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Comment by drunner | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, is it possible to search the internet while ignoring content farms these days? Just trying to find information on any kind of consumer product is insanely difficult to do these days when there are thousands of "best 10 x" sites in the results.

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Used the Kagi trial. Even without any custom filters it had much less SEO garbage than Google.

Or just pay the $10/month to Kagi, for search results that aren't garbage.

Kagi lets you exclude websites entirely, so… yes with an asterisk that you have to put some legwork in to fully do so.

Would be cool if Kagi had a way to share, or to locate others lists.

They do publish global leaderboards.

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

Pinterest is the real MVP for most hated and most prevalent SEO spam.

I would say 7 of the top 10 are just Pinterest, but it’s really 7 of the top 7. Yeesh.

I assume you mean excluding individual websites; though the idea of a search engine ignoring all websites is pretty amusing... (maybe you still get hits from Usenet posts?)

Yeah, that’s the legwork you have to do. Honestly it’s probably not much legwork but if filters like this were more prevalent in say Google for example, it would turn into a cat and mouse game very quickly between search engine users and blogspam.

Yeah, I feel like the reason Kagi works is because google still delivers the majority of results to these sites. If Kagi one day becomes dominant, the filters will cease to work as you said.

It's more... about the user having that control, not the service provider. I would wager it would still work all the same.

Perhaps, some websites would stop being so hostile if they were considered as such and blocked by a higher percentage of users :)

you mean you don't like Pinterest search results?

Kagi needs to be able to exclude sites with Amazon affiliate links. That's the only reason people create those awful "Best X of 2023" sites.

I've seen a lot of people on here mention Kagi, a paid search engine that supposedly filters out results and makes search useful again etc. but no idea if anyone actually uses it and enjoys it or if they were just astroturfing shills.

I've been a happy subscriber since the beginning. People have been talking about Kagi for a while. The devs have released a lot of figures on their blog blog.kagi.com and the feedback website is very active too. kagifeedback.org

Ive been using it for around 40 days to test. So far i like it, i do not notice much difference versus google in general. But i also got to bump quality sites in my niche up the listings (and reddit). So far i dig it

Happy paying user here. Managed to even convert some friends to it.

I like it. It’s a little behind google sometimes like with very breaking news, but for most of my day to day it’s a massive improvement.

The also display list articles separately from other sites, which is very refreshing

> It’s a little behind google sometimes like with very breaking news

I view this as a feature, as I find my mental health improves the less I am tuned in to current events that are not explicitly relevant to my job or hobbies.

I’ve been a happy subscriber to Kagi ever since Neeva shut down. Kagi is much faster and yields better results for the kinds of queries I make. The domain filtering really makes a big difference.

I've been using it almost exclusively since February of this year. It's pretty nice to be able to being able selectively bias searches yourself.

Huge Kagi fan. Daily driver for last six months

Even if you could block sites the issue fundamentally is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Ironically YouTube is what some use since any video that features a person reviewing the product is at least guaranteed to not be from a bot.

AI generated content will change that.

Maybe, but unlike websites it’s easy to see the “reputation” of a given YouTuber by looking at past videos and the comments at least.

For now, until content farms of chatgpt-style comments and upvotes network together.

There generally just isn't a lot of organic content to be found for those types of queries. Best hope is reddit or similar enthusiast watering holes, but not every product category has a strong enthusiast community.

Add "reddit" to your query. That's pretty much it.

Or “site:reddit.com” for more accuracy. You can define a search prefix or text replacement for it.

brave search is pretty good about removing those.

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