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Comment by Ezhik | Hacker News Reader

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".

I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.

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On a search for "avi to mp4":

- Google shows CloudConvert, then some helpful Reddit threads, then Ask Ubuntu, then some spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

- Kagi shows CloudConvert, then pages and pages of spammy SEO-optimized converter websites.

Google clearly wins there.

Opposite here, but I also don't have a personalized Google search experience, and an exhaustive list of sites in Kagi that I raise/lower/block from the results.

Happy paying customer of Kagi here. because to me intention counts.

Kagi has the explicit intention to serve me their best results.

Google has the explicit intention to get me to click on their customers results.

Happy to pay kagi.

Use an ad blocker.

Now Google has no intention to serve you

I've never had any issue using any Google service with an ad blocker. They make plenty off of me via YouTube Premium and Google Flights commissions - both services that I think are valuable, and one that I actually gladly pay for.

You do you. I do me.

I think Google has the intention to get you to click on their ads. Which they can achieve by providing ok search results.

Did the same here on my Android phone.

Google:First result, occupying half my screen, was a sponsored Google Play junk app, then CloudConvert, FreeConvert, Convertio, Adobe Express, Restream (this one seems like garbage), then a second Play widget and then SEO slop.

Kagi: FreeConvert, CloudConvert, a youtube tutorial, a Quick Peek widget with unhelpful topics, Restream, Adobe Express, SEO slop at the end.

Not that much better by Kagi, but it's pretty good not having any ads. I'm curious why you'd think leading you to Reddit when you searched for a converter is a desirable result, though, and I think you got that because you search for "[term] reddit" so much it defaulted to it via algorithm

It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.)

I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.

[1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...

So you're saying it's good to have your results influenced by megacorporation exclusivity deals? I didn't use an adblocker because I was using the app, and having to rely on adblockers is cheating for Google, the services should be judged as is. Google isn't above blocking you from their services for using adblockers, too, as we can see from Youtube

Did I say that?

I hadn't heard of that deal. How is that not blatantly anti-competitive?

The best part about Kagi is that if the default results don't seem helpful, one click restricts results to only discussions and forums, which is usually exactly what I want to do next.

Google supports that too. After searching, click “Forums” in the top bar.

Avi to mp4 is best done with an ffmpeg command written by an llm. But OK, I get that that was not the point.

If you already have ffmpeg, you shouldn't need an LLM to write `ffmpeg -i video.avi video.mp4`.

The llm will tell you there are lots of interesting options.

As will the manual of ffmpeg itself, for what it's worth.

Yes, but a llm (or good old stackoverflow) are faster for most people.

There's pretty much nothing you can't do with ffmpeg https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM?si=KJJOhnoa-2bFLkt5

If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.

Which is to say, I highly recommend using an LLM for exploring commands to run in a terminal. Once past the learning curve, it is a good way to avoid dozens to hundreds of cryptic short-options (just ask for only long options).

> If there is perhaps just _one_ thing that we can all admit that LLM's are good at, it should be bash one-liners for common tasks.

Sorry to disappoint, but no can do on that agreement. The web is full of bad advice for shell scripting one liners, because too many people fumble their way to a semi-workable inefficient solution for their specific problem, then instead of attempting to refine it and make it better by removing extraneous options they publish it as is to a blog post or gist. The result is that LLMs ingest a lot of subpar commands.

I’ve tested this many times. It is rare that an LLM returns me a one-liner that I can’t immediately see how to improve.

The interesting thing is that there are objective measurements about code (like unnecessary commands in answers, or code which flat out never worked), in which generally people are not great. The amount of bad answers on Stackoverflow and on most of the blogspam is staggering. Even reference documentations are bad or wrong many times. LLMs work with that. They won’t be better than that.

> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country

It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing. I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead.

Does Kagi solve this problem somehow? Like, can I make it give me non-English results for local things and English results for everything else?

I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!

The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud...

For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.

Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.

If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.

This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)

Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.

Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.

You can use https://google.com/ncr which doesn't redirect to a country.

try searching for an english word in incognito, there should be a yellow box on the right that lets you change to english. dunno about logged in searches

In Kagi you can search with a specific country selected or the default "international".

I find it a superior alternative to Googles "wherever you are", but I do a lot of multilingual searches. For example, when I'm searching for french recipes, I don't want crappy American SEO optimized recipe agregators. Selecting the country I live in brings up local laws instead of stuff from other (bigger) countries where the same language is spoken. International works very well for code and general queries.

One thing Google does which I like is that I don't have to fiddle with region dropdowns. I just drop in a keyword in my local language and it knows to switch the results sources.

Kagi should be able to do that nicely, though I'm not gonna suggest anything on their feedback forum, that's already backlogged to the brim.

that sounds good until you want to buy that uniquely named ingredient in the usa and it will only give results elsewhere and you have little control

Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.

99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.

duck duck go have a drop down where you select any county anywhere you are.

want to search in spain while in the UK? so easy. all other searches are completely broken without this.

Use https://google.com/ncr (which stands for "no country redirect" IIRC). Has been working for me in a non-English speaking country for a very long time.

> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.

> customizing ranking for certain websites [...] the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

These were the killer features for me and why I'm happy to continue paying for Kagi.

That being said, I've (anecdotally, at least) noticed the quality of their search results declining (still better than Google).

I search for a lot of error messages (for example, errors that I encounter while compiling Java code) -- with very unique strings -- only to have the entire first page of results not contain these strings. Even if I quote them. I really want the ability to say "The page MUST HAVE THESE STRINGS". Google used to have "allintext:" -- but even that doesn't guarantee a page will contain a certain string anymore.

Now, when I'm trying to get more insight on an error message, I'll use AI first. And while I get much better results that way, I find it incredibly frustrating because search engines USED TO BE JUST FINE for this use case. Now they no longer are.

I live in a non-English-speaking country, and Google works fine for searches in English. I would say it only works poorly for single-word searches.

Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.

I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.

A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.

Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.

Just curious if you have a screenshot or a list of the top n results for "avi to mp4" when using Kagi so that there is a bit of a data point for comparison captured in thread?

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