Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…
You still get Google results in the end, which are growing more full of blogspam and affiliate link farms every year.
Google results are the one thing keeping me on Google. Not sure why getting the almost indisputably best results would be bad. Even if they are getting worse, they're still miles ahead of anyone else. I've been waiting for a Kagi invite for a while because I've heard good things on HN about it. Finally got one a couple weeks ago. Finally switched off of it and back to Google yesterday. The results weren't even in the…
> The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed.
Have you posted feedback about bad results on kagifeedback.org?
The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on
Its only even really trendy here on HN. This place is getting less and less useful over time.
No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.
Wow, they have that? That’s what I always wanted from Google and they never delivered. Im sure they had reasons. I really don’t think they want to empower their users, they are even hostile to search users and content creators, amp comes to mind and am glad it dissapeared already. Meanwhile I’be been using duckduck but i’ll give kagi a go.
I stopped using Google search. The only Google product I use now are Maps and Android. I used DuckDuckGo for a while and more recently I switched to Qwant. They're all approximately the same.
I don't think that PageRank or similar algorithms provide any competitive edge at this stage. The real advantage of PageRank in the past is that it was difficult to game, but nowadays, backlinks are all about money and SEO anyway.
No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
I disagree, Kagi is not yet "better in 90% of the queries" than google, it's good enough to not have to launch google in 90% of it's query.
This is probably true for me, if we also say that 50% of the queries are orders of magnitude higher quality on Kagi.
No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
I disagree, Kagi is not yet "better in 90% of the queries" than google, it's good enough to not have to launch google in 90% of it's query.
Kagi's better than Google for me. Proof is that initially I only had it set up as default search on one device but I've progressively switched them all over out of annoyance with crap google results. I haven't yet had to go to google once to finish a search I started on Kagi.
No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.
What happens when you ask it how many Ukrainian generals have died? Does it insist on giving you pages and pages about Russian generals, like Google?
I was looking for this and it really annoys me how it thinks it knows what I want.
I had trouble switching to DuckDuck Go search previously.
It changed when I installed DucDuckGo browser on my phone. It has really good internet decrapifying features and it uses ddg search by default and so far I didn't have a single reason to change that default.
I hope ddg will relese similar browser for desktop. Maybe I'll be able to switch to it then.