• 16 Dec, 2025 *

I can’t be the only person who has found Google to be absolutely unusable these past 4-5 years. The front page is always filled with sponsored posts and SEO garbage that never gives you a straight answer.

To those under the age of 20, it hasn’t always been this way. I remember when it was no trouble to find obscure forums and blogs that would ACTUALLY answer your questions!

So it’s no surprise to me that Google is sweating with the advent of AI search engines like Perplexity, and now they’re forcing AI summaries down our throats to compete.

This whole arms race gets under my skin because this was a completely preventable problem! All Google had to do was make their searches actually display usable information, but no, instead we have to create elaborate new technologies to solve a problem we shouldn’t have had in the first place.

It’s a band-aid over an axe wound, basically. It’s like all the talk we’re having about colonizing Mars when we should maybe focus on the planet we live on first?

I say all this, but I figured: "Well, at least SEO spam will be less of a problem, right?" …Except that people are already gaming this new system using something known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

So basically, AI search does nothing to fix the problems that plague our ability to get relevant answers. The real problem is and always will be Google’s inability to curb low-quality pages.

So what is there to do about it?

Now I don’t like to just leave things on a dull note. There are alternatives, like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Brave Search, or shudder Bing. I’ve used them all, but they never were great like how I remembered Google to be, just good enough.

That was how I thought things were going to be from now on… Until I tried Kagi. It’s a search engine you unfortunately have to pay for, which believe me, was a serious turn-off for me too at first. But I remembered this post showing how much Google collects data on you (including saving EVERYTHING you tell Google Assistant), and it reminded me that being free has its own invisible costs. That led me to bite the bullet, as paying for search means it’s not incentivized to collect on ads and your data. You are NOT the product. I never looked back after that.

Of course, it goes without saying that if it was ever revealed that Kagi collected data on me, I’m out, but until then, it’s been an amazing experience using it. Also, the dog mascot reminds me of Rover the Dog from Windows XP, which hits me right in the nostalgia bone and gives me a cozy feeling. (I’m only human, I can’t NOT like a well-made mascot.)

ANYWAY, the point is that Kagi’s results worked for me. I found that, while Kagi can give you AI summaries upon request, I would click through results a lot more often anyway because the results spoke for themselves, what a concept. This refreshing search experience helped me realize just how messed up this whole situation is.

A good search engine won’t fix the overall state of the Internet, just like how these AI search engines or AI browsers or whatever won’t. That sucks, and Google sucks the most for allowing this to happen.