the recent years of the internet have been kind of defined by search engines, but i barely use them anymore. they are not particularly useful anymore.

i started off using google. it worked, it was fine, it did what i wanted. but google be's evil. so duckduckgo it was.

i used duckduckgo. it worked, it was fine, it did what i wanted, until it didnt. google stopped being useful around the same time.

what killed them both was the act of SEO. i dont know when it started, but around 2020 ish the mass of things written purely as SEO bait increased by a large margin. at this point search engines still gave me useful results, i just had to dig a little. some of the SEO bait was in fact useful. i could usually click on the first result and it would be somewhat of use to me. maybe a bit long, maybe a bit subpar, but it was information.

no more. with the introduction of LLMs to the masses the amount of SEO bait has increased to a degree where "just digging a bit" is nearly impossible. not only that, but the SEO bait in question no longer even had any information at all. it was even longer, even less useful, even more subpar, and no more information. it went from SEO bait to SEO slop. it didnt just bait you, it also gave you nothing at all in return.

search engines are dead, for the most part. "AI search" is the new thing, but it isnt good either. i refuse.

kagi promised to fix it, and then turned out to be not only politically meh, but also not be very good at fixing it.

i refuse. search engines are almost entirely dead to me; i use them occasionally to search specific things, and sometimes i am even successful at achieving being shown a useful result. the vast majority of my information now comes from asking people, and from wikipedia. if i cant find it on wikipedia, i try some precision search engine use if its specific enough not to produce vast amounts of slop, or ask people. the more generic the topic is (e.g. food), the more i ask people instead. we have the technology. there are chat apps. there is decentralized social media (a whole nother can of worms i will not open right now - i have some opinions on that too of course). we can communicate without using a search engine, and most people know stuff i do not.

the other part of my refusal is that my sites can largely no longer be indexed by search engines. this is largely deliberate because it has been shown again and again that they will misuse this data or act bad in other ways. no more - no entry. i disappear. my words and code are mine to share, and i share them liberally, but i will let that be something for the creatures and the Links Of The World Wide Web Of Links to do, not the indexes that betrayed me.