The enshittification of Google results does NOT just apply to Google. Even if we don’t count the “engines” that use Google as a backend, like Startpage and Metager, every search engine nowadays has been indexing fewer and fewer useful pieces of content. Time was, if you wanted to find a comment on Reddit or Tumblr or what have you and you knew some part of it word for word, you could put that portion betweeen quotes and you’d find it immediately. Now you’ll just get nothing. DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, Bing, none of em’ll do it. Not even pushshift works properly anymore.

Do not get me started on the trash fire that is Searx. Hosting your own search engine sounds cool until you realize it means running your own indexer and only getting results from sites your individual instance has crawled.

Also, did you hear that Gigablast, the only open-source search engine apart from Searx, shut its doors for good earlier this year?