Google Search: The Time Tax

Performance-Fresser — Episode 19 I have been supporting Kagi since before it launched. Not because I enjoy paying for things that used to be free. Because my time is not negotiable and my search results are not advertising inventory. Ten dollars for hours saved in research every month is not an expense. It is a rather obvious decision. Thirty percent of a knowledge worker's day goes to searching for information (Forrester). One full month per year lost to bad results (Slite, 2025). Not obscure things. Things that should have been the first result. The Decay Google's trust score dropped from 7.05 to 5.73 in one year. Market share fell from 91.47% to 89.57%: the largest annual drop in a decade. People are not leaving because something better arrived. They are leaving because Google got worse. Leipzig University studied 7,392 queries across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Finding: higher rank correlates with lower text quality. The majority of top results are affiliate-monetised. Algorithm