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Comment by bombela | Hacker News Reader

> This system reduces search engine quality for users and drives up advertiser expenses. Google can get away with it because these manipulations are imperceptible to the user and advertiser

I sure have been noticing. At this point finding anything on the web feels like a lost cause.

Besides duckduckgo (bing) which is not even that great either. What other option do we have?

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Kagi search is a paid search engine that delivers higher quality results with no ads. I'm currently using the free trial (you get 100 searches for free) and enjoying it.

https://kagi.com/

Also been really enjoying Kagi, just converted to the $10/mo unlimited searches plan even before my trial ran out because it's such a breath of fresh air!

$10/mo seems really reasonable if its actually that much better than google

This also gives you access to some of their AI tools, such as being able to summerize the results of your search using their quick answer feature.

This is something Google can't and won't do because they, and the people they depend on, would lose too much ad revenue. This is going to be a future problem as we transition to AI and AI assisted search for information retrieval.

It's amazing. I searched for a recipe and didn't end up with some bloggers life story.

How does a search engine control this? Did it extract it? Does it search some recipe database instead? I'm confused how using Kagi netted this as this seemed to just be a defect from SEO. Is it just that Kagi doesn't promote pages like that so you end up getting the ones that don't have it?

No, it just had an allrecipes result at the top. Maybe they mark some recipe websites as good? Maybe they put less importance on quantity of text. Maybe they are not motivated to send me to a page where I need to scroll through a blog post (and ads) to get to the ingredients/steps.

One of the things they do is have the number of trackers on a website affect its ranking (negatively). I imagine that is an effective signal in cases like this.

Kagi also uses Bing

According to this page [1], they do use external sources (Google, Mojeek, Yandex and more), but not Bing ;)

They also have their (two) own indexes.

Tbh, for me (as small town dev) it feels like magic how fast those different sources are combined, additionally with user search preferences like raising or blocking certain domains. Insides welcome :)

Edit: Here [2] are some benchmarks and general strategies they pursue. Would love to read more details.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-speed.html

Crowdsourcing on Reddit, gone are the days when you could answer a question with ‘let me google that for you.’ So you’ll see the same questions appear repeatedly in subreddits as previous answers are lost.

Personally, I maintain an extensive bookmark hierarchy and a collection of rss feeds. I also buy more books instead of reading blogs. medium.com with their subscription baiting articles are PiHoled as the signal to noise ratio is so low that I find it’s a net negative.

I’m also looking forward to locally running a LLM as my own personal search engine.

the SEO folks are starting to pollute reddit threads, too.

The Reddit redesign hid the sidebar, where many subreddits had a FAQ. Now, only that tiny percentage that uses old.reddit.com will see the FAQ, Wiki and all those other treasure troves of information the community had built up. I suspected – and continue to suspect – that Reddit wants the same questions to appear over and over again, as that seems like the very definition of engagement.

I have also seen mods claim that when people post a question, it isn’t necessarily because they couldn’t answer it themselves, but because they’re just seeking interaction with other members of the community. Therefore, old-school net users who refer people to FAQs are cruelly denying them an outlet for socializing.

Browsing with a Pihole really is eye-opening for the "drives up advertiser expenses" bit; I'll Google a thing, click the (very subtle) ad, get a Pihole block, then go down to the actual first result to get to the same spot.

Right? Google target. Top results: ads for target. Halfway down the page? The search result which goes to the same place. Why would I need or want to click the ad if I know exactly where I'm trying to go?

Yandex works VERY WELL for me for general stuff. Goods, reviews, piracy, etc. All super nice.

Things that are location-based do bad, cause they're Russian. They optimize for Russian location stuff.

Brave search is really good, its my main search engine, and i found it to be better than kagi with better AI integration.

They are also integrating their own chat ai which is also privacy respecting.

Try Yandex and Kagi. First for breadth, second for depth

How is Yandex, whose stock stopped being traded on the day of the Russian war, is still able to browse the entire Western universe? I’m not expressing a moral opinion, just surprised the West lets them do it.

They are based in EU actually))) Afaik the ru part is a 'subsidiary', at least on paper

None of the (Western) sanctions include widespread internet blocks/filtering, nor would it really be to the West's benefit to do so.

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