Maybe a life without Google search is conceivable after all, or at least without its disadvantages
For my column I read texts about the conspiracy myth “Dead Internet Theory”. From a Reddit discussion of the topic, I find references to various offers that try to better open up the non-commercial part of the Internet. Among them is the search engine kagi.com. I look at it, find it immediately convincing and sign up to test it. You need an account, even if you just want to take a look, because this look-only is limited to the first 100 searches.
After that, the search becomes chargeable, but that now makes sense to me, because advertising-financed offers lead to exactly the same problems that have made me half-heartedly wish for a new search engine since 2008 and very intensively since 2013. (I can date this because I took part in a television discussion about search engines in 2008, from which I only remember mentioning my waning love of Google, and because in 2014 I provided material for a text about the painful lack of an alternative to Google Google searches.) I don’t think that everything is automatically better with paid offers (the details are here), but the probability of enshittification is certainly not that high. You can read the official reason why Kagi costs money here.
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I didn’t suffer a lot of pain every day because of Google, because I had set everything up largely free of ads and nerves with the help of browser add-ons. And of course I don’t even look for many things because I already know that no reasonable results can be expected. But I don’t like the principle. It’s like living with an annoying person because of whom you no longer discuss certain topics and always wear headphones and so on. I don’t want the search engine to change my behavior. I would like to be able to change the behavior of the search engine.
This is possible in Kagi, for example I can set directly and without a browser add-on that I never want to see results from Pinterest in the image search. Pinterest search results have been hated by many people for many years because when you click on them, you don’t get to the image you’re looking for, but instead you’re just thrown into the Pinterest image mash somewhere. That’s why the first seven places in the leaderboard of the domains most frequently blocked by kagi users are occupied by the various Pinterest domains (before foxnews.com,breitebart.com and Facebook):
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Kagi has its own small index that favors the non-commercial part of the Internet, but is primarily a filter for the results of other search engines, including Google. This means that my request is forwarded anonymously and I see the results, free of advertising and spam, as I set them in the many configuration options (which I have only partially tried so far).
The concept is not new; the meta search engine MetaGer has been around for longer than Google has even existed. I also used MetaGer around the turn of the millennium and then stopped for some reason. Probably because Google was faster and the problems with Google were still in the future (for me). Maybe I would find MetaGer very convincing now, I haven’t tried it in the last fifteen years and didn’t even know it still existed until two days ago. But now I’m already registered with Kagi, someone else can try out the other alternatives.
I set up Kagi as the new default search on my laptop and cell phone. On my phone, because the Google search field cannot be removed on Android, this means that I now have two search fields on the home screen again, a correct one at the bottom of the screen and a false one at the top. But no problem, soon I won’t see anything superfluous anymore.
Although I search very sparingly on Monday and Tuesday, which means I don’t mindlessly enter anything into the search field if I already know where the answer is likely to be, my 100 test searches are used up on Wednesday and I switch to the paid tariff. For $5 a month you get 300 searches, but it’s likely that this will only be enough for the first ten days of the month at most. That’s why I’m taking the unlimited plan for $10. I understand everyone who doesn’t want to spend $10 a month on a search engine, but I goo… I mean, I really do a lot of searching, and I expect that ten bucks will quickly pay for itself in satisfaction.
(Kathrin Passig)