How I search in 2024

We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding edge of LLMs. On the one hand, we have the fall of old companies. On the third hand, on the heels of the large companies of the last 15 years declining, we have a new indie search engine scene emerging, hungry, armed with AI tooling, and ready to take back quality on the web. Kagi: I've been using DuckDuckGo for at least the last 8, and I want to say 10 years, as my default search engine, and I loved their initial mission but the results have never been great, and I'd always have to append g!, which meant that I was doing a Google search anyway. The results were so good that I immediately bought a subscription and switched my default search engine in my web and mobile browser to Kagi. They've had some controversy lately, among other things, for their very varied product sprawl, but the search results are so very good, the business model is really pro-user and I can't see myself going back to Google unless something very bad happens. Marginalia surfaces only non-commerical content, and as the search engine says, "This search engine isn't particularly well equipped to answering queries posed like questions, instead try to imagine some text that might appear in the website you are looking for, and search for that." The idea is that you find not exactly what you're looking for, but something related on pages that have long been removed from relevance due to the merciless PageRank. The TL;DR is that we are now in the unbundling of search engines and information retrieval to some extent into task-specific elements, and I'm excited to see what else emerges in the aftermath of the era of Big Search.