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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.

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You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites.

This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites).

For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from:

- w3school

- GeeksforGeeks

- real python

- programiz

- code academy

And only after do I get the official python docs.

On Kagi I have blacklisted all of those garbage sites and the official docs at the top result.

Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.

I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.

Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).

Here's some stats that kagi publishes on how people are using their blocking and a great place to great started with it as well.

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Normal users don't want to have to remember magic incantations to not have to sift through malicious "businesses".

Normal users also don't want to have to go through curating their own blacklist of sites to get decent results.

Sure, but given the shit state that Google is, I argue that normal users would rather have to curate their own blacklist a few times instead of being subjected to (at best) SEO spam or (worse) malicious websites.

That's why I use Kagi.

You can do that on Kagi, too. You just don't _need_ to.

I haven't set up blacklist for my kagi account. Searched for "python sum", got a link to the python doc as the first result. So imo. you dont need a blacklist.

Is it worth $10 so you don't have to search the Python docs directly? That seems terribly wasteful (monetarily, computationally), when you could use something like devdocs, among dozens of other options.

To me, it is not the results that are the kicker. It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.

Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.

And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.

> It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.

Can you explain what this means in more detail? (To be clear, I'm not trying to be adversarial, I'm asking for a sales pitch :) )

Google's customers are the companies who pay them to place adverts in search results. The results page includes them and it's not always clear at a glance which results are promoted/paid.

Kagi makes this a non-issue.

I use an ad blocker.

one I like to use to demonstrate is "how to fix a leaking faucet"

Google gives you a full page of ads for plumbers

Kagi gives you instructional videos from This Old House. It's night and day.

I just tried this, and google returned a variety of videos (guides for fixing), and various text/website tutorials (home depot, reddit etc), I had to scroll to the absolute bottom to see an ad for a plumber.

I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.

> @dh nats !

This brings me directly to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/. Like it doesn't even show Kagi.

> @hn !

This brings me directly to the front page of HN.

> @gh jj !

This brings me to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

> !guixc how do I install nginx?

This brings me to https://kagi.com/assistant/071a7584-d0a3-49fe-abe1-635223085..., which includes an answer relevant to my distro from a generic question.

> !p nginx

Brings me to https://packages.guix.gnu.org/search/?query=nginx.

The customization is extremely powerful as you can see. Snaps are also often significantly better than bangs, because sites often have bad built in search (!dh particularly sucks. !gh isn't great either imo).

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