Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

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Absolutely seconded.

What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".

Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).

Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.

Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:

  /*
  Hide pre-translated webpages.
  "sri-group" is main result, "__srgi"  are sub results.
  You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
  */
  :is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
    display: none !important;
  }*

It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.

That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.

We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324

You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)

The chatter in search right now is related to AI-assisted answers, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile — local results — 0 from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of code. We’re constantly working on search.

In terms of traditional web links, which year after year have become less and less of the search results page, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies can not do it all themselves.

> The conversation about and innovation in the future of search right now is related to AI-assisted answers

I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.

But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.

AI-assisted answers are completely optional on DuckDuckGo.

Also, I have no problem with Kagi -- we are actually investors in it. The more competition in the search market, the better.

Kinda sad to read this.

The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.

If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.

Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.

The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)

I also like traditional results, which is how I got into this in the first place (crawling myself). I meant the conversation right now is about AI-assisted answers, and just revised to make that more clear what I referring to.

In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.

We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).

I'm (obviously) a Kagi stan, but let me say that I actually like AI answers. Especially the way Kagi does it, where it stays out of your way, unless you add "?" at the end of a query.

One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.

The problem is not showing stuff from Yandex, the problem is that by paying Kagi you Yandex by proxy and that is an absolute red line for many people.

I did not know this about Kagi!

I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.

> You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022

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