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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#11

Post by JumpCrisscross »

"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality."

This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use.

It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you notice the productivity and curiosity boost.)

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#12

Post by dsego »

The same type of scams now exist for almost anything, I know you have to be careful when buying digital vignettes for motorways across europe. There are official websites and then there are these official looking 3rd party websites that try to trick you into paying several times more for the same thing. Of course, the scummy ones spend more on SEO and ads to get to the top.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#13

Post by pookieinc »

For those of us who have moved the vast majority of our Google searches to ChatGPT / only use Google periodically for one-off questions, is there still a reason to switch to Kagi?

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#14

Post by jessekv »

decimalenough wrote: post #2

> no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark) TIL! I'm a paying Kagi user and I didn't even know this feature existed.

!code will get you into the proper code assistant.

I'd love it if it supported custom assistants though.

For example, !joost (the name of my AI language tutor)

Edit: I got this working.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#15

Post by Ezhik »

Kagi is so nice. Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

It even passes my personal search test - it shows reasonable results and not pages and pages of junkware when I search for "avi to mp4".

I think my only annoyance with it is that it shows me shopping websites for irrelevant countries when in "International" search mode - but that's honestly something I'm not sure should be fixed, especially given how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#17

Post by [deleted] »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #6

I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK". But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue. I haven't perso…

[deleted]

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#18

Post by orhmeh09 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #6

I tried every search mentioned by the author in Google verbatim, and the government's website was always first. In fact, the whole first page was only government websites from multiple countries for "travel to UK". But everytime this issue is brought up by people, I ask them to share the keywords they searched and the results they expected, and it always becomes blatantly clear that it's a user issue. I haven't perso…

Perhaps you are lucky to stick to happy paths or are not particularly discerning. It's real. https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-wors...

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#19

Post by snorremd »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11

"Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality." This sums up my experience tidily. Kagi is a delight to use. It doesn't make sense ex ante why one would pay for something that's colloquially free. But then you experience it and it feels luxurious. (Before you not…

I love that Kagi puts the "monetization" icon right next to results so I can avoid navigating to them. This means I'm much less likely to click on Medium.com links and other monetized blogs and sites. Often times the good content is on some personal website where the creator doesn't really care about earning money off it.

Another neat feature is the possibility to rank results or block them manually so you can lower visibility of certain sites. Really help push the scammy sites down.

Compare this to Google Search where the first half page is paid results (ads) and the rest of the results are of dubious quality. And you don't really have much of a way to influence your search results.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#20

Post by camillomiller »

Try not living in the US/UK and looking for results in languages different than English. The sad, sad, sad reality is that Google is still best at these type of searches. That comes, alas, with a ton of useless and often half-scammy sponsored links on top of any SERP, plus now also some awful AI-overview results that are even worse than English (but there's the cheat code for that, at least).

So the only doable thing here is Google + Ublock + Anti-AI Konami Code.

Possibly the best ever depiction of Enshittification in practice.

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