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Comment by Vegenoid | Hacker News Reader

I pay for Kagi to get better search results. Lately, I’ve felt that Kagi’s search has been just as full of low-information and AI generated results as Google. I’ve been wondering why I’m still paying for it. This seemed like a good litmus test. Unfortunately, Kagi displays pretty much the same results as Google for nanoclaw.

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Yeah that's increasingly been my feeling as well. I have to keep prefacing my Kagi recommendations with, "web search is less and less useful every year, but..."

I still appreciate being able to customize rankings, bangs, and redirects. But with how utterly shit the web is overall, any web search is basically only good if you know the site(s) the answer(s) will be on. When you're searching for something novel-to-you, even Kagi is just going to show you a full page of unregulated slop on the dumbest, just-registered-this-year domains. Real information is increasingly limited to small islands of trust.

Isn't Kagi basically just using a blocklist? In which case it's whack a mole as new sites spring up or bubble up to the top of other results. I keep my own blocklist and intermittently search key phrases to blanket block new sites, and there's often new sites popping up.

This sounds very interesting, could you elaborate on your methods and tools?

https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

Basically,

- whenever a spam site is in my results, click to block - click through some and check out pages like "About" "Terms" "Disclaimer" "Privacy". often common boilerplate phrases abound. affiliate marketing spam, and similar, for example - exact string search those phrases - (get often many pages of results) - using a userscript, block all domains in each result page

my results have gotten so much better for common types of queries. even then, new sites pop up almost daily it seems. add to the list.

I don’t like any search engines now :(

It's because the search engine is being eaten by the LLM. I'm not suggesting that it's a perfect substitute. It's just what I feel is happening.

more like LLM garbage are rotting search engines from the inside out

Naw this is a pre LLM problem.

Yep. SEO spam has been a thing for decades.

LLMs have supercharged it though, it's so much easier to create dozens or hundreds or thousands of ultra low effort LLM written webpages and websites that it ever was before LLMs.

I'm not talking about LLMs diluting search. I'm saying users are using LLMs to search more than search itself, including in search engines.

I hadn't really noticed anything like this until you pointed it out. My main use for Kagi is to pin Wikipedia results... I just tried searching for "nanoclaw" on Kagi (I'm in the UK so results biased towards there) and got:

1. nanoclaw[dot]net (!)

2. github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw which looks like a ripoff?

3. Three videos, at least one of which looks like slop with crypto ads

4. github.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw which I presume is the real repo judging from the name?

5. Three "interesting finds" the top one of which is nanoclaw.dev, but with the title "Don't trust AI agents" because it's a blog post from that site

6. A fork of the qwibitai/nanoclaw repo

> 2. github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw which looks like a ripoff?

That is literally the GitHub repo the original article shows as being "real".

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