Similar vein, how the hell do I search an image and combine it with text anymore? I hate Lens and there's apparently no way to properly "image" search anymore.
Yandex's image search is pretty good
Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
161–170 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you (or anyone) supply an example where it doesn't? I just tried a whole bunch of queries on seemingly generic-sounding sentences from old pages on niche blogs and it found every single one. So I'd love to understand when it doesn't work and if there's some pattern -- like if certain punctuation trips it up, or if it's simply pages not indexed in the first place.
It didn't work for any query. A verbatim search was very similar to putting every word in quotes. That's very obviously not your experience, so it's either a personalization thing, or Google silently changed it. Anyway, there isn't a pattern to find, it works or it doesn't. But then, I've seen it work too. And stop working again.
OK, so can you supply any query then? Any example will do.
This is just about verifying the behavior, that it's not finding a verbatim result that it should. And it has nothing to do with personalization -- it's easy to run these logged out.
Also, "A verbatim search was very similar to putting every word in quotes" is not an example of it not working. The question isn't whether they're similar -- your claim was that it "didn't work", which I take to mean it was returning incorrect results, that correct results were missing.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird question that I have that I'd love anyone who makes a Kagi account to trial after reading the parent comment to answer: When you make your account, you're given the option to customize. When you do, you can pick things like color theme and how URLs are displayed. On the right hand side of the page there is a preview of what your Kagi searches will look like. In my example, the demo Kagi search is Magic The Gath…
I'm kind of blown away by how popular that game has gotten over the past few years in North America. I think the pandemic really accelerated the popularity of that and D&D, people are still doing these things after all of that. Even saw someone playing over the phone the other day. I don't seem to remember it being so popular but now it's more than ever and hardly a surprise tbh
The two biggest reasons for this are that the format Commander has specifically blown up in popularity and Wizards of the Coast making a first-party desktop/mobile client MtG Arena to compete with games like Hearthstone.
Commander is a 4-player casual format that's has as much in common with more typical board games as it does with traditional MtG.
Arena is likely what you saw someone playing on their phone. Funnily enough, it doesn't support Commander!
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#164Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.
I’ve replaced most of my google searches with LLM discussions and some bullshit checking I usually only need to understand a concept, not understand if the personnel and company names it made up actually exist everything else I use google for are just addresses so I’m wondering if a paid search engine would shift my behavior back to search engines, or if that ship has just sailed
LLMs can not yet replace good web search. There are whole categories of queries whera a LLM is more or less helpless with. Think navigational queries, shopping /reviews, location aware, 'grep the web' style queries just to name the few.
For example:
nyt crossword
cheap iem reddit
starbucks near me
M7FFALP
Likely, a good search product in the future will be a combnation of both.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being logged in while making search queries in search engines poses significant privacy risks. The searches can paint a comprehensive profile of the user, and these data often remain stored for extended periods. There's a chance this information might be shared with third parties. Coupled with other user data, these logged-in searches can pave the way for targeted advertising, sophisticated predictive analysis, and p…
Any system that can check balance, can link searches to a user. There's no way around it. In your case, Kagi would need to trust the client with the balance, which would be insecure. There's only one solution, and that is that you need to put a bit of trust in Kagi. Compared to the major one, Google, you can chose between one that promises to not store data, and one that promises it does (and does a lot). It's always…
> Any system that can check balance, can link searches to a user.
I don't think it's true. I can immediately see at least two ways how it can be done without identifying the user.
1. Each user gets X tokens at the beginning of the month. When searching, user supplies a token, which is immediately burned. The token does not contain the user identity, just signature validating it's a valid token.
2. Variation of the above: each user gets a token good for X searches at the beginning of the month. When searching, the system will return a token good for N-1 search each time token good for N searches is presented. Again, no need to contain user identity anywhere in the system.
Of course, both solutions have their downsides (sync between multiple devices, stealing tokens, losing tokens, etc.) but it id definitely possible. And I am sure if somebody spent a little time thinking on it, these ideas can be seriously improved to eliminate the downsides without introducing the need to identify the user.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any system that can check balance, can link searches to a user. There's no way around it. In your case, Kagi would need to trust the client with the balance, which would be insecure. There's only one solution, and that is that you need to put a bit of trust in Kagi. Compared to the major one, Google, you can chose between one that promises to not store data, and one that promises it does (and does a lot). It's always…
I'm not a cryptography expert, but from my research, shouldn't it be possible to verify quota on ZKPs server-side? Essentially, the server doesn't need to know the specifics of the user's identity, just that they possess a valid token and haven't exceeded their quota. You can use search engines like Google without being logged in. When combined with tools like uBlock Origin and Cookie AutoDelete, it becomes more chal…
The issue is implementing it client side. ZKP means that you cannot simply embed a token in the URL, but instead need to participate in an active protocol. You could implement this in JavaScript, but then you need to trust the JS being served from the server.
Even once you do that, you have all the other tracking mechanisms that the server could use if it wanted to.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being logged in while making search queries in search engines poses significant privacy risks. The searches can paint a comprehensive profile of the user, and these data often remain stored for extended periods. There's a chance this information might be shared with third parties. Coupled with other user data, these logged-in searches can pave the way for targeted advertising, sophisticated predictive analysis, and p…
Kagi already provides a way to search anonymously via a random email address (we do not really verify it or need it for anything) and Bitcoin/Lightning payment [1]. Since you are interested in cryptography, there is a discussion on Kagi feedback site along the same lines as your idea, about possible ways to achieve this without the need for cryptocurrency. [2] [1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin [2] ht…
Thanks for the links. Using a disposable email with crypto payments and occasionally generating a new account to unlink from previous searches could be a viable intermediate solution.
Also, I found this link [1] in the thread you mentioned. They seem to have implemented something like that.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the usecase. If you're querying for something local like a restaurant or a store, google wins by orders of magnitude. If you're researching, duckduckgo is fine. Duckduckgo doesn't really compare to Kagi though.
What's wrong with DDG and local searches? I find it exceedingly good, especially with the country selector being so up and front. It's very easy to search for those kinds of things in other places, for example to plan a trip. Kagi for me is a no-no. I mostly browse on temporary containers, and also have Firefox delete cookies on close. A search engine that requires me to be signed in would be a massive pain to use.
>What's wrong with DDG and local searches
Maybe its different in the US or just not optimised in Germany, but the quality of search results isn't comparable.
Query: "All you can eat Kiel"
Google:
1. a map with the top three restaurants for this context in the foreground
2: a list of restaurants, sortable by price/date/hours
3 to end of page: links to homepages of the top restaurants
DDG:
1. a completely random assortment of irrelevant links on the left
2. a semantic web box with a 3/5 rated irrelevant restaurant on the right
3. wild youtube-videos vaguely related to the query between text results
4. images
5. more wild links
that kind of thing. And Kiel isn't a small city, we even had DDG print ads here.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can add it with parameters: tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&num=30&safe=off&q=test
But that's almost worse than removing it completely! They recognize that people still need to do this, but deliberately make it more difficult in the UI.
(I worked on the team that added the tbs= parameter, 14 years ago.)
There's nothing nefarious here. The integration of &tbs= is deeply tied into GWS; it's written into the C++ substrate, while most of the rest of the server has been rewritten in Java + a bunch of custom languages. Most likely they simply can't remove it - it's permanent technical debt that nobody has the expertise to touch anymore.
Changing the UI is all done in a plugin these days, and is a relatively trivial change.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#170I use a local hosted web spider and search engine
It only index the pages that I've viewed so it's not spammed by SEO junks