Sometimes I wonder how much better the internet would be hits on Google weren't directly tied to revenue from Google itself through its ad program. I am certain Google has made the internet and the world a worse place to live.
Quite a bit.
So much that now that I have what "everyone" asked Google for for years - that is blacklists - I hardly use them.
Why? Because with Kagi I get much better results out of the box.
I am fairly sure Googlers will tell me there are multiple safeguards to prevent the inclusion of Google ads from affecting ranking, to which I just have to say that the results speak for themselves.
Please note: I have only used Kagi for two years. I am only one user. But I am a user with 20 years of experience with Google and that got to count for something.
And if you use it I am happy, that gives Kagi an incentive to keep it around.
I'm just saying that for me the results are so good out of the box that with a couple of exceptions I never had to block anything.
I don't know how people keep talking about it. The results, as you say, speak for themselves.
I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.
I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned.
Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
Kagi is pretty clear about how they do what they do: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... You're half right, except that Google is not a vertical that they leverage for their index. Their solution works for me, but I'm also a techy. Anecdotally, my partner uses it, and she is not a techy.
> Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
The only way this statement applies (to me) is if you can optimize for Kagi. The only way I can think of to do that is organically, but admittedly I haven't put much effort into it because the magic of Kagi's flavor of search is that it puts me in near proximity to information density and sources that I already trust. The real proving grounds for Kagi are a decade out.
>Kagi is known for delivering a unique flavor of high-quality search results, sourced from our own web index (internally named "Teclis") and news index (internally named "TinyGem").
The marketing at least is pretty good -- I haven't seen this many committed devotees since the iPhone was announced.
But here on the ground, I can type a few queries and reveal that Kagi is the same shit as Google. Perhaps you are seeing some manually adjusted queries?
P.S. there are lots of other concerns about Kagi too, I'm just talking about the search https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
Here on the ground in Norway I just say "lucky you" if Google serves the same results as Kagi.
My experience is Google expands my search terms beyond recognition and I am absolutely and utterly fed up with starting to read an article about a problem I searched for, getting a result from a trustworthy site, starting to read only to realize Google secretly behind my back expanded my search from "unpopular-ancient-javascript-framework-from-2021" to "currently-popular-js-framework-with-kinda-similar-name".
My time is valuable. Not having to babysit my search engine is something I happily pay for.
Could probably get my employer to pay for it too.
If Google by some miracle has you in an experimental group where they don't mess with your queries, or if you have time to babysit it - more power to you.
I am only saying Kagi is just as shitty as Google for my queries and certainly is using their index based off the 30 or so searches I made. I am not in a technical niche however, so maybe they're using something different for that or you saw a manually-adjusted query?
But for the regular, everyday people queries, yeah 100% it's just google bro.
Let me also clarify: I am absolutely not denying that Kagi uses Googles index.
I am just pointing out that for some reason when I search with Google I get lots and lots of results for things I didn't search for. For a while I kept them away by sprinkling doublequotes everywhere but the last few years, no amount of double quotes or even the verbatim operator works anymore.
With Kagi however not only does doublequotes work (for now at least), - I usually don't even need to apply them, my queries work just like they used to do in "old" Google back in 2009.
That is what I pay Kagi for.
I can be totally open that for what I know the reason might be as simple as the fact that Kagis API access gets results directly from Googles search API without passing through what I think of as a "search broadening" function and without applying A/B testing experiments to the results that come back.
I don't care. I get my results.
And if someone come along and present a better alternative that uses only their own independent index, I'll be inclined to pay even more just because I'd love to see it. (I was a marginalia supporter for months and might become again in the future.)
And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.
I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then
Kagi is kind of like Google in 2009, seriously good coverage, good ranking
... but also:
- more modern
- more features (summarizer, bangs like in DDG, FastGPT and probably a few I forgot)
- blocklists for websites (and also options to pin, raise and lower)
- with actual support: report a bug and you get an answer from a real engineer, a follow up when it is fixed and a shout out in the relevant release notes
- no tracking
If I were a rich man, I would probably keep my subscription just to support a Google competitor. Alas, I'm not, and so I'll be going back to Google.
Did you try blocking the problematic sites and if it didn't work, did you file support requests?
I didn't on support requests, either, perhaps I should. I have before, and the team did a great job at addressing what wasn't working.
While these situations could be a pg-style astroturf submarine, or they could be satisfied customers (the best kind of advertising), I wouldn't necessarily say fishy (you can look at the satisfied users' previous contributions to make that judgment yourself! :)).
Personally, I've not used Kagi, but I hear positive things from people I trust that use it. So I'll likely try it in the future.
Also, none of these accounts saying nice things appear to be bots or kagi-focused in any way, so I think it's safe to assume they do actually just like it.
Kagi has a free trial, but you have to pay, which is the difference between it and early Google.
Of course, now we have Google ads instead, so who knows, maybe not bots.
I am definitely not a bot.
I am however extremely fed up with Google. And equally thankful that I have found something that works as well as old Google (or better).
The alternative is Searx and I may try it sometimes, but so far Kagi is cheap and very efficient for me (C++ coding and other languages).
From the website about: "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
(Other standard lenses include
- Forums
- Fediverse forums
- Usenet/archive
and I think 7 others.)
They're just reselling google searches. With maybe 1% salted in from elsewhere for deniability.
Or at least I thought so?
But with Kagi you can always lower github results if you want to. Or boost other sites that you prefer.
If that is true why hasn't Bing noticed it?
The github bias in google results is huge compared to bing. Just try running the same search on both sites. I find it hard to believe that the Bing engineers simply haven't noticed this.
That because there's a chance Kagi will become bad, there's no point in using it now and thus we should stick to Google, which is already bad? That doesn't make sense.
The same line of thought can be applied to anything. We don't know what will happen in the future, therefore we can't be sure that things won't go bad. Is there even a way to have such a guarantee?
Assuming I don't want to use Google (because it's bad) and I won't use Kagi or Perplexity or others (because they might become bad), what's the realistic solution? Roll my own search engine? I don't have resources and I don't trust the future me to maintain it.
If the way you make money is by convincing people to pay, you are highly incentivised to make the product good, especially where there are many other free competitors who are ad supported.
Well duh. Because it's the only value you're allowed to collect from retail customers without having to deal with either chargebacks or kyc.
We've deliberately made every other form of micropayment infeasible. It shouldn't be surprising that the only one left is insanely popular.
You might lose some people, but probably not many - we've been conditioned to really accept ads everywhere.
If they do become bad then at least I have had a fantastic search engine for another few years of my life like I had from 2002 until 2009 ish.
And also, already at this point, they and marginalia has proven that it isn't impossible to enter the search engine marked even now. This was long considered impossible, at least here on HN.
Even if they got 100 million active paying users it’d still be a tiny fraction of overall search traffic.
In the beginning, Kagi was mostly just API calls to Google and Bing AFAIK. Their results were still better for some reason, probably because they didn't have to consider how valuable the ads on garbage site were before throwing the site out of my results.
But I fear that if a large search engine copied some of Kagi's filters/lenses for non-commercial blogs & forums then SEO agencies would dedicate immense resources to polluting them.
People will target Kagi because it's packed to the brim with people who have $5-10/month to spend on a search engine, and likely have $5-10/month to spend on other things too.
No matter what, whatever we ended up with was going to be shitty and exploitive.
I made my decision two years ago and I would probably do it even if it was just on par with Google, to support competition and to avoid supporting Google.
But in hindsight it is just exeptionally much better. There is no going back unless Kagi does something monumentally stupid.
It might be that I rely a lot on precise queries and doublequoted words and also cannot get myself to use the conversational style that at least Google seems to prefer now.
I'm still happy to put my money where my mouth is and do pay for services which are genuinely useful to me. But this is not the kind of internet I imagined when growing up.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
Then, now, it is like media before the 90s: you need to pay a lot of money to be in the center page of the newspaper.
But, hopefully we are talking about LLMs now, seems like one of the answers to search engines in general. Beyond AI, I see LLMs as a good evolution from PageRank.
A little bit general but lately I use the expression: "Complexity as Scam". Google always pointed to their "algorithms" and played with this term as if algorithms couldn't be adjusted to whatever you want to be. Initially the coined term was sound because it was based on a scientific paper and eventually it evolution but it seems like the PageRank original idea has detoured from being a "pure" graph algorithm.
Another context where I use "Complexity as Scam" is Web3. It is like Matryoshka dolls where there is always one more step of complexity to probe a point, but it never ends.
A barrier whose erosion has been well documented over the last 10 years.
Google search was taken over by an ambitious clique of failed yahoo managers that successfully destroyed their former company for their own financial advantage then did the same at google.
Acting as parasites on society at large.
Google and the ad ecosystem they acquired was basically the flywheel that spurred content creation at scale. Anyone could jump in, follow a few guidelines and earn a living by producing content on the internet. The Youtube acquisition and monetization followed the same pattern.
Over time the market consolidated and got less and less competitive: less platforms with complete control of traffic and one-sided revenue sharing agreements. The guidelines so to speak on how content should look and feel like were algorithmically made stricter and stricter until everything looks, feels, sounds and reads the same.
The problem right now is that the platforms are still tightening their grip, and it's all tied to the approach of using AI to replace the content creators on the platforms from Google to Spotify to Meta, and carving the spared money to shareholders. And while the web has been shitty for a few years now, we're now seeing a sudden drop in quality because the average user has no recourse or alternative, and neither does the average creator have the means of distribution and monetization (not just publishing, that's been solved) to even find, let alone meet the new kinds of demand.
I'm certain that in a few years this will even out: new search engines, new aggregators and new feeds will emerge, but the content - money - network problem triangle remains as a fundamental problem of the internet.
The internet is boring. And the trash is still there. Its just become reputable instead.
Can you expand on how a card catalog improved the world? As a kid I used the card catalog a lot, both the physical version and the later electronic versions. Full text search definitely leads to pulling in information from a wider selection of sources.
I remember a lot of stratification of news sources pre-Google (which news channel you watched, which papers/magazines you read). Did Google cause reliance on one source of information, or does Google simply exist in a world where people tend towards echo chambers? How would Alta Vista have improved that?
i was lamenting the library recently and remembered how books were organized on shelves using the dewey decimal system
this meant that if you knew of one book that has something you're looking for, you can find all the _other_ books about the same topic right next to the first book, even if you knew nothing about the contents of the related books
I think the curious crazy tid bits are still there.
I have used Google since probably 2001-2002 sometime and a number of other search engines before. It is rather obvious to me and I have writing and screenshots from around the time quality took a dive that supports it.
Back then I think people mostly agreed that the results that ranked on top in Google generally were there because of criteria that benefited the end user.
I mean, even as crazy as Google results has been the last few years they have still managed to be better than Bing and DDG who both manages to have worse ranking and also like Google completely ignore my doublequotes.
It's a more level playing field, and it's intrinsically more human-friendly.