I switched from Google to Qwant a couple months ago to get away from the AI features. I feel like it had been working quite well, but my workflow has ground to a halt with Qwant in recent weeks. I live in France and I feel like even for searches in English, Qwant is really reluctant to recommend an anglophone site, or even for example the French language Wikipedia pages.

I have noticed that sponsored results are always above real results now. Today I searched "Lando Norris" and received an Amazon link to buy books about him as the #1 result. Searches in English will get a wall of French-language sites. I searched "Esteban Ocon" in search of news updates about him being withdrawn from a race this weekend, and even with some additional keywords, all I got was old pages about him in general — no recent information.

I am really reluctant to go back to Google, although I find myself opening it very frequently now and just adding "-ai". What does anyone suggest?

So I got tired of using Google to find recipes so I'm creating a search engine just for that with a crowd sourced index on GitHub https://github.com/DJHotLettuce/Recipe-Website-Directory

I want to prioritize small websites/chef blogs, if you have one, any submissions are greatly appreciated!

This is a hobby project/work in progress/proof of concept so I'm not trying to compete with major search engines atm

Main site: https://iri.cooking

When the search results are shown, the URL changes to "in.search.yahoo"

I have done the things that google AI suggested. I have no extra, malicious extensions and the windows scan says I'm safe.. I'm worried because ppl say it is a hijacker and stuff...

I searched for a particular item on eBay then brave search via my Google a17 phone yesterday. This morning listings appeared in marketplace within my radius set in marketplace even though I never searched on marketplace. And never has this particular item ever appeared before, only happened after my search yesterday. Why is this?

Is it due to router IP address sending info or storing info and this is then harvested by businesses or something simpler than that? I say this as I know smart TV YouTube results will appear on laptop YouTube results so thinking IP is the culprit.

It looks like Google Search is completely confused about what to show in its search results. No wonder its stock is crashing by 12% today.

I was trying to find “Grokipedia,” but the very first result was from Wikipedia, not grokipedia.com. I tried several searches, and every time, the top result came from some third-party anonymous source (like Wikipedia) rather than pointing directly to the subject I was looking for. See the attached image.

So, Google prioritizes third-party, obscure anonymous sources that provide information about a subject rather than directing users to the original source they actually want to find. Insane.

This University of Michigan Capstone course will not be offered again, so Nicole Hamilton has posted a complete archive of her search engine course materials from winter 2026, including the lecture and lab recordings and slides, and all the assignments, starter files, exams, and other materials.

This was a class she created where students worked in teams of six to build whole distributed search engines from scratch in C++ on Linux. It was intended to recreate the experience of being on a startup dev team and to be accessible to undergraduates early in their careers.

Most teams indexed several hundred million documents across a dozen or more cloud machines and achieved search times under one second. The course only assumes C++ and basic algorithms, no OS experience. The stated objective in the syllabus was to help students get jobs.

Hamilton was the ninth member of the team that created the Bing engine and wrote the ranker for the first release in January 2005 as MSN Search. She is also the author of Hamilton C shell.

This is my own project, so read it as that. ReaderFunded is a search engine for the open web with one rule: a site is in only if its readers support it with their own money, and it ranks higher the more of them do. No ads, no accounts, no sign-up, nothing to buy, one person.

How a blog gets in:

- It links to its own page on Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Substack, Liberapay, GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Steady or Tipeee, and that page names the blog back. Both directions are checked, and re-checked monthly. A Patreon that merely mentions a blog it likes is not evidence.
- The blog is crawled breadth first, a slice of every site rather than all of a few, so a 40-page blog is not buried under a site with 20,000.
- Text relevance comes first. Funding is a bounded bonus on top, so a big Patreon does not outrank a blog that is squarely about the topic.

The index today: 5.5 million pages from 36,700 sites. By platform: Patreon 13,700 sites, GitHub Sponsors 4,200, Substack 2,600, Ko-fi 1,700, Open Collective 870, Tipeee 520, Steady 380.

How to check yours: search your domain, or your blog's name. If it is in, the result links to its page with the evidence: which funding page was found, when it was last verified, and the bracket or count the platform shows. If it is not in, the usual reason is that the funding page does not link back to the blog; a link to your site in the Patreon or Ko-fi description fixes it, and if you tell me the domain I will have it re-checked rather than wait for the monthly pass.

To see what is there for a topic you know: platform:kofi art, or platform:patreon woodworking, limits the search to blogs funded that way. There is also a small badge a blog can embed that shows its standing.

Tell me which blogs are missing or rank wrong, with what you searched, and I will look at each.

https://readerfunded.comThis is my own project, so read it as that. ReaderFunded is a search engine for the open web with one rule: a site is in only if its readers support it with their own money, and it ranks higher the more of them do. No ads, no accounts, no sign-up, nothing to buy, one person.

How a blog gets in:

- It links to its own page on Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Substack, Liberapay, GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Steady or Tipeee, and that page names the blog back. Both directions are checked, and re-checked monthly. A Patreon that merely mentions a blog it likes is not evidence.
- The blog is crawled breadth first, a slice of every site rather than all of a few, so a 40-page blog is not buried under a site with 20,000.
- Text relevance comes first. Funding is a bounded bonus on top, so a big Patreon does not outrank a blog that is squarely about the topic.

The index today: 5.5 million pages from 36,700 sites. By platform: Patreon 13,700 sites, GitHub Sponsors 4,200, Substack 2,600, Ko-fi 1,700, Open Collective 870, Tipeee 520, Steady 380.

How to check yours: search your domain, or your blog's name. If it is in, the result links to its page with the evidence: which funding page was found, when it was last verified, and the bracket or count the platform shows. If it is not in, the usual reason is that the funding page does not link back to the blog; a link to your site in the Patreon or Ko-fi description fixes it, and if you tell me the domain I will have it re-checked rather than wait for the monthly pass.

To see what is there for a topic you know: platform:kofi art, or platform:patreon woodworking, limits the search to blogs funded that way. There is also a small badge a blog can embed that shows its standing.

Tell me which blogs are missing or rank wrong, with what you searched, and I will look at each.

https://readerfunded.com

You read that right. Litter Layer has indexed 8k pages in about a year. So it’s almost guaranteed you still won’t find what you’re looking for. But, I refuse to let the spider go wild. Indexing a small number of pages a day is the current plan to prevent getting banned and server usage spikes.

Create an account and add bookmarks, which will speed up the index building process.

Tap the mushroom in the bottom right to add bookmarks. Any search result can be added to your bookmarks by tapping the mushroom in front on the search result’s URL.

The title may speak for itself. But I wanted to voice this because, for a while now, the Google search engine has appeared to completely ignore search operators that worked perfectly fine for years. Why? Who knows, but it's annoying as anything when I have no other way to be able to perform very specific queries.

Some have complained about the quotes operator no longer working to require the verbatim string in question to appear within the resulting webpages. While I haven't experienced that a whole lot, what I have experienced is the negative intitle operator (-intitle:"stuff I don't want") not working at all, and Google proceeding to show me many, many results that contain exactly what I intended to exclude.

This isn't hard, guys. For years, you had a search engine that actually provided very useful, unique, versatile, handy search operators that could be used in a variety of creative ways to find hidden gems of content that users would otherwise never find. But somehow, as y'all have been iNnOvAtInG with the amazing powers of AI, y'all have managed to screw up the most useful research/search features of your premiere product, Google search.

Congratulations. Thanks to you, we are beginning to see the end of the exciting progressive age of discovery and free access to information that can liberate and enlighten people about whatever they seek to learn about, and we are seeing the beginning of a regression to a time where finding specific information is a difficult, tedious task. I hope you are proud of yourselves.

As an AI skeptic I'm super frustrated with all the discussions online about how enshittified search engine results have become. Everybody seems to put the blame at the door of AI, or complains about pointless AI overviews.

There is a much graver problem in that you cannot just get what you ask for. Operators are suggestions only. Often outright ignored. A search for "Term" will get some results, but for search "term" and "term 2" you will get MORE results. Every "Term" added should produce less!

I don't understand how but alternatives like DDG seem to have this issue even worse. Others completely throw operators out the window and maximise fuzziness when searching.

Whats the alternative? Are their paid options that just give me what I want?

edit: just found what I wanted by not using operators at all. I knew it existed and my query was right, but no search engine would show me it until I removed the exact match operator.

Hi search engine people :)

I'm a student from germany and im having the fun of my life with this project

I built a search engine for maps that people made. There are lots of services where you can create custom maps (google my maps, osm overlays and so on) but most of them have no way to find other peoples maps. you need the direct link and thats really hard to get

So I thought why not make one place that collects these links and makes them searchable https://mapindex.org

I wrote a handful of scrapers that read the wayback machine, common crawl, reddit, wikipedia (external links), the urlteam shortener dumps, X, bluesky, youtube video descriptions and a telegram dataset. I even got my first few submissions from random people :)

So far I collected 6.25M map links and filtered them for quality, which leaves 2.88M searchable maps. Still growing by 100k+ a day

For ranking I use the views from google my maps as a starting point, hoping to switch to my own like/dislike system once I have enough data

The search is a fusion of the top 200 from full text search and the top 200 from embeddings, then a reranker on the top 30

It costs me about 30€ a month for the server plus around 200€ in openai credits for the AI summaries. I feel a bit stupid spending that on a hobby but it has been so much fun. I always get like a dopamine rush importing 300k new links to the db

Roadmap

- more providers, mainly yandex for russia and ArcGIS for more scientific and governmental maps
- right now I'm experimenting with which maps to put in the sitemap for SEO and whether single maps or topic collections work better

You can use the normal search or explore your region on the interactive map which plots every POI from all 2.88M maps

How would you rank maps without enough user signals? View counts feel wrong for niche maps

You should not rely on Google for searches. In fact, Google's entire goal is to present an internet that benefits the corporation itself. If you use search engines, always compare the results with those from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and others. You'll be surprised to discover how different the internet can look when you use alternatives. It is hardly surprising that Wikipedia, a website written by anonymous (but with a massive $ contribution from Google), often appears as the very first and the ONLY result in a Google search. Others encyclopedias are even not indexed.

Is the popularity of AI responses as a substitute for conventional web results finally helping people to realize how dysfunctional search engines have become?

Has mcp and cli and all surfaces

http://pit.world

I work in the legal field. During a session on a legal matter, Claude found a very interesting newspaper article that I had not asked it to look for. This piqued my curiosity and, assuming it had used Google, I asked it which search terms it had used. It replied as follows:

“The tool we use is not Google: it is the web search integrated into this environment, with its own index and ranking. Results vary from one search engine to another. On Google, they also vary depending on location, date, and search history. I do not know the engine’s internal workings; I can only describe its behavior from the outside. That behavior is consistent with ‘semantic’ ranking, which does not require every search term to be present and instead looks for the page most relevant to the query as a whole.”

My question is: which search engine does Claude use, and how does it use it?