How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
6.8 Key Insight: The degradation of search quality is not subjective complaining but empirically demonstrable through simple queries, revealing how profit incentives have corrupted what was once Google's core competency while demonstrating that small, independent alternatives can outperform billion-dollar companies when properly incentivized.
Through systematic testing of naive queries across Google, Bing, Kagi, Marginalia, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT, this post empirically demonstrates that major search engines now return significantly worse results than a decade ago, dominated by SEO spam, scams, and deliberately fraudulent content. Marginalia, a single-person search engine, often outperforms trillion-dollar companies by returning fewer scams despite having less comprehensive coverage. The findings validate complaints that search quality has degraded substantially, contradicting defenders who claim concerns are overblown.
8 In their original Page Rank paper, Sergei Brin and Larry Page noted that ad-based search is inherently not incentive aligned with providing good results: 'we expect that advertisin…
7 Google has also gotten into the action by buying ads that trick users, such as paying for an installer to try to trick users into installing Chrome over Firefox.
7 the traditional ecosystem has the problem that the system highly incentivizes putting whatever is most profitable for the software supply chain in front of the user which is, in ge…
Measurement & DataIndustry Myths