[onlyrealcuzzo]

It really shows you what a bubble HN is.

Every post about Google for years has been people saying it's terrible and dead.

Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Even within Google, about a year ago, everyone was saying that Google was dead because of Perplexity, which is barely a blip.

It's kind of shocking to see DuckDuckGo is only about 1%, with everything you hear and how much you hear it within certain bubbles.

[jorams]

> Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Not that I'd expect them high up on the list, but Kagi sends the following response header:

    Referrer-Policy: same-origin

As a result the browser won't send a Referer header with outgoing links, completely excluding them from this report.

[jeffbee]

Even if they could technically show up in the logs, we know that their MAUs are 5-6 orders of magnitude lower than Google's, from their own claims.

[freediver]

To be exact, we are about 8 seconds worth of Google daily queries :) [1]

Not much, but each one of those deliberate & paid.

[1] https://kagi.com/stats?stat=queries

[aidenn0]

If my math is right, that would put it between Lilo and Startpage in the rankings

[brookst]

I’d argue that HN sentiment is a leading indicator, not a claim of current reality.

Compared to a year ago, Google has declined from 89.487% to 88.915%. Just half a percent, but IMO it will accelerate.

Meanwhile OpenAI has gone from 0.194% to 0.226% in just three months (they weren’t on previous quarter’s reports).

Sure, it’ll be years before Google drops to 50%. But it will happen.

[gkbrk]

Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.

It's not a charity, if people truly preferred Google results over defaults, Google wouldn't give out tens of billions of dollars to be the default.

[tanaros]

> Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.

It is a widely held belief that users don’t change the defaults, and I’m not asserting it’s wrong in general, but why doesn’t it apply to web browsers?

As an (unhappy) Windows user, I note that Microsoft pushes Edge aggressively, with each major Windows update “helpfully” offering to “optimize my computer” by making it the default browser again. However, Edge market share is only ~12% on desktop [0], despite the fact it is significantly more work to install Chrome than it is to change a mere default setting. Is that just because desktop users are more willing to jump through hoops?

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

[gkbrk]

Chrome didn't get its marketshare out of thin air either. It paid other software to be bundled just like malware apps, and automatically configured itself to be the default browser.

It also prominently advertised itself on the Google home page, which would probably cost many many billions of dollars if a non-Google browser wanted to do the same thing. On top of that, if you used another modern browser like Firefox, Google websites had popups that you should upgrade your outdated browser to Chrome.

Once Chrome on desktop was popular, then came the "oopses". [1] Accidentally breaking Google websites on non-Chrome browsers left and right.

After Android became popular, it's not hard to guess which browser they shipped by default on millions of devices. Device manufacturers weren't allowed to remove Chrome if they wanted to have working Google Play Services and access to the Google Play Store. I think recently in the EU manufacturers are allowed to remove Chrome and keep Play Services because Google got fined 4 billion euros.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

[EbNar]

> Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)

Being at least 10€/month for the only "useful" tier is a powerful reason for that...

Maybe also Kagi being a metasearch engine reduces its visibility? Just speculating, I obviously don't know how it really works.

[chrisweekly]

My Kagi account is $5 (USD)/ mo and it is VERY useful.

[EbNar]

I meant that only starting from 10 $. You get unlimited searches. I'd burn these in a few days, as I rely heavily on my search engine.

Fortunately, I have been able to join a family on sharesub and get "unlimited" for basically half the price. Actually, it's a great search engines, with lots of goodies. I really hope it gets more adoption.

[toast0]

> Every post about Google for years has been people saying it's terrible and dead.

They are terrible, but that doesn't mean anybody else is good or better. And being better at search isn't enough anyway [1]. Also, when you give Google less of your searches, personalization drops off and it gets even worse, but most people give all their searches to google so they see the benefit of personalization if they compare.

[1] When Yahoo did user research on search, one of their findings was that if you asked users which results were better, there was a strong and consistent preference towards results that were shown as Google results, regardless of the actual results. It's been forever since I saw those reports, so I don't remember the numbers, and the numbers are likely different today anyway, but that's a huge barrier to adoption that you have to manage.

[gregates]

One of the things I pay Kagi for is to avoid the "benefit" of personalization.

[toast0]

I mean, there's "benefits", but there's also benefits. A lot of computer words are also words in other contexts. At least when I stopped using Google search as my primary search, it had figured out I wanted the computer words. That's pretty useful, and I kind of miss it.

[mgh2]

Is it a though? Just bc 99% of population don’t notice or care about misinformation, does it mean the majority consensus is right?

Which do you think is more abundant, lies or truths?