I thought it would be fun to try taking a break from using search engines. Is this possible?
Like everyone else, I’ve used Google a ton and it’s been very useful. In recent years, I’ve felt kind of like Google isn’t serving my needs as much. I’m not a big fan of the AI widgets at the top of the search results (see this recent article, Google Is Burying the Web Alive from John Herrman). And I find that when I visit the Google homepage on my phone, it’s popping up clickbait articles under the search bar that are uncannily good at grabbing my attention, and suddenly I’m forgetting what I was going to search for in the first place.
I tried out DuckDuckGo for a few months and it’s a fine replacement, but they’re also popping up a little AI widget all the time and you can ask it to go away but then it just comes back after a while and that kind of rubs me the wrong way too.
I just tried out Kagi for a month. It’s a paid search engine, and it’s $10 per month, but you only get 300 searches per month, and I apparently use more than that, and I can’t quite bring myself to pay $25 a month for this, so I think I’m out.
If there’s no search engine that I’m excited to use, maybe I should use no search engine? It’s a bit of a hard sell, given that I clearly love to search (I used up my 300 Kagi searches in 20 days!). It’s muscle memory: just write something and hit enter, over and over.
But I know how to break muscle memory. Recall my steam locomotive post about how to break command line habits. All I need to do is find a way to see a six second animation of a train whenever I try to google something, and then I’ll stop googling things.
Thankfully, most browsers have a way to specify a custom search engine, and I know how to make websites, so I can just make my own search engine, and configure my browser to use that. And I can make that search engine display a six second animation of a train, or whatever else I would like.
Despite being motivated here by some antipathy for AI insofar as it is not what I am looking for when I am just trying to Google something, and even though I do worry that it is fairly likely to put me out of work in the next few years or at the very least make my job different in ways that mostly suck, I can’t help but be curious about how other people are using it, and so I decided to try to build this search engine site by vibe coding. I’ve had fairly limited success with vibe coding but this seemed pretty doable. I was inspired by a recent blog post and video from Mary Rose Cook demonstrating how she approaches “AI-Augmented Programming” which gave me some insight into how to actually use these things effectively, which doesn’t come super naturally to me.
Here’s what I came up with:
https://maxjacobson.github.io/search-engine/ (source) (GitHub Copilot wrote 100% of this code and I didn’t read any of it)
No matter what you search, you see a spinner for two seconds and then it says “There are zero results”. Lol.
I think this should be basically fine. I can bookmark websites that I know are useful, and I can go to them, and I can use the search functions built in to those sites. That’s the plan.
This feels likely to flop, but I think it’ll be interesting. Will report back