Google search has been bad for quite some time. But lately with the AI slop and ads-first search responses it has gotten unusable for me.

There is an adage in the business world called Goodhart’s law that as soon as a metric becomes a target, the metric ceases to be useful. The field of search engine optimization has, for the most part, made finding anything on the web impossible.

Google Web Search is no longer optimized to getting good information – it is optimized to website who can hire someone to manipulate their search results.

There are of course a few alternatives with the same interface as google:

https://duckduckgo.com/ https://kagi.com/

But I’m more intrigued by some of the newer LLM based search engines like https://exa.ai/ and https://tavily.com/

Rolling your own interface for search engines gets easier and easier – especially if you Vibe Code it

I like the idea of paying for search – this means the business’s interests and my own are aligned toward surfacing good information.