Beyond Google and DuckDuckGo: How I search the web

It is my considered opinion that web search is doomed. It's getting harder and harder to find reliable information on the web with Google or DuckDuckGo, and it seems likely that the trend will only continue for the foreseeable future.

The causes of the decline appear to me to be these:

• Google's monopoly position and incentive to promote "sponsored results" (i.e. advertisements).
• Spammy, search-engine-optimized websites, whose only purpose is to show up at the top of Google, get clicked, and shove ads in the user's face.
• Google playing both sides of the ad market — that is, both renting out ad space on spam sites (and taking a cut of the revenue), and preferentially sending search users to those sites (because they're profitable).
• AI tools that make it easy to generate limitless volumes of bullshit text, which can then be posted on spam websites to boost their search ranking.
• AI "research" tools that steal traffic from the very web sites that serve as their data source.

What all this adds up to is:

• It's getting harder and harder for human-made websites to get discovered via search.
• Search is becoming less useful.
• Search engines themselves are being intermediated by AI tools.

And the kicker:

• This is all a self-defeating downward spiral, because AI research tools need web search in order to function. The AI models aren't omniscient; they're just Googling stuff and clicking on links. If what they find is garbage, then the summary will also be garbage.

The pollution of the web isn't easily reversible: once the web is littered with AI-generated crap, it will take over eight thousand person-years¹ to clean up the mess.

I saw all this happening in mid-2024, and I'm sorry to say my doomer-y predictions have only been confirmed since then. Search is in a sorry state.

What's a web user to do? Well, for me, the first obvious step was self-defense: reduce my dependency on web search, thus reducing my vulnerability to its decline.

My efforts in this direction were successful: In the second half of 2025 I used Google and DuckDuckGo a total of 24 times. Yes, you read that correctly: an average of 4 searches per month. I suspect most readers will find this unusual and perhaps wonder how I survive on such a restricted diet. How do I find information? Do I just live in ignorance?

The answer to that is "no," of course. In fact, I find that I now have the information I need closer to hand than I ever did in the heyday of Google.

My approach is simple. What I do is this: I bookmark websites that I trust, find useful, or want to visit again. I put all of these bookmarks in a big, categorized list on my website. Then, when I want to look something up, I go directly to the site I'd end up on anyway if I used DuckDuckGo, and I search just that site.

Sometimes, I don't need to search at all: my bookmark list already contains the exact page I want. For example, I have a list of my favorite software engineering blog posts. I am constantly handing out these links to people who didn't ask for them — on the assumption that they might have asked, if only they had known there was an answer ready.

Searching my own webpage ends up being faster and easier than going through the intermediary of a web search engine. It's also (I suspect) more environmentally friendly, since fewer pages need to be searched and ranked.

But suppose you don't have a website where you can maintain a list of bookmarks? There are various lightweight alternatives you could try:

• Use your browser's built-in bookmarks or favorites feature.
• Use an app like raindrop.io to keep track of your bookmarks.
• Use site-specific search from Google or DuckDuckGo: include e.g. site:wikipedia.org in the search. Of course, this requires that you have the domain memorized.
• Use DuckDuckGo bangs to quickly search a specific site.

That said, an advantage of having your own website is that other people can find it and benefit from your curatorial efforts. Curation is creation, now more than ever, and we can all add real value to the world by sifting the gems out of the muck and holding them up for the world to see.

Those eight thousand years will go a lot faster if we all pitch in.