I find this with coronavirus as well.

This is also why having just one big search engine is a bad idea.

Vector search is that the thing that makes it ignore my search query and search for something else?

Also, is this the problem Bing has?

And is it much much cheaper since they choose to use only use something so utterly ridiculously broken?

Edit: I'm obviously exaggerating heavily here but this has cost me so much time and frustration.

I agree with others: if pages exist that contains the exact matches why don't return them first?

Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.

‘site:4chan.org wuhan’ returns no results ‘site:4chan.org wuhan institute of virology’ returns 1,710 results

- inferior power tools (because I couldn't afford good ones last I bought)

- inferior search tools (because Google has broken itself)

The similarities are that I was stuck with bad tooling and when you know how big the difference is it hurts.

For people who never took advantage of how good Google used to be or who have never used good tools it probably wouldn't hurt as much.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Still nothing better that Google for me.

After that try: python datetime timestamp

or: python convert time

or something similar. Edit: see also marginalias answer next to me.

As I wrote earlier: marginalia is most for fun (although lately I have gotten better results for at least one simple technical query.)

Edit: if a search engine respects your query you can always broaden your query. If a search engine ignores your query you cannot do anything.

Which had been totally fine if they hadn't nerfed it for us who knew how to use it.

This is the way anyone with a clue would approach search until Google broke it: search for words or phrases within the page.

"perfect steak recipe"

"perfect grilled chicken"

and such... typically resulting in the best results.

"R53 mini cooper fuel filter"

reduce the words to the core of the question, and get good results.

I've only ever "fallen back" to Google for a small handful of searches since then, and only out of curiosity for what it might look like in comparison to the Kagi results.

Although it's only been a small amount of time, I'm sticking with Kagi for now because the search results are at least on par with Google's, and significantly less encumbered by Google's SERP dark patterns.

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+un...

Has this as the first result, though:

http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-con...

Holding up against a HN hug of death last month, providing an absolutely refreshing search experience!

Marginalia for fun stuff.

Kagi seems to use both Google and bing results and will cost a minimum of $10 a month. Seems like the worst of all worlds to me. It’s a good option I suppose for those who want to pay.

I've recently seen queries answered on Kagi that returns utter rubbish when I paste the exact same queries into Google or DDG.

I’m skeptical of their privacy policy as well, given that you need an account and have to pay, it’s unlikely they don’t know your searches.

That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them?

In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors.

Happy to be proven wrong.

That's the part I want to avoid. Build your own crawlers and stop relying on Google. Google already has enough control over the internet, I do not want a search engine that's just downstream of them.

I can however use a search engine that doesn't mock me and second guess me all the time and that tries to anonymize me.

But I agree very much with you.

If someone launches a search engine that works as well as Kagi and doesn't use either Google or Bing I'll happily pay a premium for that on top of of what I have already said I am willing to pay for Kagi.

Edit: In fact I already support a search engine with an independent index.

If by better you mean supporting a competitive market that doesn't strengthen the monopoly Google has on search and their results which, as years go by, are augmented for their benefit but not yours, then anything is better than Google.

If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. That being said, when it comes to tech, with most answers found in open git issues or stackoverflow, i find brave search sufficient. So much so that i haven't used any of Google's services in over a year.

The real question is, what are you willing to compromise? There's an in-between for the two extremes above and the choice is subjective.

An exciting alternative is https://neeva.com/ I'll happily pay money for a privacy oriented search engine as i do for email, cloud storage and NextCloud. We shouldn't expect things to be given to us for free. I work, they work, we can do a fair trade with some iou derivatives.

Hasn't been true since at least December. Kagi is better now by almost an order of magnitude.

Of course my Google is not your Google. Still I have experimentdd so much with Google over so many years, logged in, logged out, from multiple addresses that I am confident in saying that it hasn't been itself for a decade and finally now we have a better alternative.

And that's the main problem with the new Google.

A website that requires me to sign up to see what their premium account may cost ... this sounds pretty scammy to me.

Straight from the playbook of big film ;-)