"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
3 years ago by Optional to c/technology
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
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.
Yeah, Matrix is way better, but the search there is way too slow on busy channels.
Just post stuff on the open Internet...
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
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.
so I've just giving it a quick test vs google with the query "open source chromecast alternative"
the first result for both is a reddit post about NymphCast
it's the rest of the results that are interesting though.
Google has a ycombinator news article about NymphCast and then decends into the usual "17 best chromecast alternatives in 2024" rubbish
Kagi on the other hand lists the github for NymphCast, and then goes on to list others... mirrorCast, pyCaster, free Cast, an article on using a raspberry pi as a chromecast alternative.
obviously this is only anecdotal, and very unscientific, but it's got me interested for sure! Gonna bookmark it and see how it goes
No joke can you share those results? I'm holding out for matter cast
Huge bummer that they're all 5+ years old. We've been moving to libreelec with Disney+, Jellycon, Netflix, Youtube, and amazon prime plugins. It's not the same, but it's workable. If Amazon keeps MatterCast open and open source implementations get made, that's where I'm focusing my attention. A raspberry pi with libreelec that can be a casting target feels, to me, like the holy grail:
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
You know he isn't retrieving the results personally?
Pieces of shit exist in most companies.
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.
What SSL thing?
Google stopped indexing all websites without SSL certificates in July 2018.
For example, darklyrics.com is a website I and many others grew up using as a resource to understanding lyrics. They've stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches. However, without an SSL, they do not show up in Google search results.
This is one of literally millions of examples. Some more reasonable than others, but it still was a massive blow to the efficacy of their search.
They've stubbornly not gotten an SSL because they transact 0 data beyond band name searches.
Even if sites do not store user account data, such as passwords, ALL websites, and I mean ALL, handle user data, because merely accessing pages (urls) is user data.
Stubbornness is not a good reason not to setup SSL. Encryption should always be on, all the time, for everything.
Hmm I hate Google as much as the next guy and am actively trying to de-Google myself, but I'm not sure I can get behind the outrage here. Certificates are free and easy to obtain with LetsEncrypt, so there's really no excuse for sites not to accept unencrypted traffic these days. I'm sure Google does lots of things to delist the small guys and promote their big payers, but I don't think this is one of them.
People say Kagi is the same but it's not. It takes Googles results and filters out the crap and orders results differently, since it's not trying to get you to go to some commercial site unless you intend to.
Also the lenses are great.
Just being able to exclude certain sites, and reduce the ranking of others, makes search so much better in Kagi.
I hope they eat Google's lunch.
I used this to completely block Reddit.
It takes Googles results and filters out the crap and orders results differently...
It uses more than just Google's, FYI.
Isn't that what DDG was supposed to do?
This all works until Google cut off API access to a competitor right? Relying partly on a Google API is surely suicidal for a Google Search competitor...
They use Bing’s index as well and also have their own
If you don't do anything except use it like Google, then you only get improved search results. But the other features like lenses, site ranking, URL rewriting, question mark instant answers, and document Q/A make it way more worth it to me.
I think people are just used to being passive now. They dont tinker with the tech and they think its all the same.
People still use Chrome also because Google kept saying its "faster", which doesnt even mean anything. Security, privacy and plugin support is what matters.
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
Especially after they got rid of the compact interface completely, which was a more stripped-down version of the old one, that didn't have any of the CSS, or special effects.
The last workaround stopped working as of a few days ago.
Old Reddit may well be next on the block.
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.
I suspect most of kagi's subscription money actually went to google's pocket. Google charges a lot of money to access their search api, about $5/1000 queries.
I genuinely think Google's success is its own undoing.
If everybody had carried on making sites in the same way they did when Google came out, the results would still be good.
Bit they didn't. There's gold in them thar hills, and now SEO and generated bullshit are a way to make money, while Google's algorithms seem easy to game if you have the resources to do so.
There's like a hundred large companies doing this, and if you blocked all their sites in the Google results it'd give results similar to Kagi and other flavour of the month search engines.
I'm still very happy with the experience, especially the UX and customisation options, and they're developing new features fast. Not always successfully at first, e.g. the recent integration of WolframAlpha isn't entirely a step forward (mostly because they're not displaying the extra context that WA shows that lets you know when it's answering the wrong question).
I think overall most people are very happy, as shown by the frequent recommendations on here (so much so that someone on Lemmy was telling everyone it must be astroturfing).
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.
I take your point, and agree when it comes to Google
But here's rabbit hole for anyone interested. That brand name being synonymous with the product thing is actually fairly regional.
We just call them tissues here. I think you can get Kleenex brand here, but I don't think anybody cares about the brand of tissue. There's a particular kind that has some kind of aloe Vera extract which is all I'll use if I'm sick, but I don't even know what brand they are.
On the flip side, we call marker pens Biros, and where I grew up we called them Khokis
We call it a sleeve where I come from...
Yep, it's regional.
Where I grew up only a few people used "kleenex", and I never hear it where I live now.
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.
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.
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.
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
@lemmy.world
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
go to feed...
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.
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