Honestly not sure if search engines are the future at all, at least for commercialisable content.
More and more I find myself searching through moderated social media like Reddit or Facebook Groups/Marketplace for product recommendations or local services.
Gave Kagi a go, but it seemed to be even worse than Google for what I tried.
Isn't FB marketplace just another search engine? It seems unlikely that the algorithm would be able to purely guess what you currently (actually) need.
And moderated groups don't sound like a solution to the 'I have a concrete question that I want an answer for right now' problem either (unless you're thinking of massive live chats with many lurkers, which sounds more like the web of the past, tbh).
i think general purpose search engines will always have a place, but they're ultimately a tool you use for finding information, not necessarily a tool you should be expecting to make decisions for you.
so many of the complaints about google search results seem to be along the lines of "i asked google what X i should purchase, and they served me an ad", whether that's a first-party ad on google or search results that are external ads. If you're only attempting to use a search engine to find facts, it's a much more satisfactory experience.
search results for opinions are and have always been trash - they don't serve you the best opinion, or the most trustworthy, or the most well-reasoned. they serve you the opinion most relevant to your search terms. and that's probably not what you want.
More and more I find myself searching through moderated social media like Reddit or Facebook Groups/Marketplace for product recommendations or local services.
Gave Kagi a go, but it seemed to be even worse than Google for what I tried.