The story of Google's search engine is a class story of boiling frogs. They came to dominance by have great user experience and relevant results, but slowly and surely they've crammed their search results page with their own misleading ad results, and have allowed their results to be gamed mercilessly by low quality spam.
Sometimes it feels a bit hopeless, until you realize that it's possible to just forget about google search. Breath in a sigh of relief and enjoy the renaissance of new search engine providers, many now with 200% more AI.
In no particular order:
- https://www.perplexity.ai/ - fun combo AI + traditional results page
- https://kagi.com/
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ - "an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
- https://search.brave.com/ - sometimes has a pretty good 'AI' results blurb (with source citations) for your query, along with traditional results. Brave is also innovating with goggles, discussions (help surface forum content)
I'm sure there are a lot more - vive la renaissance des moteurs de recherche!