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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

What’s better than Google?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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 ;-)

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.

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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