Search engines

I'm thinking I'm going to stop using search engines.

We all have our complaints about search engines. The biggest one is that they tend to only show SEO content (top X Y to Z in CURRENTYEAR) and recently a lot of AI content too. There is little in the way of personal websites and the like there.

I also realise that I don't have any kind of collection of sites that I visit or have visited, like bookmarks. For instance, I have been trying to find a good blog I came across a while (years) ago on Wordpress, which had showcases of flowers that were cool. I can't find it anymore, because I didn't keep a track of it anywhere.

As a result, I've banned search engines. I've put them into my /etc/hosts files on all of my systems (even my phone, thank the Lord for adb root) so I now cannot access them at all. That's all of them, not just the bad ones like Google but even Brave search and Duckduckgo and Startpage, etc.

I'm going to also put together a portal page on my site, which I can use for my own purposes to find and save down any sites that I find interesting, or that I commonly need or use.

Apart from that, I'll need to learn to stop with the middle man. If I want to look something up on Wikipedia, I will go to https://wikipedia.org and search it there. Likewise, if I need to look up a plant, I can go to https://rhs.org.uk and search it there directly.

Let see how this goes!

Really, this is just another step in my moving away from the internet. I know it makes me unhappy, and often doesn't benefit me. So, I can move closer and closer to the web of old, and the web that brings joy, not frustration.