I have never asked for or even wanted "personalized" results, because on Kagi and everywhere else, personalized is shorthand for "very very poor guesses". It's very frustrating.
disclaimer: I work for Kagi
Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. That is because their database actually knows about the movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar theme, etc. But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement rather than user experience because a small minority will end up watching something from the garbage results while the majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.
With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies.
But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress.
On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that.
Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress.
Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for.
Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.
I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4 of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.
This has never been the case. If it can’t find your title, it’ll display “titles similar to”, right at the head part of your search. No 20 seconds of confirmation needed.
I actually prefer Netflix’ way because if I search for “Demolition Man” and they don’t have it, it might be that I’m in the mood for any <2000s action schlok, and who says I already know about “Escape From New York”?
I searched for "Ted Lasso".
It has grey text "More to explore:", white text "Ted Lasso" and then thumbnail list of different shows, and it's literally just thumbnails, you can't even Ctrl + F and you have to read all the titles in different colored and stylised fonts.
It's as if it is intentionally built in such a way to make it hard to understand that it's really not there.
Edit:
And in TV it says nothing, just gives you the thumbnails and since it takes longer to type you must check after each character whether one of the thumbnails happens to be what you are searching for.
It seems to me "everyone" think it is always about privacy or features or something.
But the main thing that keeps me on Kagi is the results. They seem to have most relevant results and few irrelevant results and if I decide to be specific using doublequotes I get no irrelevant results wrt that word. (And if you find one it is a bug and will be dealt with.)
I have lost enough hours of my life clicking through Google or Bing results that maybe has something relevant to my search.
Edit: I have been beating this drum since matt_cutts was in Google and used to frequent HN and so I think it is relatively clear that Google does not care about the quality of the search results.
A decent search engine should do the same, be able to tell that you're doing something wrong, and do better if you want some answers.
If we balk at AI when it hallucinates, we should balk at search engines when they hallucinate, too.
Kagi does the correct thing, IMHO.
Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.
> This is what any decent search engine should do -- return nothing
WHY?! That's the opposite of it's job!
I have an account with a username that is spelled very similarly to a real word. Google will suggest searching for the real word instead. If you do that though, you'll never find the username!
I'm tired of people saying the computer should not do what I tell it to. It's like children who won't even attempt a multiple choice test because they aren't 100% sure
Hacker News in a nutshell.
I'm saying I don't like high cutoffs of similarity scores. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Very very few queries should have _literally zero results_. Surely you have at least a few words in common with something
I'm saying if you have a query that returns a similarity score, I don't want only results with > 0.1. I want all the results returned
> Then it should suggest a better one and then evaluate the query anyway.
Google does this, and they suck at it, unless you just spelled a word wrong. Do a niche or very specific query, for which Google has no answer and it will, without fail, remove the most relevant keyword and give you a bunch of junk results.
Like search for things you did not search for...?
No the hell not. It should do what I tell it to. For a search engine that is to show me what it has about the query I input. If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it "think" I meant. Not its job.
That's what I said. "then evaluate the query anyway." I should have added "original" to that statement
> If that is nothing, that's what it should show. It should not show me entirely unrelated results, ads, or what it "think" I meant. Not its job.
I'm saying I don't want similarity cutoffs. Most FTS methods involve a similarity score, I'm saying I don't want only results with > 0.1 similarity. I want all of them that were returned.
I'm NOT saying it should somehow inject results that didn't originate from the original FTS query.
It’s terrible but far better than getting 100’s of irrelevant results because Google decided two words out of 10 in your query were the only ones that matter.
I've had queries of copy+pasted errors with zero results, but playing around with it a bit just to find a github result that was only like two words off.
> it’s terrible but far better than getting 100’s of irrelevant results because
Surely the similarity to the one on github would still have it ranked on the first page?
Yes but there's a >0% chance that you'll click on a potentially sponsored link (or a non-sponsored link to a page that itself contains ads) when you instead see a bunch of unrelated results. It makes financial sense to show random results vs not showing anything.