Does Kagi give a similar impression as Google did then?
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.
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...
Pinterest is a scourge on the modern web, worse than any other.
(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)
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.
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.
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??
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
> 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.
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)
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...
[0] - https://tecadmin.net/get-current-date-time-javascript/#:~:te...
I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.
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)?
The best kind of search engine is the kind that can read your mind (by inferring your intention or something)
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.
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.
"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
When I came as far as "mixspeling" however it came back with the same result as the one I pasted in above.
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
https://kagi.com/search?q=%22casues+of+the+civil+war%22&r=us...
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.
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
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
Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
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.
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.
Obviously you can also use an ad blocker, but I think DuckDuckGo deserves more credit for making it a first-party option.
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.
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...
Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.
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.
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?
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.
But what I can't stand is the self perceived moral superiority of people who are like "haha, lottery is for idiots!"
Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.
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.
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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?
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.
The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Here's their current list of offices:
https://yandex.com/jobs/locations/
So, maybe? (Better than "definitely", though...)
- 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.
(Then again Google results today are so abysmal that it wouldn’t surprise me if Bing is now dramatically better.)
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.
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.
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.
Very happy customer here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...
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.
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.
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.