[mongol]

Can the search result quality be quantified somehow? I remember when Google was new, and I used to use Altavista and Hotbot and those older search engines, the difference in results were like night and day, and Google's results were "wow!"

Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?

[viraptor]

In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam.

For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.

[Grimburger]

> it's easy to click "block this domain"

Friendly reminder that google had this feature a decade ago then removed it. Hopefully someone in the C-Suite got a few back pats for that decision.

https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...

[RajT88]

Google's gotta make money off Pinterest somehow, based on the most blocked domains on Kagi:

https://kagi.com/stats

Pinterest is a scourge on the modern web, worse than any other.

[ask_b123]

Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi? I don't use Pinterest, and never really encounter it on a daily basis, but some of my friends really like the site. Tbf, they might use stackoverflow more, but seeing Hacker News on the top 5 doesn't seem to reflect the average web user's usage...

[EricMausler]

I used pinterest and still hate(d) when it popped up on search.

Without too much conjecture I think the problem is search-related web crawlers and users have very different experiences with pinterest. To the web crawler, the information is there and easily accesible. To a user, it might be behind a login, or part of an image description, or a sidenote, or whatever. The page doesn't exactly load with what you are looking for front and center

Additionally, I don't use it through a browser, I use it in an app, so im not logged in on my browser.

[super256]

I only recently discovered pinterest as a useful site, but only because a friend convinced me to create an account. It only becomes usable with an account and it even makes fun, but most people are probably like I was and don’t want to create an account and are annoyed of pinterest hijacking the „save image“ function, redirecting you when you don’t have an account and nagging you with a login wall. It really only becomes great if you give in (only took me 5 years or so).

[tayo42]

There was a time where Google image search was dominated by Pinterest results but clinking through never took you to the photo. And most of the photos were rehosting of the original so you wouldn't get that either.

[climb_stealth]

I wonder if it is also biased in the sense that it's only certain people who customise these things. And that it's only the most common ones. You would never see my favourite car forum listed here, but bumping it in search results is where I see value with the feature.

[hnben]

> Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi?

yes, obviously.

but also: Selection Bias Is A Fact Of Life

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of...

[dwighttk]

Do your friends who use it use Google to use it? Or do they go to the site itself.

I don’t use the site itself but the irritating thing is a first page full of useless Pinterest links when searching for something.

[janandonly]

Of course they are biased. Just look at how NYTimes is both blocked and upvoted on Kagi. Some people like a source and others don’t, it’s that simple really.

[d0gsg0w00f]

For me, I ignore NYT because I'm not a subscriber and it's annoying to always hit the paywall.

[popcorncowboy]

It's telling that the top sites on that list accurately map to companies that have been the most "successful" at blitzing the incentive structures of the current internet economics model.

[mcpackieh]

I don't understand why people hate Pinterest in image search results. If the image is relevant to my search then I don't care who's hosting it. Can somebody explain to me what the problem is here? https://0x0.st/HO57.webm

(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)

[d0gsg0w00f]

I don't like pinterest because the images have no metadata. If I see something I'm interested in--like a piece of furniture--I have no way of knowing how to get more info on it.

Same thing with those displays that rotate earthporn with no info on the location. So annoying to see spectacular things and not know what they are.

[CynicusRex]

It is indeed, hence “https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=%s -site:quora.com -site:pinterest.com” as my default search syntax.

[permo-w]

I have a strong memory that Quora used to be quite good, and then was suddenly horrendous. Is this just me?

[rchaud]

Quora was excellent for SEO, so brands and companies started using Quora answers to pump their own products and services. It's completely useless now.

[ConSeannery]

Not just you, it used to have solely high quality Q&A...then the yahoo answers folks migrated over

[rjh29]

They started monetizing it by paying people to write answers, so it's now full of blogspam.

[dwighttk]

Quora used to be good but then they had to try to make revenue

[laserlight]

I had to quit doing so, because I discovered that it didn't just exclude listed domains, but performed a totally different search. Locations or local results were largely missing, when I excluded some domains.

[mrAssHat]

That's curious, please expand on this. Do you really mean it performed a search for different thing? If so - have you figured how it differed?

Or did it just have to perform a non-cached search and thus not only excluded said domains, but could also reorder the other results based on the current relevance, rather than cached relevance from the past that is being served to everyone else who doesn't exclude said domains?

[hendersoon]

Pinterest uses different domains for every country so you'd need to add around a dozen qualifiers to get the big ones excluded.

[WhrRTheBaboons]

same here

[theolivenbaum]

I was wondering what would be the impact of being in the front page of HN, it's awesome that their stats are open: almost 2k new members!

[lostlogin]

I’d argue that Google is worse than Pinterest. We got here due to Google.

[abricot]

To be fair, google DID provide quality at scale in the past. I'm not sure the same can be said about Pinterest.

[rchaud]

Due to linkrot, a lot of images that stood on independent websites, are now only available on Pinterest, which scraped and cached them before the original site went dark. Clicking through to the original links these days often leads to 404s.

[biglyburrito]

The uBlacklist browser plugin adds support for blocking sites in Google searches.

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

[Grimburger]

This looks really good, thanks. Works on other engines too. Goodbye Quora results.

[WhrRTheBaboons]

will check it out, thanks!

[Gustomaximus]

This seems the most obvious value add feature for search results at both an individual level and for reviewing overall moderation.

I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.

[zo1]

Eventually someone was going to create an easy to list/share/subscribe list that individuals could easily add to their personal Google domain block list. Think EasyList.

At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.

Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.

[beefield]

The easiest is to look where the money is. Might be risky to let your custo^H products hide the pages where you have most revenue generating ads.

[xnx]

Counterpoint: That feature has very little utility to all but a tiny fraction of users. Those users can readily find other means (e.g. extensions) to achieve the same thing. In the interest of simplicity, it was the right call to remove this. I imagine it was pitched for its ability to gather feedback on search quality, but the type of people using the feature aren't representative.

[bambax]

> when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy

OMG. Why doesn't Google filter out the likes of geeksforgeeks for instance? How is it possible that it always come before the genuine SO answer?

Even without offering the possibility to filter out a domain (which they had, and later removed), how does the ranking algorithm not see those horrible, zero value clones??

[oblio]

Misaligned incentives (in corporate terms, $$$).

I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.

[willvarfar]

My theory is that google went from ads in search results to ads on visited pages. By buying doubleclick etc they are suddenly incentivised to drive traffic to ad-supported websites.

Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but the part of google that sells the ads on sites instead of in search results would throw a fit.

[flir]

We could test this. Take a few hundred search queries, strip the pages that display Google ads, and see if the remainder of the search result is better or worse.

We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"

With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.

It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.

[rvnx]

Google searches are ranked by humans, it’s a contractor job

[Phemist]

Aha. This makes a lot of sense for Google.

But the same websites show up in e.g. DDG (through Bing), as far as I know neither DDG nor Microsoft make a dime from ad-supported websites like Google would, why are these results not nuked similarly to what Kagi is doing?

[Phemist]

Aha. Couldn't help but scratch my own itch. I wonder if DDG has a deal with Google where they get a cut of the ad profit if they are mentioned as a `ref` in the doubleclick ad request.

:path: /pagead/viewthroughconversion/796001856/?random=1695374589838&cv=11&fst=1695374589838&bg=ffffff&guid=ON&async=1&gtm=45be39k0&u_w=2704&u_h=1756&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geeksforgeeks.org%2Fc-plus-plus%2F &ref=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F. <<<< What does this do? &hn=www.googleadservices.com&frm=0&tiba=C%2B%2B%20Programming%20Language%20-%20GeeksforGeeks&auid=68284397.1695374483&data=event%3Dgtag.config&rfmt=3&fmt=4

Hence providing the same incentives to keep shitty sites like geeksforgeeks in the results.

I guess also geeksforgeeks is incentivized to report these references, so that search engines and other linking services will continue to show their links.

To reproduce: 1. Go to duckduckgo.com and do a search that will turn up a geekforgeeks website 2. click on the link 3. watch the network tab as requests are made to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and check the path.

[danielcampos93]

Most other search engines train with a target of google or with some form of reward which is bootstrapped on google rankings. It makes Bing results implicitly have the same behavior as Google. DDG and others just use BingAPI so googles incentives pass on through.

[popcorncowboy]

These sites exist precisely _because_ of their expertise in the toxic race-to-the-bottom SEO/SEM game that Google created.

[dwighttk]

What I don’t get is how many people are looking for stackoverflow answers while a)not aware of so copycats and b)not running adblockers

[bambax]

Adblockers are not a defense against this, as those results are genuine search results.

I run uBlock origin (of course), am extremely aware that geeksforgeeks exist and is utter shit, and yet I get fooled now and again, which makes me very angry at that website, Google, myself, and the world in general...

[dwighttk]

But to make money those sites have to show ads

[ilkke]

If I ran a seal-clubbing business I'd have to club seals to make money. The whole argument is that those sites don't exist to provide a good service yet sadly need to show ads to keep the lights on.

[JoshuaEN]

This is my experience as well. Low quality junk is often not present, and if it does show up, it's two mouse clicks to never see that domain again.

Also the ability to promote high quality domains helps even more with this (though i have found one needs to be careful with pinning domains, as it can lead to irrelevant results being shown first because they have some if the same keywords).

[ipaddr]

Feels like I'm paying to do someone elses job.

[stavros]

Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free.

[hk__2]

> Well, your alternative is that the job doesn't get done, for free.

You can do it with uBlacklist [1]. See also [2].

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

[2]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

[stavros]

I didn't know about that, thanks! Excellent.

[kelnos]

> yet another stackoverflow copy

I never got why these even ever appear in Google search results (or any search results, really). It feels like it would be super trivial to identify sites that are scraped copies of other sites. Granted, without foreknowledge, the engine doesn't know which is the original. But at the very least this can be determined by a human once, and then the problem goes away forever for that particular site.

[cryptonym]

Maybe that scraped copy leverages doubleclick so its success is aligned with Google interests, sometimes even more than the original website.

[tiagod]

That ship has already sailed, they are already using AI in mass to generate original looking content.

[HideousKojima]

Trying to find any guides for anything in Baldur's Gate 3 returns page upon page of AI generated garbage, a sure sign of things to come.

[snowram]

Funny that you mention this game. bg3.wiki, the community wiki had a lot of troubles with SEO. It got ignored or pushed down in the search results for a very long time, while the awful Fextralife wiki that includes a Twitch view botting iframe on every pages was always first.

[HideousKojima]

Sadly even the Fextralife wiki (garbage that it is) is better than most of the other results and that's still drowned out by the AI spam.

[BizarreByte]

At this point it's just safer to treat any content newer than about a year ago as highly suspect. Bots and fake content have been around for years, but things changed when ChatGPT and the copycats went live.

[jodrellblank]

En masse

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en_masse

[saalweachter]

Which is French for "in mass".

[jodrellblank]

The blue ribbon chef was said to be the cream of the cream, so the restaurant owner was happy for him to have white card over the place. He arranged an outside the work of fatty liver, a main course of rooster of wine with eat all, and as the blow of mercy: burned cream; the full menu was a feat of strength! He made sure to wish the diners good appetite. However, when the owner visited from her foot on the ground she turned into a terrible child and demanded mouth amusers and crescents. She hated the decorative objects of art made of chewed paper.

(When we steal from French, we don't translate it to English, it becomes English).

[waynesonfire]

it's kind of upsetting that the first to benefit from LLMs are the scum of the internet.

[boxed]

It's googles fault. They are the ones who make this a viable business model. They pay the ads, and they pollute their search results with this garbage.

100% Google who are destroying this part of the internet.

[yard2010]

Google gave and google took

[mensetmanusman]

The love of money

[mekster]

How can the search engine not able to tell who the original is? Originals always exist earlier, not to mention SO.com domain rank is way higher than those spammed sites that existed for less years.

[dpkirchner]

Even if it wasn't easy to detect SO rip-offs, surely Google engineers see them all the time when they perform searches.

[retsibsi]

Is this after you've done a lot of blocking (or other customisation)? For me the top Kagi results are mostly similar to the Google ones, and when I scroll down a bit Kagi doesn't save me from articles with openings like

> Time is an important part of our life and we cannot avoid it. In our daily routine, we need to know the current date or time frequently.

and

> Time, a measure of the passing of moments.

[viraptor]

Not too much. I've got maybe 5 straight up SO clones blocked, but that's about it.

[alberth]

> “searching … on Google, I get SO, MDM and basically a lot of SEO spam sites”

I get the same in Kagi clicking your link above.

Both the 1st and 3rd result is SO. 2nd result is MDM.

I’m confused, so what’s different between paid Kagi and free Google search then?

(Note: I’m not hating on Kagi, I’m just genuinely wanting to understand)

[pasc1878]

SO, MDM are the good results together with the blog Kagi gave in 5th place. In google you got the first two then a lot of spam and not the other good results.

[dbish]

That's still an example of better quality results that should be quantifiable, that's ranking. We have things like precision@n/NDCG@n/etc. where it should be straight forward to show a metric for some smaller n where Kagi beats Google since it doesn't show some set of irrelebant/low quality results interspersed.

[dark-star]

> yet another stackoverflow copy

I get those in Google as well. But tbh, I don't care. If I'm looking for "current time in JavaScript", I don't care if the answer comes from stackoverflow or any of it's clones. It's not like I want to interact with that site somehow. I just want answers. If I want interaction, I obviously go to stackoverflow directly.

It might matter that I'm using Ad-blockers, so maybe if I didn't, those sites would feed me obnoxious popups and malware, but as it stands, I don't see any difference...

[FpUser]

I just did exactly this search on Google. The first result was this -[0] which is exactly spot on. Not sure if it is because I use Brave browser which also blocks ads on websites.

[0] - https://tecadmin.net/get-current-date-time-javascript/#:~:te...

[viraptor]

The result on Google is indeed correct, but I was posting a trivial example that was supposed to show the variety of answers/sources not the accuracy of the top one. For that, they're fairly similar, although Kagi seems to prefer the higher signal-to-crap ratio.

[MatthiasPortzel]

You clearly use an ad blocker. That page is over 50% ads.

[Falkon1313]

Wow. I just loaded it and then turned off the adblocker and reloaded it. It's like you need another search engine just to find the content in the page hidden amongst all those ads.

I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.

[dgb23]

Yes people are. And it’s the least technically literate people with “outdated” machines and bad connections that slug through the web like this. They don’t know what to trust and often fall prey to deceptive tactics.

[rjh29]

There's also a class of people who can just filter out all those distractions much better than many of us, and have a high tolerance for slowness.

[fauigerzigerk]

Strange, I don't see a single ad for this query (current time in javascript), using Chrome logged into my Google account. Results are good as well.

[FpUser]

Well I did not see any thanks to Brave and the content was spot on and that is all that really matters to me

[spencerchubb]

My goodness, I thought you were exaggerating. I've been using ad blockers for so long, I forgot the web had this many ads. Or has it just gotten worse over time?

[donny2018]

Well, I still remember times when 50% of google results weren’t ads.

Interestingly, Bing almost doesn’t display search ads, and the search results are becoming even better than Google. I haven’t had a need to use google for a few months now.

[retsibsi]

I wonder if adblockers have contributed to this. In theory we users can reward non-horrible advertisers by whitelisting their ads, but in practice we tend to block as much as possible. The remaining ad-viewing audience will be partly composed of people who are ethically opposed to adblocking or are held back by a lack of tech knowledge, but it will also be relatively insensitive to ads (both in the sense of being able to put up with a lot, and in the sense of requiring a lot to attract their attention).

[abustamam]

I think it depends on the site. I remember early 00s where many download sites would have ads with a download button, or pop-ups that blasted sound like YOU JUST WON. Now I think that sorta thing has been normalized to even non shady sites. My primary use of ad blocker is so that I don't get random autoplaying videos.

[tacitusarc]

It has gotten significantly worse.

[darkwater]

And by that, you are telling google you liked that result (by clicking on it), even if in the end ads revenue is not increased by your visit. Maybe Google consider less important signals coming from ad-blocking browsers, that I don't know.

[eviks]

But with an extension I can have a personal garbage block list or hide/collapse website preview without removing the result completely that works on other search engines

Btw, can you hide text preview on Kagi instead of removing the domain completely (in case you're not certain the website is garbage and sometimes want to check the results, but just want them less visible)?

[ShakataGaNai]

Wait? I can kill yummly results when looking for a recipe? Ok, I'm in.

[vachina]

The fact that Kagi has a blocklist tells me their algo isn’t any superior.

The best kind of search engine is the kind that can read your mind (by inferring your intention or something)

[pbhjpbhj]

Maybe for you that is better, but I want word negation to work, and "verbose" to actually require words I specify to be on the page. Word stemming would be good as an option.

Sure, I'd like Booleans to work again, and intitle:.

That said, Google could probably make an inferred search interpretation work well if they wanted to return results that were good for the user rather than return results that optimise their ad revenue.

[mcpackieh]

Why stop there? The best mind-reading search engine is one that doesn't even let me type queries, it tells me what I need to know before I even know I need to know it. The fact that all search engines still have query fields tells me they all still suck at reading my mind.

[efdee]

I feel that Google's going downhill ever since they started to try reading my mind.

[eitland]

Yes.

In four ways for me:

- it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.

- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.

- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.

- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.

[eviks]

Does it warn you about typos in your "prhase that exists with a phrase " or just blanks out?

[eitland]

I wasn't sure because this never bothered me so I did a little experiment by searching for

"does it warn about mispellings"

(Note the intentional misspelling above.)

And here is the result:

  We haven’t found anything.
  There are no results that match all your keywords exactly.
  Check your spelling, try different keywords, or try without quotes:
  does it warn about mispellings

Edit: I then tried to repeat the experiment with only one misspelled word which was harder because misspelled is misspelled in several different ways across the web, so the first most realistic misspellings actually returned real results.

When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.

[eviks]

Thanks for checking! This result is too verbose (first two sentences mean the same, but also aren't needed since you already see no results), and then instead of the "check your spelling" it should just, you know, check my spelling :) and show an active link to the quoted query with typos corrected

And the suggestion shouldn't only show when you've found nothing, it should be a basic spellcheck correction suggestion - since the web also has misspelled words you might not even notice the mistake since you see some results and think it's ok

[eitland]

If this is more important to you than all the things I have listed above then I don't think Kagi is the right search engine for you.

[saalweachter]

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22does+it+warn+about+mispel...

[eitland]

With three results based on this discussion and and one content reposting site :-)

[benhurmarcel]

It does fix typos unless you put them in quotes. And tells you about it.

[eviks]

I was specifically asking about typos in quotes

[sergiosgc]

No, it won't fix quotes. A quote is an exact match. And please, let it continue to be so.

[eviks]

Please read the question again.

What part of "Does it warn you about typos" is about "fixing quotes"???

[billbrown]

Here's an example search for "casues of the civil war" so you can see the behavior for yourself.

https://kagi.com/search?q=%22casues+of+the+civil+war%22&r=us...

[_flux]

If you get zero results, you'd probably see the mistake prettty fast, right?

I imagine most often (like 90%+ of cases) when one searches for phrases they would be a result of copy-pasting from another source, so handling this case in a special way would just not be worth the effort.

[eviks]

What's up with the extreme estimats?

And if you get 100s results instead of 0?

And what if it's not 90%, but 50%? It's definitely wrong for me, I most often use it to exclude irrelevant results, and I'd imagine it's also wrong in general case for such a targeted search engine

The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning

Also the benefit of a warning is that you can press a correction link to automatically fix and restart search, which is better UI

[eitland]

> The "effort" is using the same typo detection algorithm you use for non-quoted search to display the same warning

If you were a paying customer you could submit this idea in the forums and someone will actually look into it. I have sent in a few ideas and I think most have been accepted and fixed/implemented within a few weeks.

[eviks]

Gladly this company is a bit broader minded and accepts valuable ideas from a broader group of people

[svaha1728]

If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

[robocat]

#4 pinned is hacker news!!! So clearly big crossover between HN fans and kagi. 8,629 Members.

Top Blocked (from most blocked):

pinterest.com/.co.uk/.ca/.de/.fr/.com.au/.es facebook.com foxnews.com tiktok.com quora.com w3schools.com breitbart.com dailymail.co.uk appsloveworld.com instagram.com githubplus.com geeksforgeeks.org libhunt.com twitter.com msn.com healthline.com solveforum.com 9to5answer.com alternativeto.net giters.com wikihow.com nypost.com codegrepper.com issuehint.com cnn.com educba.com coder.social linkedin.com geekrepos.com kknews.cc bleepcoder.com amazon.com programcreek.com forbes.com newbedev.com drivereasy.com medium.com lightrun.com you.com reddit.com webmd.com blog.csdn.net nytimes.com washingtonpost.com

[macNchz]

Interesting to see reddit on the block list, I have issues with the way they’ve been operating but I do often find myself explicitly adding site:reddit.com to google searches, since it seems like one of few places online where there is still non-sponsored conversation about diverse topics. RIP old-school forums.

[wyclif]

Note that Reddit is also on the Kagi promoted leaderboard. It seems that Reddit represents a paradox in that way.

[Falkon1313]

Given the audience (mostly techy people), it seems to be a love it or hate it thing.

[kunwon1]

I'm doing the same thing, but specifically for reviews/recommendations. I can't remember the last time I had even an inkling of trust for a review published on a website. Reddit is basically the only source I have for potentially trustworthy opinions about products

[n42]

IMO, this is no longer the case. Basically any new thread is getting astroturfed by marketing teams, and it seems like Reddit started doing SEO to promote newer threads, so the days of reliable reddit reviews seem to be over

[yunwal]

Subreddits that are about buying things (/r/buyitforlife, /r/frugalmalefashion) are done. Same with any askreddit thread that's like "What's a product for under $x that changed your life" or something like that.

I still find /r/cooking gives good recommendations, despite the fact that the world of recipes is filled with spam and low quality content. Maybe the unit economics of astroturfing just don't work out for it.

[shyn3]

Definitely true. Marketing teams at multiple roles paid third parties to advertise on Reddit. Even tongue in cheek comments about incidents are marketing.

[pbhjpbhj]

If you're not logged in to Reddit (and Facebook, etc), you often don't get the content that shows in the snippet of the SERP. Google don't always have a cached page now.

[shermozle]

Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!

[HanClinto]

I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam).

Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?

[belltaco]

I think people have been using MDN.

This has some of the context https://web.archive.org/web/20110412103745/http://w3fools.co...

But looks like w3schools has cleaned up their act in the past decade.

[wyclif]

They have. It's a lot better now than when they started out. They have incrementally been improving it. The reason why it gets pushed down is because a lot of people have a natural distate for the ads and the fact that it's a content farm. But if you have good ad blocking I don't see the harm in using it as long as you understand what it is.

[wyclif]

I agree with you about w3schools; they've improved a lot since they first started out, and cleaned up a lot of problems. I think it's just fine to use for that purpose. A lot of technologists look down their noses at w3schools and vilify them just because they consider it a content farm.

[robin_reala]

Leaving aside what everyone else said, the thing that rankled has always been a false claim of association with W3 in their domain name.

[rambambram]

With W3C, you mean? Because as far as I know W3 stands just for world wide web.

[dredmorbius]

I'm ... surprised and have mixed emotions that though msn.com is listed, no Yahoo domains make any of the blocked / raised / lowered / pinned lists. I'm reading that as a sign of total irrelevance.

[adamsb6]

I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow.

I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.

[olig15]

You can bump individual sites up and down in priority for your account. Hover over the shield to the right of each result and click ‘raise’, ‘lower’ etc

[14]

It appears you can as one commenter who uses the search engine states in one of the comments.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow?

Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.

[MatthiasPortzel]

You can turn off ads in DuckDuckGo. Settings > General > Advertisements = Off.

Obviously you can also use an ad blocker, but I think DuckDuckGo deserves more credit for making it a first-party option.

[bee_rider]

Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another.

So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me

Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)

When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363287602_Coping_wi...

[5e92cb50239222b]

I have personally seen people pushed into buying crap they don't need (and didn't even think about a few minutes before) by ads they saw on the internet. I don't like playing tech support for others, but installing ad blockers for technically illiterate friends and acquaintances now feels like a socially responsible thing to do.

[Thorrez]

If you're a new company, buying ads can help you get customers who would otherwise have bought something from your older, more well-known competitor.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.

[vxNsr]

Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”

[Thorrez]

Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.

My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.

However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

[abind]

Ever heard of google cloud?

[vxNsr]

Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.

[bee_rider]

Unless the older, more well-known company has a larger ad budget, which seems… very likely.

[Thorrez]

Without ads the big company gets 100% of the mindshare and the small one gets 0%.

With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.

[Thorrez]

I just came across this example of how ads help (or at least helped) small and medium businesses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37662179

[dylan604]

Isn't that the same thing said about Lotto/scratch-offs/etc?

[kelnos]

It's complicated.

I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.

If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.

The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.

But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.

[dylan604]

Look at the numbers of the people playing lotto/scratch-offs. Look at where they are being sold. These are targeted at a specific group of people. You can try to whitewash it all you want, but it only makes you look naive. Especially that last sentence of yours. I'm really struggling to not get banned for commenting to this, but I'd suggest taking some rose tinted glasses off and taking a real look at this issue.

[flagrant_taco]

Can you help me understand how this is whitewashing exactly? I guess you could invent a term like poor-washing, but where did race come into this?

[shkkmo]

The term "whitewashing", like many uses of the color "white" has nothing to do with race. Rather, it is a metaphor referencing a type of paint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewashing_(censorship)

[pbhjpbhj]

The poor people who buy a $5 ice-cream sundae every day are the ones addicted to food ... people are not making a freely reasoned choice to spend money gambling, poor people are in a vulnerable position and lottery runners exploit that with heavy advertising to ensure people are hooked on the idea they can improve things by spending money on what seems like hope.

[rchaud]

> But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.

What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?

A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?

[InitialLastName]

If they spend the $10 on scratch-offs that didn't pay, are they any worse off than they would be if the first hadn't paid?

Arguably, they'd be better off having had 3X the entertainment for their dollar.

[oaktowner]

A good friend once described the lottery as "a tax on people with bad math skills" and I don't think I've played since.

[bee_rider]

I don’t play the lottery, but I think this is not really correct.

Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).

So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.

[yunwal]

I think it's still probably better to throw all the money down on an unlikely sports bet or some crazy options trade. The lottery is particularly skewed to the house.

[NotSuspicious]

You can buy a lottery ticket for every single big jackpot for a year and lose less than your average options trader. The value is the feeling you get that you and your family might not have to work for the rest of your lives. That feeling is clearly and obviously worth a dollar a day.

[bluGill]

At least with sports betting skill can make money. Just betting on the first place team to win over the last place team for example, it won't always win, but typically will. Of course bookies know this and so the payoff isn't enough to make a living on (if you can figure out the exception and bet only on the last place teams that win you can live well). Statistics are generally well studied in sports, but if you study how a team is coached you can find cases where they have a better than statistical chance to win a game they are expected to lose. Most people betting sports either always bet for their team, or bet on statistics, so if you can exploit something else.

[Falkon1313]

$2 isn't going to get much from an options trade, or a sports bet either.

[dazc]

I can see a potential problem here in that a sizeable win from a random bet is likely to encourage some people to keep making these bets in future, with inevitable consequences.

[audiodude]

I don't love the lottery or scratch offs, though I don't mind playing occasionally.

But what I can't stand is the self perceived moral superiority of people who are like "haha, lottery is for idiots!"

[dazc]

People still win the lottery though, bad math skills or not.

[meroes]

Even those who don’t think ads affect them are mistaken. And if you extirpate ads completely from your life the tax is your time and effort to do so. That’s one of the most toxic mantras, it even seems purposefully misguiding.

[gaudystead]

I mostly agree, but I've been blocking ads however ways I can for years now, and I'd say a few minutes of setup has saved me HOURS of dealing with ads at this point.

Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.

[meroes]

I know this is late but I did a PiHole for years as well. But then I needed another solution for being out of the house, and my housemate later complained they wanted to see Facebook ads…

And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).

It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.

[Falkon1313]

I wish I'd been able to get the pihole to work as easily as it sounded. It looked cool. But it was incompatible with the router from the ISP I had at the time, and rather than also buy and setup a new router, I just packed it away. Now I have a new ISP with a different router, and I'm sure it's incompatible too.

But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.

[Silasdev]

You should really consider getting a proper router like Unifi or the like. It's a one time cost and it will save you from these issues no matter what ISP supplied crap you end up getting.

Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.

That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!

[lostlogin]

I used a EdgeRouter and it was amazing, though a little-hair raising as a complete rookie.

The Unifi line solves this, and while it has some rough edges, it is so great. 9/10.

[comprev]

Consider using NextDNS to help block ads on both individual devices and network-wide too.

[manishsharan]

I don't have PiHole but this instead https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ on all laptops.

[seventytwo]

It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.

I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.

[pierat]

> It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.

Yet.

Google did the same originally. Super clean, just delivered whatever was searched for; no more, no less.

When Kagi gets a taste of how much money is available for tracking and profiling users. and theyll start small. And since you have to be logged in to do searches, everything is already pre-tracked. Then its only a matter of recording and selling (on the sly) to data brokers.

I used not to be this jaded. But its watching the same thing again and again is why I wait for it this time around. All good things do indeed come to an end.

[freediver]

Kagi founder here. You have my assurance this will not happen. Life is too short and I am not spending 10 years of my life building yet another ad-based search engine.

[selcuka]

I trust you will not, but what about after you exit?

Anyway, you or someone else will probably start a new search engine, and we will start again. It's best to enjoy it until that happens.

[pierat]

I believe the founder, freediver.

In the case of Radio Shack, they too made a promise never to sell or give the data to other entities. The CEO even fought for that in bankruptcy court.

The judge deemed that the user data was worth a significant sum, and the judge screwed everyone over for the debtors.

Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset. And there's always someone willing to go to any end and use it, regardless the promises. And it may full well be someone who has power over you, and you'd never know until it's too late.

(I've done my share of medical and sensitive queries. The really sensitive ones go through I2P or Tor in a VM. I'm not willing to give that knowledge to anyone.)

[freediver]

> Once you capture the data, it's a toxic but valuable asset.

That is the thing, Kagi does not capture the data. Not only we do not need it, but it would just be a liability for us, with no benefit.

Please refer to our privacy policy for more details: https://kagi.com/privacy

[selcuka]

> I believe the founder, freediver.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I believe them, too. My point was if they ever sell the company, the buyer might change the privacy statement and start collecting/selling information from that point on. I didn't mean the new owners would necessarily have access to the data collected previously.

[mewse]

Since you're bringing up "capturing the data", it's worth pointing at Kagi's privacy policy, the very first point of which is this:

> * Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Additionally the search page itself displays this notice:

> Your searches are always private. We do not see them and they are not associated with your account

The "captured" user data you seem to be concerned about doesn't appear to actually exist in this case; the data is quite explicitly not being captured.

[claytongulick]

My biggest question - and the one that will drive me to subscribe right now is how "harmful" "misinformation" and "malinformation" is treated today, and how it will be in the future.

I Do Not Want anything or anyone deciding what is good for me, what I should be seeing, or making it difficult for me to find things I'm searching for, regardless of the content.

A search engine should be like the phone company - providing a pipe to content and allowing me to decide what I want to see / block.

If I want to search for Nazi propaganda because I want to understand why people believe the things they do - I don't want the safety rails. I want the most raw, worst of it. I'm an adult with critical thinking skills, I don't need to be directed to the "safe" content.

Or covid vaccines.

Or anything.

If kagi has guarantees around this, your paying user base will be +1 tonight.

[NotSuspicious]

Yandex is pretty great for that. It's trash. Everything it spits out is trash. But sometimes you're looking for trash. If you're looking for some old offensive meme or whatever you can pretty easily find it in Yandex Image Search, for example.

[jsndidneske]

Actually Yandex is much like google with blacklisting i have found.

[nvm0n2]

I'm also curious about this, but if the claim that it's mostly a proxy for Google with some way to rerank results is true, then it wouldn't solve that problem.

[carlosjobim]

Try a search for Alex Jones on Kagi, I think that's a pretty good benchmark.

[lostlogin]

Surely results will always be weighted? How should it decide what to show you?

[no_wizard]

How do you feel about the name?

“Kagi it” feels clunky to me. “Google it” while I’ve heard many instances of people using the phrase even when Google isn’t involved has a ring to it that’s easy to say and tools out well.

Have you given thought to whet the Kagi equivalent would be?

[ldx1024]

I think if Kagi was the established leader and Google was the challenger you would be saying the opposite.

[helboi4]

No it's the actual word. "google it" allows for a liaison between the two words because "google" technically ends with an l sound (a consanant) and "it" begins with with a vowel - "googlit". It's also a soft sorta rolling consanant, which helps. In the case of "kagi it", "kagi" ends in an I and "it" begins in an I. That means you have to make a hard stop between the two words and pronounce clearly to differentiate between one I and the other otherwise you lose the words entirely. The two words fail to flow into each other in any way, making them feel less like a pair. Phrases that are easy and satisfying to say in the sense that they are actually just easy to get your mouth around are more likely to catch on. This is definitely something they should consider more carefully.

One could also argue that google is a pretty nice word for the English language since it evokes words like "look", "oggle", "oodles", implying looking through a lot of stuff and having a playful tone. Sounds silly but when someone says words sound like they mean something, it is a real phenomenon due to the way we interpret various sounds. In most languages, B sounds sound like big and round things and K sounds sound like sharp things. There have been studies on this. You can then get more specific in the subconscious patterns people recognise when you narrow it down to a certain language. This is why I say, Google is a great word for its function in the English language.

[plextoria]

What happened to simply using the verb “search”? Or phrases like “look it up”? It shouldn’t really matter (typical conversation) which search engine a person is using.

[lostlogin]

I say ‘cellotape’ for any old tape, I say ‘cellophane’ for whatever is in the drawer. I say ‘biro’ for pens and say ‘twink’ for that white stuff.

I don’t think it really matters as long as meaning is there.

Though ‘Google’ is starting to mean ‘ad infested trash’, so maybe the word will lose favour.

[paradox460]

Kagit

[Matcham]

Cage it. As in enclosing the answer, and capturing the essence of it.

[matt-attack]

Do you retain search logs?

[eitland]

They are very clear that they do not.

[dgb23]

All good things do come to an end. There’s no argument here.

But I think we’re in a different situation when people are willing to pay monthly for search.

There is also exactly 0 risk involved here for a consumer. If this product stops being worth your time and money, just stop using it?

It’s not comparable to say, buying a service or product that you build on top of. No lock-in in that sense.

[askvictor]

Not just that, but it's not really on the radar of SEO. If they get big, SEO will probably lead to the same enshitification as happened to Google.

[freediver]

I don't think it can. What would the financial motive be? With Google it is more ads with Adsense on their crappy SEO site. With Kagi, we actively downrank such sites out of existance.

[carlosjobim]

SEO also has the purpose to rank your website high so that you can sell your products. A huge part of the internet has nothing to do with ads, but businesses selling their products and services

[whs]

I think if they want to sell to me and ads&trackers harm their SEO, it'd at least make the internet a little bit more private.

That or it'll be a cat and mouse chase like cname cloaking/proxying rendering those harder to statically detect.

[dazc]

Boss of wonderful search site seems to be unaware?

[askvictor]

The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.

[crisp]

I think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification.

The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.

[mypetocean]

I've been around to compare them all (and used to spend countless hours doing search engine research on Fravia's "web search lores" website).

Google represented a huge step up in search result quality generally. But in recent years, the quality has really slid – even while tuning results using more advanced Google features.

I don't think Google cares much about search result quality these days, except insofar as they have to keep a minimum threshold just to drive their ad and analytics revenue.

There is a lot of opportunity for other search engines to make strides forward in quality relative to Google these days.

[Falkon1313]

One of the big differences is that at some point they seemed to basically delist forums, de-rank most blogs, and totally forgot that personal web pages still exist. All those things are still out there, but you are highly unlikely to find them via Google now. Maybe if you do an exact phrase search for the page's title, otherwise, they're buried.

Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all.

The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information.

I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?

[root_axis]

The results are worse because the Internet is worse.

[dazc]

Exactly, the incentive to produce good quality content is no longer there.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

That's how Google was when I was a kid

[hyperhopper]

I, like any person in 2023 should, use unlock origin so I never see ads on Google.

[rg111]

I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google.

I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching.

I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc.

I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.

[pierat]

Oh Yandex is AWESOME, especially for tech, porn, and piracy. None of its blocked. I get exactly what I'm looking for. No bullshit.

And I don't care if it is Russian. Tells me that the US government wont be buying search history from them, or cooperating in any capacity. Thats actually a double-good.

[hedora]

They used to have a US office, which got me wondering if they're obligated to sell private user information to the US gov't.

Here's their current list of offices:

https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/

So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)

[int_19h]

The interesting thing about Yandex is that it isn't even screening political queries (or if it does, it's not effective at it). Search for "bucha massacre" or "резня в буче", and all the top links are to websites that have factual information on it, not Russian agitprop.

[hedora]

Google's been losing in blind comparisons for over a decade (experiments:

- Both have google branding -> competitor wins

- Neither has google branding -> competitor wins

- One (chosen randomly) has google branding -> google branding wins

Yahoo search consistently beat them for a few years before Microsoft bought it and turned it into Bing. It doesn't surprise me at all that Yandex is also producing better results.

[simondotau]

I participated in this kind of experiment in 2007 comparing Google to Bing, and ho boy, the Bing results were abysmal.

(Then again Google results today are so abysmal that it wouldn’t surprise me if Bing is now dramatically better.)

[gcanyon]

Even when Bing was specifically advertising their head-to-head site, every time I tried it, google won. I don't remember when this was -- maybe 2012? -- but I tried it at least a dozen times, and Bing didn't win even once.

[bluGill]

2012 was 11 years ago. things have changed, i'm now happy with bing being equal to google. i mostly use duckduckgo.

[tomjen3]

Bing beats Google for certain queries - most notably when I invoke the AI chat.

And that’s going to be the challenge going forward. For non destination queries, that’s those that are not about finding a specific website, ai search is just so much better.

Kagi had a summerize search results at the top of their results page for a long time.

[jasonjmcghee]

Verizon bought Yahoo, not Microsoft- it was never turned into bing. interestingly, a years ago they became independent again.

[tech234a]

To my knowledge, Microsoft never bought Yahoo!, but Yahoo! does use Bing for its searches.

[mypetocean]

Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.

[dazc]

'Yandex is better than Google nowadays.'

I also find x is better than y for some things. I switched to DDG a couple of years and seldom have to revert to Google but, to be fair, results tend to be about the same for most queries, save a few nuances.

Kagi are getting a lot of love around here, likely because they block a few annoying domains and boost some others.

The real problem is the quality of free to access sites generally available and this is a problem that's not so simple to solve.

[devjab]

I switched to Ecoasia when BG3 released and a search for “BG3 wiki” didn’t turn up the actual wiki site on Google. Maybe it’s because it’s on a .wiki subdomain (I’m only 90% sure that’s what it’s at since I haven’t used it for a couple of weeks, but it’s on some “odd” subdomain), but Google returned a plethora of useless wiki sites that were frankly so terrible it hurt. I believe the Duck had largely the same issue, but Ecoasia didn’t.

Anyway, I switched mostly at a joke at first. I had tried replacing Google with DuckDuckGo a few times, and it’s just not good enough. At least not for my searches (and I am Danish, with a work VPN in Holland, so there is that issue to confuse it). Anyway Ecoasia has turned out to be great. I do still use the !g feature once in a while, but far, far, less often than I did on the Duck. It’s actually mostly for when I want to buy stuff since Google is better at listing Danish shops.

[dcow]

Kagi has replaced DDG for me entirely. Now that you get unlimited searches, do you think it would for you, too?

[louthy]

When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched)

Very happy customer here.

[ramenbytes]

When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.

[konfusinomicon]

hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas

[rkagerer]

It actually felt like one of the better pre-Google engines.

[layer8]

It was actually quite good, and I didn’t get the Google hype at the beginning.

[dylan604]

you could always Ask Jeeves if you were looking for things too.

[Paul-Craft]

I used to prefer Dogpile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile

[Croftengea]

Lycos anyone? :)

[claytongulick]

Search in Spitfire BBS or Galacticom anyone?

:-)

[anotheraccount9]

Askjeeves...

[warpspin]

You guys with your newfangled stuff. Archie FTW! :D

[dylan604]

psst, look 3 replies up </hangsHeadInShame>

[niemal_dev]

From the ~5 search queries I have done so far, it's not like "wow" but more like "yes".

[esafak]

Yes, in many ways, such as the proportion of items on the first page of a query response that are relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...

[mrinterweb]

I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective. I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.

[jacobsenscott]

Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.

[palata]

> But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google.

Well the whole point is to pay for the product instead of being the product. I am very happy with Kagi, but I mostly pay to show that there is a market for that business model.

[lostlogin]

Can I encourage you to try it?

It took me a while to get good results with it, as I was so used to skipping the first 4-5 hits as those are always adverts.

They aren’t with Kagi.

[prennert]

you can try it out. They give you 100 free searches.

[_kidlike]

another happy user here. yes it does!

[distract8901]

Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is.

It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now.

I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.

[dcow]

I do think Kagi adds features that improve on what Google offered in its heyday and saying meh there's nothing new doesn't capture the full picture, but I generally understand your vibe.