is full of spam or ecommerce product pages, try the same keyword on marginalia. Unlike google, it’s a keyword search engine, so keep in mind not to ask question in it, but put the keyword that might be included in the content you want to search.
Kagi is a paid search engine. it does use data from other big search engines, but apply its own weighting and filtering and unearth contents normally buried on the big search engines. There is a free trial account if you want to test it yourself to see if it’s better than google for your use case.
There are also various searxng instances. searxng is an opensource meta search engines, which uses data from other search engine. Each instances may be configured differently, so you might want to test some of them to decide which instance works the best for your use case.
Some interesting comparison: https://danluu.com/seo-spam/