Somewhere, in the back of my memory, I have recollection of an old school comedy sketch with a title like “foghorns in disguise”. Monty Python or Kids in the Hall or something similar. Wherein people would start a conversation with someone, only for that someone to respond by being a foghorn. But all attempts at googling this sketch has ends in total failure. I thought it might be the enshitification of Google search results, but I tried a few others too. Now I think I might have dreamed it.
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?
![Wait... Where do the batteries go? [TheJenkinsComic]](https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/ac4082bd-cf43-4805-8030-070d93fc970b.png){kind=link}
Somewhere, in the back of my memory, I have recollection of an old school comedy sketch with a title like “foghorns in disguise”. Monty Python or Kids in the Hall or something similar. Wherein people would start a conversation with someone, only for that someone to respond by being a foghorn. But all attempts at googling this sketch has ends in total failure. I thought it might be the enshitification of Google search results, but I tried a few others too. Now I think I might have dreamed it.
Go make it
Don’t let your dreams be memes!
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?
It’s almost like we need a non-profit (like Wikipedia) just to handle search in a centralized and fair way.