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Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

> Google will return irrelevant results from today rather than relevant results from 10 years ago.

Tip: leave Google behind for now.

That site has the last few years been very useful but only in the same way as my very cheap electrical saw: because I didn't have access to anything better.

For someone who has tried good tools like Festo, Milwaukee, Hitachi or old Google it is just a painful reminder of the past and how good life used to be.

It works but hasn't sparked joy for close to a decade.

After kagi and marginalia came into my life my life has improved significantly.

Note: I'm not saying Googlers are evil or dumb now but I will point out that engineers there have incentives stacked against them.

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It’s very clear Google has censorship and biases. If you search for some subjects you will get vague unrelated results, but legitimate results from say Bing. An example of this is anything related to the sex industry.

I find this with coronavirus as well.

All search engines have some form of implicit bias. An unbiased search engine would be beyond useless at actually finding anything but extremely well specified queries. The trick is to tune the bias to favor results that are interesting and relevant.

This is also why having just one big search engine is a bad idea.

At the very least though, I would expect my search engine to rank results higher, if they contained the words I was looking for, without having to wrap in +"..." every single word. This seems to be something, that few search engines are capable of. Is this very basic thing labeled as "advanced" now?

That's how most search algos work out of the box. Google used to work that way. I agree; it's getting worse. It's not obvious if this is being done purposely but the result is that Google is basically unusable for a lot of searches now.

Google's moved to vector search, which doesn't lend itself to keyword prioritization in the same way classic keyword search does. I think that's 90% of the problem.

So finally I have a name for the utter madness that hit Google a decade ago?

Vector search is that the thing that makes it ignore my search query and search for something else?

Also, is this the problem Bing has?

And is it much much cheaper since they choose to use only use something so utterly ridiculously broken?

Edit: I'm obviously exaggerating heavily here but this has cost me so much time and frustration.

I agree with others: if pages exist that contains the exact matches why don't return them first?

Not bias, deliberate disappearance of specific categories of ideas. Independent blogs and forums not owned by large silicon valley companies have disappeared, for example. So have all discussions of current events, except for "mainstream" news publications.

Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.

Can you give examples of search queries, and blogs and forums that you would expect to show up from those queries?

Here’s an example on Google search:

‘site:4chan.org wuhan’ returns no results ‘site:4chan.org wuhan institute of virology’ returns 1,710 results

Examples?

Don't know what you want to tell us by comparing software tools with hardware tools. Quality hardware tools from the last century are still doing what they are designed for and in professional context even work bettern then most current tools as the old hardware were designed to last.

Point is last fall I had both

- inferior power tools (because I couldn't afford good ones last I bought)

- inferior search tools (because Google has broken itself)

The similarities are that I was stuck with bad tooling and when you know how big the difference is it hurts.

For people who never took advantage of how good Google used to be or who have never used good tools it probably wouldn't hurt as much.

What’s better than Google?

https://kagi.com/

https://search.marginalia.nu/

I just tried "python convert datetime to unix timestamp" on marginalia and it came out with nothing. Kagi I signed up for the beta and I'm on a waitlist.

Still nothing better that Google for me.

Read the how to on marginalia. Edit, it is right beneath the search box and says: [...] A concrete example: How do I cook steak? will probably not be helpful, Steak Recipe will give better results (just Steak is pretty good too).

After that try: python datetime timestamp

or: python convert time

or something similar. Edit: see also marginalias answer next to me.

As I wrote earlier: marginalia is most for fun (although lately I have gotten better results for at least one simple technical query.)

Edit: if a search engine respects your query you can always broaden your query. If a search engine ignores your query you cannot do anything.

Is my memory filling me or is that much closer to how search used to work in the early 00s? I have vague memories of being flabbergasted by someone even trying something like "how to XYZ?" in a search engine.

Yeah, you used to have to think of specific, unique keywords that would appear in the page you were searching for. A lot of people couldn't break the habit of asking questions, so search engines just started accepting it and trying to optimize for it.

> A lot of people couldn't break the habit of asking questions, so search engines just started accepting it and trying to optimize for it.

Which had been totally fine if they hadn't nerfed it for us who knew how to use it.

No, you are right.

This is the way anyone with a clue would approach search until Google broke it: search for words or phrases within the page.

I always search as such:

"perfect steak recipe"

"perfect grilled chicken"

and such... typically resulting in the best results.

"R53 mini cooper fuel filter"

reduce the words to the core of the question, and get good results.

I distinctly remember terming my searches as questions. I was young and this was back pre Google so I was using Ask Jeeves. Naturally if you're asking someone something you would phrase it as a question, so in my mind it made sense to ask it that way.

Wasn't that the whole premise of Ask Jeeves? And then much later, Wolfram Alpha awed with that same 'plain language' functionality?

I got access to the Kagi beta a week or so back, and have been daily-driving it as my default search engine ever since.

I've only ever "fallen back" to Google for a small handful of searches since then, and only out of curiosity for what it might look like in comparison to the Kagi results.

Although it's only been a small amount of time, I'm sticking with Kagi for now because the search results are at least on par with Google's, and significantly less encumbered by Google's SERP dark patterns.

Yeah it's not quite the sort of query it's good at. It's more geared toward discovery than answering questions. You can answer that particular question if you tune the query a bit though.

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+un...

Has this as the first result, though:

http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-con...

You're right. It works better when I think "hard keyword search" than what I'm used to with DDG and Google. I tried "python super classmethod" and got here: https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3135/ which perfectly answered my question.

Isn't it beautiful that something so amazing can run on a standard tower PC in a living room in Sweden?

Holding up against a HN hug of death last month, providing an absolutely refreshing search experience!

I just tried on Kagi, this was the result: https://imgur.com/a/Ds1YTf5 I've been using Kagi for a little while now, honestly, it's been pretty great.

Kagi for serious stuff (work, health). I've no idea how since they build mostly on Google and Bing but something they do makes an enormous difference.

Marginalia for fun stuff.

> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.

Kagi seems to use both Google and bing results and will cost a minimum of $10 a month. Seems like the worst of all worlds to me. It’s a good option I suppose for those who want to pay.

That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google but manages to get good results!

I've recently seen queries answered on Kagi that returns utter rubbish when I paste the exact same queries into Google or DDG.

I don’t see what’s magical about taking results from other sites lol. What happens if bing and Google block them?

I’m skeptical of their privacy policy as well, given that you need an account and have to pay, it’s unlikely they don’t know your searches.

They are paying for API access, not scraping results. Why would they be blocked?

Where did you see that they’re paying for API access? Their FAQ says that they’re making anonymized requests but don’t go into more details than that.

That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them?

In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors.

Happy to be proven wrong.

If they were just illegitly scraping results, they could not provide any kind of consistency in quality as they would be getting blocked on and off. And the small search engines like DDG, Startpage, Ecosia, etc have been making these kinds of deals for more than a decade and with more users than Kagi is likely to ever have without having their contracts terminated due to "too much traction".

Late but I have texted a number of times with the Kagi team and they do pay for API access.

>That's the magic part, it uses Bing and Google

That's the part I want to avoid. Build your own crawlers and stop relying on Google. Google already has enough control over the internet, I do not want a search engine that's just downstream of them.

Ok. I see. But I cannot do that.

I can however use a search engine that doesn't mock me and second guess me all the time and that tries to anonymize me.

But I agree very much with you.

If someone launches a search engine that works as well as Kagi and doesn't use either Google or Bing I'll happily pay a premium for that on top of of what I have already said I am willing to pay for Kagi.

Edit: In fact I already support a search engine with an independent index.

They are still a startup. If they can get the users/money, eventually depending on Google will be a risk/too expensive, and they'll start crawling themselves.

Define better first.

If by better you mean supporting a competitive market that doesn't strengthen the monopoly Google has on search and their results which, as years go by, are augmented for their benefit but not yours, then anything is better than Google.

If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. That being said, when it comes to tech, with most answers found in open git issues or stackoverflow, i find brave search sufficient. So much so that i haven't used any of Google's services in over a year.

The real question is, what are you willing to compromise? There's an in-between for the two extremes above and the choice is subjective.

An exciting alternative is https://neeva.com/ I'll happily pay money for a privacy oriented search engine as i do for email, cloud storage and NextCloud. We shouldn't expect things to be given to us for free. I work, they work, we can do a fair trade with some iou derivatives.

Neeva signups are bizarrely region locked. I get that there may be some local results for some kinds of searches, but that's easily handled with a banner in results for geo searches that states "local results aren't available in your area yet", rather than locking much of the world out of the service.

> If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king.

Hasn't been true since at least December. Kagi is better now by almost an order of magnitude.

Of course my Google is not your Google. Still I have experimentdd so much with Google over so many years, logged in, logged out, from multiple addresses that I am confident in saying that it hasn't been itself for a decade and finally now we have a better alternative.

> Of course my Google is not your Google.

And that's the main problem with the new Google.

> neeva

A website that requires me to sign up to see what their premium account may cost ... this sounds pretty scammy to me.

Also not available in my region.

Straight from the playbook of big film ;-)

I was excited for Neeva at first. But then I saw the premium includes some kind of NFT trash attached to it. I'll take my money elsewhere. I signed up for the Kagi beta and am hoping it will be better.

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