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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#31

Post by senko »

camillomiller wrote: post #20

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…

Hello from Croatia. While most of my searches are in English, I just did a few searches for local topics, in Croatian, and find the results comparable.

I do assume Google is faster to index and has a larger index, so finding very new, or obscure, pages in non-english languages will probably be worse in Kagi. For those niche cases I have !g

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#32

Post by mrweasel »

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…

When trying the "travel to UK." in Google I get the same result as suggested in the article. The issue is the "Sponsored" results (which is a stupid name for scams). They take up the entire page and are obviously not what you're searching for, but some of them seems official enough, if you don't know that everything from the UK government follow a very specific design language and will alway be under gov.uk.

My parents ran into the same issue trying to cancel a subscription, some scammer buys the first results, makes it look decent enough, but then charges you €100 for an otherwise free service. The real result is down below the "Sponsored" links.

Trying the same search on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will yield ads for hotels, AirBNB and organized tours, which are related to travelling to the UK, but it's clearly not related to ETA.

In the article there's a quote: "Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results," ... Yes, from their search results, if you want to run your scam on Google you have to pay them, but if you do they'll move your page to the top.

Google is actively enabling scammers at this point, don't support them, switch to basically ANY other search engine. I don't care if it's Bing, that still way better than Google at this point.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#33

Post by sitkack »

That reminds me, I need to cancel Phind, they cost optimized it and gets stuck where it refuses to search and argues with me, doubling down on its confabulations.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#34

Post by JumpCrisscross »

glenjamin wrote: post #24

I find it a little surprising that the famous apple blogger neglects to mention that Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS!

> Apple makes it hard to use a search engine like Kagi on iOS

Unobvious. Not hard. To the chasm that is getting someone to pay for search, getting them to install an app and follow tedious but simple configuration instructions is a gap in the sidewalk.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#35

Post by Zealotux »

I tried not so long ago, it didn't stick, I still find results are too sanitised and got better results with DDG or Yandex. Now that Google is pushed this own flavor of AI slop I will do a new round of testing of the alternatives.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#37

Post by demaga »

Ezhik wrote: post #15

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 sh…

I live in a non-English-speaking country, and Google works fine for searches in English. I would say it only works poorly for single-word searches.

Of course, I have my system and browser language set to English, so maybe that's why.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#38

Post by foresterre »

sixtyj wrote: post #10

Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?

DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.

I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.

I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".

The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#39

Post by jessekv »

sitkack wrote: post #30
jessekv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!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.

What do you mean by custom assistants because you can make your ! assistants with your own prompt and the model of your choice. Do you want !joost to hit and endpoint of your choosing?

No, I was looking in the wrong place in the settings: "search" > "advanced" > "custom bangs". I see now you can assign a bang directly when you make a custom assistant. Very handy!
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