Google has definitely gotten worse in the past few years and it’s fucking impossible to find any articles or news or academic papers or anything on any topic that doesn’t fit the opinion of Washington or Langley.
Anyone have any recs on what else to use.
Strictly for search, Kagi is the best unshitted search engine I’ve used but it costs money.
Otherwise I tend to use duckduckgo, yandex, searx and the internet archive, depending on what I’m looking for. They’re all shit in one way or another except the archive.
https://arxiv.org/ is okay for academic papers in a bunch of fields.
also I recently learned about: https://oa.mg/
Ddg is fine. Kagi,paid, gives me the same vibes as when I was beta testing google.
I like Kagi because, at least for now, paying for it means two things:
my data is not their product. My subscription is. So, they don’t keep much data about me (supposedly) and you can do stuff with their token system to further anonymize yourself.
they have no ads. So they’ve no incentive to keep me on their site. The more I use the site, the worse for them. So, they deliver good results at the top and send me on my way rather than trying to trap me and keep serving me ads.
Agreed. It works well but I wouldn’t “trust” it per se, especially over a long timeline.
tbh I’ve only used someone’s promotional invite code to try it for free and haven’t paid for it since that code expired, but if I weren’t too poor to pay for search I’d consider it.