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Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#41

Post by toss1 »

>>down-ranking sites with a lot of ads and trackers more aggressively

This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move!

Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site.

It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine...

Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#42

Post by endisneigh »

cetra3 wrote: post #30
fafzv wrote: post #10

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or…

~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day. There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches. It doesn't quite sit right i…

To be fair to same disincentive exists with ads, and any timed work. Ideally you’d be paid per successful search but that’s an intractable problem.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#43

Post by oh_sigh »

freediver wrote: post #39
stavros wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP didn't say they're lying about the number, the claim was that the number isn't representative of the amount of Google searches Kagi users are likely to perform.

Kagi pricing page does not talk about Kagi users but Internet users, which Kagi is trying to attract with the $5 plan. Almost all of current Kagi users are in the other 1% category, but that doesn’t change the fact that vast majority of internet users search 2-3 times a day and that Kagi would like to attract them with this plan.

But it does change the fact that 6 searches/day will probably not be adequate for the average kagi user, which they imply.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#44

Post by freediver »

oh_sigh wrote: post #43
freediver wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi pricing page does not talk about Kagi users but Internet users, which Kagi is trying to attract with the $5 plan. Almost all of current Kagi users are in the other 1% category, but that doesn’t change the fact that vast majority of internet users search 2-3 times a day and that Kagi would like to attract them with this plan.

But it does change the fact that 6 searches/day will probably not be adequate for the average kagi user, which they imply.

That is not implied anywhere?

The copy clears says internet users and provides concrete sources for the claim. How would you word it differently?

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#45

Post by hattmall »

fafzv wrote: post #10

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or…

I don't know, it seems low, but it works for me, but I still just use Google for most things. Like most of my searches are simple things where Google is fine. Recipes, weather, easy queries. For more advanced stuff where Google doesn't work I use kagi with fair success. Like today I was looking for an obituary from 1843 and Google just kept giving me shit about the Ukraine War. Kagi worked! But also gave me some Ukraine War results, but somehow the most relevant page was near the top of Kagi but nowhere to be found on Google even with multiple searches.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#46

Post by mvdtnz »

fafzv wrote: post #10

https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or…

It also doesn't say what currency it's in anywhere on that page. Is that my local currency or (presumably) USD? That makes a very large difference to my price.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#47

Post by freediver »

kid64 wrote: post #40
1123581321 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely honest. You don't have a sense of typical use. I'd argue search power users make fewer searches a day, too, but like you, and unlike Kagi, I can't back that up with sources.

[flagged]

(Kagi founder)

Kagi never did bait and switch tactics and certainly doesn’t have a “history” of this.

This is the third time you are accusing Kagi using the same words although I have addressed this already in a comment to you before [1]

I would like to ask you to stop spreading this nonsense or at least substantiate your claims so that we can have a discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684449

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#48

Post by ChatGTP »

funkaster wrote: post #37
ChatGTP wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I felt similar last time I used it. Wasn’t magic like I remember Google being. I wonder what happened to Google? My theory is maybe their own systems have become too complex for them to understand and tune now. But they’ve invested so heavily into “AI” they don’t known where else to go in order to fix it ? I’ve here seen or experienced a search product quite like Google used to be. It truly felt like magic in…

Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be (since there were no good organic search engines). Google got in there and had a great algorithm that worked in that world. It got gamed and now content is being produced to make sure you appear on top of searches that might not even be what you were looking for.

Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be

I have a feeling many things in the digital space are similar to this and will go the same way, code is a pretty good example. Longer term, I wonder what the generation of massive amounts of code will do to the training data.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#49

Post by cmeacham98 »

freediver wrote: post #44
oh_sigh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it does change the fact that 6 searches/day will probably not be adequate for the average kagi user, which they imply.

That is not implied anywhere? The copy clears says internet users and provides concrete sources for the claim. How would you word it differently?

The obvious implication of putting that on a pricing page is that the average internet user accurately represents the average Kagi user.

I have no idea if that's true or not, but if it isn't, then there isn't really a way to "word it differently" - including the information at all is misleading.

Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience

#50

Post by CapmCrackaWaka »

mtlynch wrote: post #26

I've been using Kagi as my default search engine for four months for both work and personal use, and it's been a great experience. The only time I find myself re-doing a search in Google is when I want to look something up in Google Maps, but everything else, Kagi is on par with Google or better. I really like that Kagi lets me filter out blogspam results and sites that are just remixing content from StackOverflow.

I have been using Kagi with good results too, but some things it completely shits the bed with. I wanted to find the AWS portal, so I searched for "AWS". First result, American Welding Society. Fine. Second is a medium article about AWS. The third is a reddit post about AWS. On down and down, the AWS website doesn't show up on the first page. So I searched "AWS Portal". Again, the AWS website does not show up. This is still happening for me. Just checked, I haven't blocked their domain. It's honestly such an outlier, I wonder if they intentionally blocked results from the AWS domain from showing up.
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