Google was a directory of Stack Overflow for me, then ChatGPT but mostly Claude, and very recently DeepSeek replaced and augmented those knowledge gathering functions. Search Engines are the past.
Google is fantastic. I can't remember I time when I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for including vague concepts or song lyrics.
Kind of surprised how high up Google was in the list with the demographics we have here on HN. The majority of posts I see about search engines are pretty much exclusively bashing on Google for being garbage.<p>Pleasantly surprised to see how many votes there are for Kagi though as a Kagi user.
DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, but I do find myself using !g many a times because DDG isn’t good enough to beat Google at everything. I’ve heard good things about Kagi here, but its pricing is out of reach, considering multiple people need it in a household.
I don't prefer any of them really. I just find DDG the least aggravating. My ideal search engine would be simpler and when I tell it I'm looking for a term it would only return pages which actually include that term in the visible text.
I pay for Kagi, but while the results are generally good enough, they aren't great. I've tweaked the settings recently so I hope I see a lot less crap, especially SO scraped content.<p>Blocking these sites is like playing whack a mole
Formerly DDG but back to Google these days. I actually <i>like</i> the RAG AI summaries for general queries. Maybe having an ad blocker is helping here?<p>I use a mixture of Google, ChatGPT, copilot, and gemini for coding queries.
Google today is not as good as Google from 10 years ago, but:<p>a) a big reason for this is that the web is also not as good as it was 10 years ago, and<p>b) it’s still better than the alternatives, much because of (a) (but not solely)
Google is like capitalism. It sucks, but it's the best we got.<p>It's been decades, I can literally <i>feel</i> the cheap quality of results from anything other than Google. It's like holding that cheaper looseleaf that you can see through kind of.
I use Brave Search exclusively after migrating from DuckDuckGo a year ago or so, and I'm very satisfied. I didn't like that DDG relied on the Bing index, and the ads were starting to get a bit intrusive for me.<p>Brave's integrated LLM can be a bit annoying for how it reflows the page, but it can be disabled with a cookie and frankly it's been pretty helpful.