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Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

danluu.com

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Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#191

Post by littlecranky67 »

Kagi really shines on topics that are SEO-spammed on other search engines. I.e. when travelling to a touristic city, searching a recipe, or basically any product you want to buy. I actually got "search anxiety" searching these topics, as I know I will have to navigate a lot of SEO spam, content that is artificially blown up, and the core information purposefully hidden somewhere on the page - if any. Plus the multitude of cookie consent banners and newsletter subscription popups on each link...

I've been using Kagi's FastGPT [0] now for these searches, it basically removes all the bullshit and gives verifiable sources for any answers.

[0]: https://kagi.com/fastgpt

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#194

Post by alextingle »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #173
trb wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I was curious about Kagis low ranking, and couldn't replicate the search results. Also saw ublock Origin on #3, good results for tires, transitors and snow, etc. I've never used any of the Kagi search result weighing features. Ctrl+F on the page for "System prompt" doesn't show any hits. Given how important those are for ChatGPT (another thought - was the author testing GPT3.5 or 4?) I'm not sure how much…

I asked GPT-4 about Youtube Downloader and it rambled on about how downloading videos is against Youtube’s TOS and I should buy YouTube premium which has the download feature. Getting any useful data from GPT-4 about anything even remotely “illegal” is a waste of time.

claude.ai produced pretty reasonable results.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#195

Post by motoxpro »

This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp"

Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). 99.999% of people are not programming tinkerers.

Just makes me realize how subjective search results are. All of their "Great" results are my "Terrible" results.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#196

Post by iansinnott »

hannasanarion wrote: post #165

I'm not able to reproduce the author's bad results in Kagi, at all. What I'm seeing when searching the same terms is fantastic in comparison. I don't know what went wrong there. In the Youtube Downloader search, NortonSafeWeb is nowhere to be found. I get a couple of legit downloader websites, and some articles from reputable tech newspapers on how to use them or command line tools. In the Adblock search, ublock Orig…

I'll second the chorus of those curious to hear how you've customized the search engine. I was able to reproduce the lackluster results, and was sadly disappointed. I expected what you seem to have found, that Kagi would outperform.

A specific example: for "ad blocker" the first result was some paid ad blocker and ublock was down the page below the fold.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#198

Post by mrweasel »

behnamoh wrote: post #140
alexforster wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago, and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping" equivalent of search engines.

hope kagi takes ddg place in terms of adoption. never really liked ddg even though i always care about privacy.

I really don't get that sentiment. Currently Kagi is just as dependent on Google as DuckDuckGo is on Bing. That might only be temporary of course and Kagi does seem to be working on a search engine of their own.

Rather than wanting Kagi to take the place of DuckDuckGo, it would would be better if Kagi could take users from Google, and then when ready, drop Google as a search provider.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#199

Post by DeathArrow »

The thoughts about building a better search engine than Google are interesting.

Unlike the author, I think that building a better search engine than Google is possible. But it's going to be rather expensive. And the only proven way to monetize it is selling ads. Which will degrade the quality of the search results fast. For potential investors, there are probably many better ways to invest money then by building a search engine.

This lets us with only one viable alternative: build it in the open like Wikipedia and source donations from people and from Google competitors like Amazon or Apple.

Re: Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

#200

Post by hamilyon2 »

Is this from desktop? What region?

Ublock origin in the very top result for ios device is simply a bad search result page. Maybe fourth position is tolerable, after three different working ones. Maybe it should be lower, I doubt myself, if my point of view is too elitist.

Yt-dlp is subject to all sorts of takedown requests in different jurisdictions.

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