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Comment by danielheath | Hacker News Reader

Kagi (I'm a customer) works much the same way google did in 2010 or so.

As a customer of Kagi, it's better than the current Google but it's still not the Google of 2010. Google sponsoring irrelevant results is one thing, but the bigger issue remains: in 2024, creating a trove of worthless "articles" and optimizing the crap out of search result performance is a viable business model. Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance. No doubt the same is true for all alternative search engines.

> Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance

It seems to be responsive to which sites you want ranked higher/lower. For instance I have wikipedia pinned which resolves a longstanding issue google has had where seo is prioritized over relevancy.

I looked up Kagi and their sources include "AI" - do you know if one can turn this off?

Yes there’s a toggle to turn it off in settings. It’s a little AI summary box they sometimes show at the top of search results.

Yea trivially

Yeah, I keep that off - although the one time I looked at it, the text it generated was full of footnote citations, which linked to actual search results which supported what it was saying.

I still don't use it - I can't trust it not to misrepresent what its citations say, and if I have to check the cited pages I might as well just use regular search.

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