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Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

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171–180 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#171

Kagi. 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 tried it a little but honestly thinking about having a limit of searches made me anxious every time I thought about searching like “is this really necessary” and so I went back to google.

Why not just ignore that the limit exists? If you hit it, you can always fall back to another search engine, after all, so it shouldn't be cause of anxiety.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure many folks, including me, would be willing to help Vlad organize a private acquisition if he suddenly had some pressing need to sell.

I love the idea I challenge you to find a group of rich folks who will fund such a thing - and will not simply demand the same profits as current structures do. I just tried this with ~30 wealthy individuals/family funds that I have great relationships with and literally everyone said some form of the following: “I am not going to liquidate my current investments that are on IPO trajectory for something that by defin…

This is really the ideal use case for nonprofit funding, but unfortunately, real-world wealthy donors tend to give to university football programs and getting their names on hospital buildings. Sadly, SMU near me just made a deal with the ACC to forego ten years of television revenue in exchange for being allowed into the conference in order to get an automatic playoff berth if they can win the conference. Boosters will fully fund the athletic department to make up for the shortfall of not receiving and television revenue. All that money could have gone to good, but rich people care more about their alma mater having a 1% chance rather than a 0% chance at a national championship.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#173
post #98

Kagi. 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.

Does anyone knows how Kagi performs on country specific search or even search in another languages?

It works fine in French for me. I really like that I can have international search by default, and specify a country when needed using a bang like !fr.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#174
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think they were playing d&d over the phone but yeah it does look like it's alot more engaging than what I seem to remember in middle school

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're basically just as good as some malware search engine that inserted itself into grandma's computer now Fantastic

At least those entertained people. I couldn't get my fiancé's mother to stop re-installing bonzi buddy or whatever that toolbar was called because she 'loves the purple monkey, he's so cute!'

Man that's crazy in the early 2000s I was volunteering with developmentally disabled adults and had to explain to them how bonzi was a 'bad monkey' and that he was 'not a friend' and they got it

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#176

Kagi. 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.

Another happy customer here as well. I use at work and home and plan to start using on mobile browsers also.

The ability to essentially "weight" particular domains (pin, block, or anywhere in between) has saved me so much time. There are certain searches I do (music-related in particular) where I always want particular sites (metal-archives, bandcamp, etc) to be the first results, and having that as an option is great. It means that searches that I perform often have a result within the first 1-5 results that is exactly what I want.

No ads, way less SEO spam, and the ability to completely remove domains from results if I think I need to tweak it further. For most of my searches I previously used Google for- Kagi makes Google's results look laughably bad.

I've also been using it at work for tech searches (linux, redhat, etc) and it has saved me time there too.

I use a "family" account- and have one work account and one home account that way I can have different settings for different environments (would be neat if this could be built into non-family accounts though... like "personas" or "profiles" or something...) because I'm overpaying a bit to have the two account setup and don't reach the search cap. I think I'm okay with that though, because having the cap so high means I've removed the "running out of searches" anxiety from my usage of the service.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#178
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day I'd suggest doing it via Alexa top sites, but now that Alexa is gone, I'm not sure what strategy I would use, but I would want to hit sites that are like the "top 10000 most popular" first, and scrape every inch I could.

I think Kagi is going in the opposite direction: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web They try to highlight small, personal websites instead of the big mainstream sites. (This was a HN submission 2 weeks ago)

I saw that, but that's kind of useless when you kind of want something like SO or similar results, something Google keeps failing at.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever go past the 1,000 search "limit"? I'm considering signing up; it would be one fewer service I'm relying on google for.

I was quite afraid of this, but apparently I'm around 700-800 searches a month and I search quite a lot during my work. Kagi is also working on removing the 1000 limit on the 10$ subscription and offering unlimited searches. Switching from the 5 $ plan to 10 $ was super smooth by the way, so if you want to try for less $, the 5 $ for a month is enough so you can get used to the product and know if you like it or not…

That would be great. The $5 price point is the most I'd pay for search, but 300 searches per month is just not worth it in any sense. If all of the tiers moved down one step, or if Kagi offered a discount for annual membership, I could see it working for me.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#180

Kagi. 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

> I usually only need to understand a concept

You should know by now that LLMs will and do lie in subtle ways that are not apparent to non-experts. Using them to understand complicated concepts is a great way to "learn" incorrect information. To be fair, the same can be said for humans, but humans are worse at bullshitting.

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