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
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don’t need to spend money on quality, because we’re all locked into using Google search. It’s cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we’d still prefer Google.
It’s been easily 15 years since I thought Google search was good.
It was not long after the SSL thing that it became actively garbage. that was what, 2018?
But yeah, it’s been bad since at least 2012.
Google 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.
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.
There is an add-on for Firefox that blocks certain domains from coming up in search results.
Super fucking helpful to block amazon
Its called u blacklist
It takes Googles results and filters out the crap and orders results differently…
It uses more than just Google’s, FYI.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
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.
Kagi uses Google’s search engine?? I didn’t know that, I thought they’d created their own search engine. If Google blocks Searx, why don’t they block Kagi?
Kagi pays Google for API access. They also query other sources of data as well as their own index.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html#external
I 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.
Search.brave.com ain’t bad
Too bad brave’s CEO is a giant bigoted piece of shit who I refuse to support.
Damnit. Okay, what’s the next best Chromium based browser? I love Firefox but I have to keep a Chromium browser on hand for the few sites FF just doesn’t handle properly.
You know he isn’t retrieving the results personally?
Pieces of shit exist in most companies.
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.
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.
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
Their business needs steady cashflows. You pay for the up time, not the queries.
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.
Fuck off with your ads for a paid search engine.
You’re accusing Cory Doctorow, the guy who invented the phrase “enshittification”, of making a blog post that’s really an advert…? Really???
You are paying to use Google, with all your data feeding their advertising machine.
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
