I just bought a new laptop for a family member. It wasn’t very expensive, but hardware now is generally amazing. It has Windows 11. My 12 year old laptop running Windows 7 is faster for most tasks, despite far inferior hardware. Plus search actually works in 7, it’s better organized, it doesn’t come with a ton of junk you need to disable or remove (good god the default start menu on 10 is a mess), and it doesn’t look like they designed the UI over the weekend. I kept waiting for the typical MS move of fixing the dumb crap they added, but with 11 it’s clear that they’re doubling down.
Google is genuinely bad now. I switched to Ecosia which is just Bing with a simpler front end and they use their profits to plant trees. I don’t think Ecosia is particularly special though. Duck Duck Go, Bing whatever, they’re all better than Google.
Whenever I set up a new computer then search for something, I’m always surprised at first seeing the awful layout and quality of the search results before I realize that I haven’t changed the default search from Google. It’s awful now. Seriously, how are people using it?
My new favorite way to search is perplexity.ai. It’s an AI search tool that summarizes the loads of crap out there so you don’t need to read through the junk that people write. It provides sources, unlike using ChatGPT, which is incredibly valuable. All AIs make shit up, so having links to double check it is a must. Unlike Bing Chat, or whatever Microsoft calls it this week, you can ask follow up questions to home in on what you want.