I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.
Discussed with nearly 900 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
I tried again in the local language and now I see some product ad results for buying a massage ball, but then it's back to the video results and sports blogs showing how to use them. That seems OK. Probably most people searching for massage balls do want to buy one or are very likely to do so soon.
I dunno, seems like they're both pretty good pages of results.
With searxng, searching at least works. It also has plugins that I think can do some of what Kagi is useful for (but it depends on the instance)
I can't speak for image searching, but I found when I get limited results from Kagi, The other search engines that produce More results just pad those results with noise. Sometimes I'll do a specific search and have no results on Kagi, so I switched to another engine justified I have thousands of unrelated results
Yeah, that's been an increasing problem.. Google has been especially bad with this for a while now.
When I tried to search for something where I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, I could only change my query so many times until it stopped being what I wanted.
Your comment - honestly, hand on heart, I can’t remember the last time I paged through beyond the first page of any search engine. I didn’t even know Kagi had this “problem” and so I guess I just don’t see it as a problem. But then I realised I’m absolutely in that bit of “must be on first page” internet lore, too…
Took me a while before I actually realized this limitation as well. I started noticing it when I was searching for things I didn't know exactly how to find.
Kagi is great for when you know exactly what to find and have a general idea of where, but when you actually need those n-page results to help you refine your search, and you can't, it's a showstopper for me.
I'm not even sure why it's a limitation. It might not be intentional?
The declining quality of Google's search results is greatly over exaggerated.
Oh wait, you meant Google _product_. You want Google to cater to its product needs by sacrificing own money making potential and limiting its actual users.
All I'm saying is that Google should consider allowing users to explicitly state their intent, since some queries ("massage ball" and "managed switch") are ambiguous and so the intent cannot always be reliably inferred. Analogy: while type inference works well in many cases, there are situations where explicit typing is required because the type is ambiguous based on usage alone.
The same deal with the ads. Advertiser wouldn't pay for advertising of their product in a region or to a demograph they don't care for.
I'd be more surprised if you did get the same result as parent.
Anyway, this is how google explains it:
> Search uses personalization to improve results
> Personalization is when you get Search results tailored to you based on your activity.
Location affects a lot more results than personalization, but that is also very query dependent, so certain queries are affected by the location a lot more than others. And the particular example query is one that you can expect very little location variation.
That said, I'll also second the back mechanic book for anyone with back pain.
Just Option+Space and get the answer with ChatGPT for MacOS.
No ads, no nonsense, just the answer.
5 - 10% of the time that answer will be complete rubbish.
We need something better than Google and LLMs e.g. Golden before it was acquired: https://golden.com
3rd organic link is a 404. And the rest of the links are either not timely e.g. from 2016 or niche e.g. for Telehealth.
Also it is not location aware so mention of Bestbuy even when not from US.
But as a default, it gives mostly "SEO-optimized" answers in a SEO-optimized format. Even simple question are answered with bullet points. Some descriptions look like advertisements and it's all very authoritative, even when it's just bullshitting/guessing and doesn't really know the answer for sure. This is what I was escaping from.
EDIT: For example the last thing I asked was how Brendan O'Brien did sample replacement in drums in Blood Sugar Sex Magic. It answered something that was 90% plausible but most of the content was walls and walls of text about the equipment it assumed it was used (plus info on more equipment unrelated to sample replacement), rather than actually answering the question itself.
I’m not an llm advocate but responses like this bring to mind the “no wireless. Less storage than a nomad. Lame” reaction to the iPod.
That's how it has always been for purely human-generated content, too.