I've found Brave Search[1] and Kagi Search[2] to be great alternatives to Google. I know exactly the sort of thing you're describing and both of them are a breath of fresh air in the space.

[1] https://search.brave.com/ [2] Beta at the moment - https://kagi.com/

The Kagi founder just posted this to Twitter, which illustrates what I was saying perfectly:

https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1494076266508537858

Am I the only one who just skips the search engines and go straight to the source? If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search. If I want to shop I'll go to respected online stores and again use their inbuilt search feature.

Obviously I've just built up a list of good sites in my head which I trust... Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to the web I guess? Although in the old days that's what web directories where good for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Wikipedia is the perfect contrast to google search results.

- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.

- Pages are organized and brutalist.

- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free.

Contrast this to Google:

- 50-100% noise (depending on the query; more information requires more queries and therefore less signal)

- SERP pages are disorganized and absolutely riddled with UX dark patterns (modals, banners, autoplaying video, etc). Many pages with good info are over-styled/over-javascripted/over-languaged, and finding the one or two sentences you're looking for is a chore.

- One-off SEO spam plagues everything; ads and affiliate links are pervasive. Stewardship is a waste of time.

As people turn to Wikipedia for information the same momentum that ruined Google is sure to follow. It's already happened to Wikipedia pages that even tangentially touch anything political. If you go on the talk pages you see a slow motion battle between good faith editors that want an encyclopedia of information with a neutral tone, vs bad faith editors that want to use Wikipedia to represent their idealogical narrative. It's even spilled over into historical pages that don't carry the "correct" judgement on the past.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-na...

>- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.

This is not true anymore. From Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger:

>Wikipedia Is Badly Biased

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

It's completely untrustworthy on anything remotely political. Very, very mainstream narrative compliant/reinforcing.

- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free

And many of them inject their personal biases.

For hard science stuff, math, and celebrities, it's pretty trustworthy but as I said, anything remotely politicized will always have the same slant.

A bunch of people claim "heavy slant", but considering how Wikipedia requires citing sources, I have strong doubts about the severity.

Is the complaint here really that some political narratives don't like being reminded what they have said or promised?

It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.

This is the behavior that should be penalized by search engines- however difficult it is to quantify. Wikipedia is some of the highest quality info on the internet, so they should be able to afford the penalty themselves.

> It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.

They are asking for donations to fund their best-in-kind free project. I know ads aren't popular on HN but if you don't want ads, and you don't want a donation banner, how do you expect sites to be funded?

Wikipedia's expenses go up year after year seemingly needlessly. It is making revenues far and above what it needs to maintain the project, but its expenses seem to go up each year anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

Wikipedia pages are not "owned" by anyone other than the editors' community as a whole.

>If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search.

Wikiepedia is a very good resource for a lot of things, and a good jumping off point, but you shouldn't assume that you are getting "factual information", especially when it comes to hot button social or geopolitical issues.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c...

Yes fair enough, but I'm not sure you could get those things from anywhere?

It's much easier to type "searchterm" or "searchterm wiki" in your web browser address bar and then click through to the Wikipedia result than it is to first navigate to every individual site and use their non-standard search bar.

I just have https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special... bookmarked with the keyboard shortcut `w`

So `w fish` will produce `https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fish&title=Speci...` which auto-forwards to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish

By my calculations it's one less click. Is that going to save you that much in your lifetime to get you better* results?

*better = more predictable in my case

> Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to the web I guess?

This is almost certainly not true. I don't think kids (who make up the vast majority of 'new to the web') care about using Google for discoverability. They'll use YouTube, Twitch and Instagram to find things they care about. Google is for answering questions, not finding new things.

And honestly, it's not generally that good at answering questions.

Source: my 10-year old.

> I'll go to respected online stores

... such as? The only general-purpose online store available to me is Amazon as far as I know, and I certainly wouldn't call them respected.

In the UK, so YMMV.

General "stuff": Argos Clothes: next, M&S Electronics: https://uk.rs-online.com/

> We're back to the Web needing a search engine.

I feel like that this has not changed the last 20 years. Yes - google was at some point like a miracle that seemed to solve lots of problems around searching the www for information.

While google "refined" its search and monetarized it the web still evolved and is evolving to something.. different. Many of websites most people already know, competing around google top rankings and ad revenue; there are even people dedicated to "make $website more visible to the web (what they really mean is google)" for lots of money while the real internet goes on in the background.

We need more ways to search the web. We need lots of different search engines that are competing and working together also. The web is still young and no one really knows what it will be in the future. (I fear it has to do with ads. Lots. Of. Ads)

>The web is still young and no one really knows what it will be in the future.

My fear is that walled gardens might win in the future because who guarantees you that websites won't move to Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Slack and Discord channels etc. Open web is weaker than ever just look at LinkedIn; walled garden, throws you Register form in the face when you try to access it and won't let anybody crawl or scrape their content except Google who drives more traffic to their walled garden.

I know normal people would never use it but I sorely wish there was a way for me to just grep the web instead of using "search" as offered by Google et al.

You don't have anywhere near the disposable funds that would be required to "grep the web" on your behalf.

One could argue that the initial trigram-based google search is essentially "grep for the web" in terms of the results it provides.

They have the buyer ready to buy and still missed the sale because they wanted to make a profit on ads. How ironic. And this kind of experience probably turns a lot of buyers off from using Google search.

We don't need your unrelated ads, we already know what to buy, don't patronize us. We need help getting to the product page from keywords. We need real reviews. We need a shopping experience we can trust.

That was the craziest part to me. I was interested in both products and information, and despite deciding it was a good idea to show me almost nothing but ads, they didn't manage to show me anything worth clicking for either purpose. I was practically their ideal target for getting someone to click an ad on purpose, and they still dropped the ball.

Could you clarify what you mean by 90% ads? I would assume there are always organic results right after the top 2-3 ads, has this changed somehow?

Also you say the results were "all from different sites". Is that a good or a bad thing? I imagine having too many results from the same site would be less informative, no?

I'm very curious to try the same search query myself, but of course I understand that it may not be something you'd want to share.

Google's ideal would be that every single search result would be both relevant and an ad. And it's going there, somewhat at least. Because the people who have the most time to write articles are employees writing/researching 8h a day. Someone doing it on their free time has no chance of competing. The problem is that obviously the people paid to write are biased. In some cases maybe it's a problem, in others maybe not.

Usually I've search for "gemology terms" or "gem cut types" first then I've mix and match those keyword until I get desired result

Some objects are more difficult to find but I use Google lens to find products all the time assuming I have a picture.