And now all search engines suck because they want you to use AI rather than finding direct sources.

The pre-Google web and the post-Google web today are vastly different landscapes. Back in the day when it was novel and exciting to stand-up a search engine, the Internet was sort of a barren wilderness with nuggets of goodness that could be found if you looked diligently. It was definitely unheard-of to transact business with the government there, such as IRS, or SSA, or Medicaid or your local service providers. Forums were personal endeavors; forums rose and forums fell on all sorts of domain names. e-Commerce was in its infancy; Amazon existed but mostly known for books; eBay mostly known for weird auctions. Wikipedia was not robust and useful was it is now.

Now I know we mostly hate walled gardens, but the advantage of many walled gardens is their well-known address and well-known contents. Today on the web, I rarely need to hammer on a search engine for anything day-to-day. If I want to query government databases, I know where to go. If I want the weather forecast, I got it. If I want to buy stuff, Amazon and eBay are right there in the URL bar; only boomers search by name!

I don't know how unique my usage pattern is, but I navigate less by bookmarks and more by autocomplete. I just go to a top-level domain and there I am. Bookmarks are for the deep links I've set up for certain properties. Search engines are for the utterly random, frivolous searches on stuff that can't be found in Wikipedia, or LinkedIn, or a known domain name.

In these days, I would do better with a personalized curated portal more like Yahoo! was. I would prefer a menu of sites, although there is nothing wrong with my autocomplete-navigations. For asking those frivolous and left-field questions, we've got LLMs now, and I feel much more comfortable conversing with a chatbot, and getting deep into a rabbit-hole, than clicking random, possibly hostile foreign links through a search-results page.