cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14100831
"No, seriously. All those things Google couldn’t find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and ov
What kagi can’t fix is that most forums nowadays don’t exist anymore and moved over to discord which is also a big reason for worse search results.
For example I had a technical problem with a device of mine, searched for maybe half an hour on Google until I joined a related Discord. Searching there in the support channel and I found the fix for my problem. Would Discord not exist and all the content be queryable by Google I would have found my answer within seconds.
I don’t understand this trend and i hate that it’s a thing. I also hate Discord.i shouldn’t have to go to a fucking chat room when a forum works better.
Exactly. I would be less mad if it was Matrix, but Matrix search is really slow and not likely to get better.
Forums make a ton of sense.
Absolutely despise discord, fucking internet herpes.
Yeah, Matrix is way better, but the search there is way too slow on busy channels.
Just post stuff on the open Internet…
I guess my point was that locking all that knowledge and troubleshooting behind chat interfaces, and obscuring it from search engines makes the internet worse
Agreed. But if it’s at least FOSS, it should be fairly easy to get the data out for searching.
That is kinda what it was designed for before profit got involved.
I really want to see more from the commune-os to make matrix communities more publically accessible or even selectivily. The AP bridge especially
And they use discord… JFC.
I think their discord is bridged to Matrix
I tried Kagi (free 100 query plan) and got about the same results as google/DDG. It’s kind of nice but I couldn’t see subscribing. I hate subscriptions. If they sold access for a flat fee per query (let’s say $5 for 200 queries) I’d buy that, and use a dozen or so queries a month. The rest of the time I’d keep using DDG or occasionally resorting to Google.
I love the idea of paying for a high quality service that I use, but Kagi was significantly worse than Google. I searched for local businesses, programming questions, and general knowledge stuff.
I’ll try it again in a year or two and see if it works for me.
I switched to Kagi about 6 months back. It is overall better, but at least on par with Google, also as far as tech / programming - related questions go. Whenever I do not get a useful result from Kagi, it literally finds nothing - I then try Google for verification, which also lists absolutely no results. That happened approximately 4 times since I switched.
Kagi is worse than Google for: reviews, memes, porn, as well as “descriptive” searches, i. e. when trying to describe the desired result using natural language, e. g. “video game character that swallows everything” (I made that up just now for Kirby).
Kagi’s ability to use lenses and assign weights to sites can make a big difference.
At first, they didn’t have anonymous payments and an unattractive pricing model, but that has been fixed for a while, otherwise I wouldn’t have switched.
Overall, I am very satisfied and have absolutely zero plans of ever using Google again.
I find Kagi results slightly better but the interface is so much nicer and site ranking is great. Mostly though whenever I try using Google it just feels scummy and more obvious than ever that they are trying to shove ad garbage down my brain. I really hope I never need to go back to that again. Agree that crypto payment option for Kagi is clutch, but wish they made that more front and center. Unless you look for it Kagi wants your name, address, and credit card number and all your searches are linked to that. That’s even scummier than Google.
They claim that they don’t link/save your search history so although they have your details for payment, technically it’s not linked. If they aren’t lying…
I also don’t lie and will send you $10,000USD if you send me your credit card number, cell phone number and social. If I happen to accidentally leak your info a few thousand of my friends I will be sure to give you 10% off of a partially reputable ID protection watchdog service. If you trust random corporations that have almost no enforced security oversight, you really should trust this friendly internet stranger as much if not more.
Yup, it’s way too expensive. If they bundled it with another service to provide more value, I might consider it. But from some back-of-the-napkin math, they’re charging way more than their competitors make from ads.
I’d also be interested in a pay-per-search option. I’d be happy loading up $5 every so often if they other services didn’t find what I’m looking for.
Their business needs steady cashflows. You pay for the up time, not the queries.
Then they wouldn’t have tiered plans. Anyway try a $12/year plan with a few queries per month. $60/y adds up a lot faster.
I don’t use Kagi, but pretty sure they offer the plan you want.
They start at $5/month (https://kagi.com/pricing) and that misses some features. But, I thought they started at $10/month. It may have changed. Anyway, I hate subscriptions and would rather pay by the query. It’s something I’d use once in a while, so I don’t want to keep paying while it idles.
Search.brave.com ain’t bad
Too bad brave’s CEO is a giant bigoted piece of shit who I refuse to support.
Damnit. Okay, what’s the next best Chromium based browser? I love Firefox but I have to keep a Chromium browser on hand for the few sites FF just doesn’t handle properly.
Vivaldi was my main browser for a while, and my backup chromium browser since I switched back to Firefox. Most of the privacy stuff in Brave is available as separate extensions and I really like Vivaldi’s sidebar and profile management.
I just use ungoogled chromium in those cases
What about Tor
What sites don’t FF handle? Small or big?
Google Docs, ComfyUI (on mobile), couple porn sites.
TradingView
ungoogled chromium obviously
I like thorium
If it works for you, and it’s only a secondary/failsafe browser, shouldn’t feel too guilty to use it.
I don’t use brave and I’m not aware of what’s the issue with the CEO, not sure if knowing that would change my protective
The founder/CEO actively donates to anti-LGBT organizations, including ones that support conversion therapy. The guy is an awful piece of shit, and any decent person should take whatever steps necessary to not support them.
Thankfully, that’s as simple as not using Brave.
You know he isn’t retrieving the results personally?
Pieces of shit exist in most companies.
No way, really?!?!
I try to not reward companies that hire CEOs who actively support the extermination of gay people
Brendan Eich was a founder. He wasn’t hired. Not sure if anyone can remove him.
How would you feel if a conservative organization mounted a campaign to boycott an entire company because the CEO is gay?
The Brave browser is not itself exterminating gay people, nor stopping them marrying.
Do you drink Fanta? Should we also still boycott Volkswagen and Hugo Boss?
If you apply your boycotting consistently you need to avoid an awful lot of things
(Note, I’m not defending Brendan Eich or his appalling views)
Get the actual fuck out of here with your both sides bullshit. Boycotting a company for being bigoted is not the same as boycotting a company because you yourself are a bigoted piece of shit.
E: sp
No-one is claiming whatever it is you are trying to say.
I’m saying neither the company nor product have done anything bigoted.
Boycotting any and every company that employs bigots is impossible.
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.
It’s been easily 15 years since I thought Google search was good.
It was not long after the SSL thing that it became actively garbage. that was what, 2018?
But yeah, it’s been bad since at least 2012.
Google has also gotten lazy and is prioritizing YouTube and Reddit results, instead of webcrawler results.
The reddit results are annoying because you can only see 2 related comments without logging in. I hate that shit. I look for stack overflow links
Change the URL to old.reddit.com.
Kagi uses Google’s search engine?? I didn’t know that, I thought they’d created their own search engine. If Google blocks Searx, why don’t they block Kagi?
Kagi pays Google for API access. They also query other sources of data as well as their own index.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html#external
I’ve used it for quite a while now, so I can safely say it’s not just the honeymoon effect. There are certain specific searches that I will prefer Google, for example if I know an exact string from a document that I’m looking for. Google still has a larger search base so if there’s information that can only be found in one or two places, Google is more likely to work. Image and video search on KAGI is still a little bit finicky. I might use Google, DDG, or Bing for those (Actually, DDG is just a front end for Bing in this regard). For everything else, when I’m looking for information or answers to questions, Kagi is the best there is.
I’ve recently started using Qwant since Mozilla has partnered with them and I’ve been pretty satisfied so far.
What Google has over every other search engine is local results. There’s just no getting around how much useful data Google has on every business in the world.
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Been using kagi for several months now and can’t imagine going back. The only thing I still use google for is when I want to shop for a specific product after having used kagi to do my homework. I’m sure I can configure a filter for that, but haven’t gotten around to that yet.
I primarily use a couple locally hosted LLMs for searching for info now.
Larger LLMs are trained on so much info that they get the answer right surprisingly often.
Only thing they of course struggle with are recent events.
I thought Kagi shut down.
I guess turns out no but if I’m going to pay for search it’s something like Perplexity.
but if I’m going to pay for search it’s something like Perplexity.
Generative AI search engine Perplexity, which claims to be a Google competitor and recently snagged a $73.6 million Series B funding from investors like Jeff Bezos, is going to start selling ads, the company told ADWEEK…“Advertising was always part of how we’re going to build a great business,” said Shevelenko.
https://www.adweek.com/media/gen-ai-search-engine-perplexity-has-a-plan-to-sell-ads/
Fuck off with your ads for a paid search engine.
That’s Cory Doctorow, my guy. He’s not making an ad.
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”, of making a blog post that’s really an advert…? Really???
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”
wow, what a genius. he’s going to solve world hunger next. he’s totally not “milking” nerds who think that word is the best thing since sliced bread.
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Using SearXNG and DuckDuckGo though, but the piece does read a LOT like an ad. Even the writing style is making me suspicious.
That’s just my impression, not trying to convince anyone
I mean I really like kagi personally, but will read the article with that in mind.
E: you were right it’s very puffy. I agree with the sentiment, but the tone…
