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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.

They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.

Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.

Yeah, that's the thing for me: filtering out the SEO crap that Google happily serves up.

Google's actual search results are a waste of time visiting, both for the mindless CEO content and the ad-laden, analytics-happy, javascript-heavy websites.

So I tend to use the AI overview. But plugging myself into the all-seeing corporate oracle, that grew on all the web's content, and now seeks to supplant it seems unseemly.

It's just sad that kagi will likely only be a fringe thing, and google will continue to promote these foul, foul, mindless websites and then supplant them with its AI.

Yup, same here. Been using Kagi for years. It's boring, it just works. Hoping they can stay that way.

My ongoing concern with Kagi is they always seem to be focused on sidequests like their Orion browser and their LLM-powered Translate tool. Maybe that's interesting for some people, but I can't help but feel like I just want a damn search engine than works.

I also have no interest in their side projects. It doesn't bother me that they have them, though. As you say, as long as the search engine works and the price is acceptable, I'm happy.

Yep, this. I was delighted they implemented this simple yet powerful idea. I don't even remember when I have needed to go to a second page of search results in Kagi and spammy clone sites which copy stack exchange verbatim are banned into oblivion where they belong. Fuck up once doing that shit, and you are forever out of my search results.

And then there is the very handy assistant, that I can jump into using follow-up questions to the quick AI queries one can choose to use or not to use by appending a "?". Again a simple idea, which empowers the user.

I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.

Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.

That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.

I’m not fawning over it but it’s

- usually better than Google

- has actually useful features (smush BS listicle articles together, weight/block sites)

- if you don’t use any searches that month, they’ll just straight up refund the month subscription automatically

- doesn’t annoy me constantly

Why? I don't really see why this is bad, other than if your company blocks url shorteners/redirects. What are you losing?

I use a Firefox extension to rewrite those Google redirects into plain links, to remove Google tracking of which links I click. The extension is broken now

Because I wouldn't want Google to know what links I click on. When I used to use Google, and they added such redirects that included the destination URL as a parameter, I'd edit the link to make it just that URL before resolving it. This new scheme would make that impossible.

They already knew which links you clicked on though…

How? I never allowed Javascript or anything.

Even with JS enabled, they did not.

Linked below is an explanation which includes confirmation of that fact by a member of the uBlock Origin team.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680338

They own the JS on the page, they don't need the redirects to know where you clicked...

Hello! It appears that you are disseminating misinformation.

A uBlock Origin developer now confirms, regarding Google results click tracking:

    It existed in a way or another, but it could be blocked. Now it can't.

Which corroborates the mysteriously flagged sibling comment.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1we7491/how_t...

Next time, please consider listening to people who know how the web works and avoid overconfidently parroting what Big Tech gatekeepers want you to think.

Thanks!

It's not misinformation. By default Google has been able to click track with JS. If you disable JS, they don't serve you search (https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/). Yes, if you are tricky, you can block just the part of the JS that does click tracking, probably. But most users can't do that. They therefore were already getting 99% complete click tracking before this change. This change is not about click tracking, it's about blocking scrapers.

And btw about the result filtering the uBlock dev wants to do: of course this can still be done, if you preload all the goto links on the page and then inline the real URLs returned by the preload requests. Perhaps not easy to do as an extension but at a browser level (Brave?) totally possible. Though Google might then think your users are scrapers...

>By default Google has been able to click track with JS. If you disable JS, they don't serve you search (https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/).

This discussion is about search results pages with JavaScript enabled.

>And btw about the result filtering the uBlock dev wants to do

For a long time, uBlock Origin has kept up with blocking Google's click tracking out of the box with the default Privacy filter list (privacy.txt).

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/...

This means that all uBlock Origin users (even people with no Google account) would NOT be click-tracked, WITH JavaScript enabled.

You say "They own the JS on the page", so the topic of discussion here is simply whether users could block click tracking on the client side.

And until now, they could have: by installing uBlock Origin or any content blocker with a sane privacy list.

Now, they cannot.

Blocking URL shorteners and google-ad links yes! Personally for me it's also the fact that this is effectively an unresolvable URL shortener, store that link somewhere and it will most likely be dead. Can't copy link anymore and paste it on a notepad or chat app to check it out later as there isn't a guarantee it will load at all (ie: the problem with url shorteners).

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