I find all the kagi mentions to be very suspicious
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It’s not, really, I switched from Google some years ago and had accepted my faith with DuckDuckGo, but then tried out Kagi. I use search so much daily for work, the relief of getting quality results again is immense and probably saves me hours per week. I get much better results from Kagi than I got at the end from Google, and I can tune them to my liking:
- block Pinterest results when I search for images,
- downprioritize shopping results,
- rewrite all Reddit links to go to old.reddit.com,
- unamp google AMP links
- summarize long texts / documents
- quick answer from the top 5 results
..and so on and so on. It’s just so effective.
I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.
I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I'm not comfortable with some of their ways (I don't want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don't like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.
Still, it's the best search I've found, and I'm paying every month until I find something better. It's worth it.
If I had stock/investments in a search engine, you better fucking believe Id also have a bunch of bots crawling for the terms "What is the best search engine" and immediately hijack the convo with bots upvoting my search engine.
I cannot explain how easy it is to do this.
I'm glad I'm finally not the only one feeling this way. I've been seeing them aggressively pushed seemingly out of the blue for months now. Especially for what is such an awful deal and zero evidence to their claims, just citing the marketing page at face value.
Technically the best one was Altavista.
But they are long gone because they came from the old academic & idealistic internet and they never learned to survive in that internet where money rules.
From a very old memory, Google blew AltaVista out of the water no?
I mean we all switched for a reason and it wasn’t the cute logo.
I believe yahoo killed altvista before google came and finished it off
Altavista was ahead of their time. The modern internet desperately needs a technical search engine.
Many people keep asserting that DuckDuckGo is as useless as Google, but I haven’t had a single issue with it. Could it be a regional thing?
DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.
I’ve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.
I don't live in the US and the regional results for my country are worse on DuckDuckGo than on Google.
But still, I noticed Google's quality drastically falling down in recent years.
It is as useless. After all, it's just Bing. But if the results are good enough for you, then why bother finding something else.
Here are some options I use in my rotation.
Brave Search (skip the browser)
Mojeek
Qwant (French)
Yandex (Russian)
Mullvad Leta (Mullvad VPN subscription required)
MetaGer (German meta search)
Startpage (Private Google results)
DuckDuckGo (Private Bing results)
SearXNG and similar self hosted options are awesome, but I’ve found them unreliable.
Be skeptical of Kagi… It’s promoted pretty heavily around here for something that’s not FOSS.
I'm convinced at this point that Kagi is astroturfing on Lemmy, it's unnatural. All they do is just cite the marketing page when questioned about the quality, or as to why they supposedly think it's worth paying for compared to much more mature as-driven services that do respect your privacy.
Yandex was way better for searches in russian sources, but it came to shit just like google and also excludes whatever russian government don't like at that point. I searched for some software in it multiple timea and the first link was some noname, probably malware site. It also promotes it's own malware like browser with questionable russian security sertificates and their own Alexa. I'd honestly not include it in any list.
I like DDG and don't switch from it that much. I've also heard Kagi as paid search engine is good, but I've never tried it.
I've found duckduckgo works fine for things that aren't recent.
Controversially the bing gpt chat bot works alarming well.
I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.
For everyone who uses searxng, is it great for day to day browsing? Do I require to host my own instance or the setup is as easy as requiring to add "searxng" option on my browser app?
I'm interested to move away from google as it becomes shitty everyday and loses its effectiveness for advanced query (based on my own result compared during 2013 up to pre covid). Bing have weird result on my region so cannot use it, ddg only for occasional use.
Thanks!
pick a host from searx.space
Might be a good idea to bookmark this too because sometimes some hosts go down.
Is "super SEO sites" a catch all term for those 99% filler websites that have a tomato soup recipe (in theory) but actually start out with, "Historical evidence seems to suggest that the tomato was first cultivated in the territory that would eventually become Guam back in 1464..."
I've wondered if we had a common reference term for those? I wish it didn't have a positive connotation though...
Even though there's a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. -- does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that's been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.
EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.
Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so I’m not too bothered by it.
I've heard a lot of great things about Kagi, though the search limit and subscription is a little off-putting. A self-hosted Kagi would be amazing though!
Kagi has a free trial, 100 searches for free, so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.
Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?
Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.
I'm worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.
Don't get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.
Kagi is the highest quality for sure. There isn't a better one, I have tried all of them except perplexity, and that's more like chat gpt rather than search.