Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related:

Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite.

So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else".

So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "every input".

Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).

So here are the results from Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+so...

For me Google says:

  > No results found for "Every input is best at something ".
  > Results for Every input is best at something (without quotes):

Meanwhile Kagi gives me a few relevant results:

https://kagi.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+somethin...

So now, while Kagi has always been a lot better at not including unwanted results, it now seems it also has a larger effective index than Google.

I get 2 results from that Kagi link and they're both what I'd consider to be spam.

But they are there, and they are real, and they don't drown out any better results.

I'd rather have no results than spam results.

Totally agree, this is my main complaint against Google.

But IIRC all except one of the ones I got were actually relevant even if I had to tweak my query even more before I got better results.

I get three results. Top one is this thread on HN!

Three now, one of them this thread.

I'm not sure I'd agree the other two are spam. One of them is a plain-text transcript of some sharepoint files that mentions the quote and attributes them to the same person. The other is the same powerpoint, but in its original on some slide sharing website.

In many cases, either would be a great result. Here it still gives us the direct quote and confirms that all the way back in 2013 somebody attributed it to the same guy. That's a great lead if you try to track down the origin of a quote. If you cared enough you could now contact the person who made the slides to track the quote further.

As I understand it, they aggregate and re-rank results from Google, Bing, Yandex, Brave, (more?), plus their own index.

I don‘t understand why this is bad. Aggregation is a feature because it allows to be no worse than Google, in my experience likely better, and you pay for search with money and not with data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com