> it still works pretty well for me

Genuinely interested: have you tried to spend a few weeks on an alternative?

I decided to try DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Not because it was obviously better, but to see if I could get used to it. After a few weeks, I had completely stopped falling back to Google when not finding what I wanted. I stayed on DDG for a couple years. Then same thing with Kagi: I just decided to try. It's been 1.5-2 years now and I'm disappointed when I can't use Kagi (which has my customizations, like some websites I ignore and some that I pin).

I guess my point is that it's not necessarily that you have to try something else when Google is unbearable. Maybe you can try something else and then realize (or not) that Google was not better.

That's not where I thought this was going. I tried using DDG and Kagi and went back to Google. Google had more relevant, fresher results than DDG, and Kagi didn't have the same integration with Google Maps and often a smaller set of results for very niche queries. Google is still basically the internet - the entire internet - though in many ways they do still fall short. But breadth of content indexing and information about local places, Google is still king.

> information about local places, Google is still king.

I try to use OpenStreetMap as much as I can (I have a deGoogled smartphone and OpenStreetMap works well enough) but it is true that Google Maps is better (at the cost of privacy of course).

But in terms of search... I can't remember of a time where I tried Google because I couldn't find with Kagi and ended up finding something with Google. On the contrary with the Kagi lenses it's often a lot easier to get specific results.

Here's an easy test case on a topic which is HEAVILY modified by Google. There are many such cases Google distorts searches but the following query is purely for illustration of the problem because it is so obvious.

1. Search Google for "ukrainian who shot his commanding officer" without quotes

2. Google serves me nothing but MSM articles of Russian this or that. The word Russian wasn't even in my search string.

3. Add the Google operator MINUS SIGN Russia

4. Results:

  a) Policeman feared Chris Kaba would kill, court told

  b) Media: Russian Repeated Offender Kills Five More His ...

  c) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena ...

  d) Ukrainian Galician Army

  e) Article from 2017 entitled Killed Defense Intelligence Officer Was "The First Donetsk Cyborg"

  f) Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President Zelenskiy's ...

5. Go to yandex.com and search the original query

6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query

Where did you get the idea for that query in the first place?

One of my interests is war photography

This is such a bad example: the yandex results have 3,4 with "russian" in the title and in general the same "msm" article list

And its first two results are for a dead site and a deleted article, so fine user-experience reasons to exclude?

And the google results have a link to a reddit story such accident on the first page

The only relevant result I get on Yandex is a website, which supposedly is a Russian propaganda outlet. Maybe that is why it is not showing up on Google, and isn't necessarily a distortion?

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/politnavigator-bias/

Yandex is indeed a Russian company. But do you really need to go to media bias fact check dot com—everyone's confirmed universal source of absolute truth, of course—to learn that?

I went there to check the result, not Yandex. Would you recommend any good alternatives to the media bias website I used?

You missed the mark here. He was talking about the Russian state propaganda site that the GP was trying to find on google: "PolitNavigator".

good "best laptop 2024" search results, absolutely exist, but they have to be heavily personalized towards user and i dont think we adjusted to such levels of in search (we have expectations of median/commonality there)

A good "best laptop 2024" query would be a conversation with a useful LLM

Yeah if you like wasting time.

Same for me. Google works awesome and I never felt it being bad, using it since the beginning.