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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#71

Post by iLoveOncall »

mistercheph wrote: post #50
iLoveOncall wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe I'm better at selecting the right keywords? Or maybe I search like a real person and not like a researcher that is only talking about product reviews? > They found that, overall, "higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality. Besides "signs of lower text quality", this doesn't in fact say much about the quality of the re…

LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results. Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever. Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker,…

https://i.imgur.com/RxSYGIe.png

What's wrong with w3schools being the first result? It's not the best resource ever for sure, but it's not a spam website either.

You can't see everything in my screenshot, but the results in order are:

1. w3schools 2. Mozilla's documentation 3. The Cambridge dictionary 4. Some Wikipedia page about what the term is in the context of mythology 5. More websites about the HTML term

I don't see ANYTHING that isn't what someone would expect here, or someone should consider spam or low quality.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#72

Post by nicbou »

mubou wrote: post #61
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…

> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing . I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead. D…

I'm travelling, and it's weird to get results in a different language with every border I cross. Just because I'm in Spain does not mean that I suddenly speak Spanish. My browser and my Google account already transmit my language preferences!

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#73

Post by piva00 »

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…

I use Kagi for all my Swedish searches, it works better than Google every time I compare.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#74

Post by aitchnyu »

submeta wrote: post #4

Thanks to this community I switched to Kagi a couple of weeks ago. And immediately paid for the service. It is what Google used to be. Non-polluted search results. Plus: I can view images! Google won’t show me too many images anymore, just products. Never would have thought that my de-googling would take such a long time. First switched emails and calendar to fastmail years ago, then google drive to dropbox and onedr…

What does Kagi assistant (every plan has sub SOTA a few days back) lack compared to Perplexity?

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#76

Post by Ezhik »

mubou wrote: post #61
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…

> how it's impossible to get Google to show English results in a non-English-speaking country It's ridiculous because there's even a language option in the search settings, but it does nothing . I had to change my country to United States just to get it to stop giving me non-English technical documentation and wiki articles. But that means in order to get local results for stores etc I have to use Bing/DDG instead. D…

The best incantation I've got to force English Google results is https://www.google.com/search?q=hedgehog&lr=lang_en&hl=en&ud...

For Kagi, I've got it set to give me international results, so technical documentation is in English, but I have to manually change the region to my country for local results - thankfully that's just a dropdown on the same page that remembers your recent country choices.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#77

Post by nexo-v1 »

I switched to DuckDuckGo recently too. It's good enough for most things, but for deeper or niche info, I still bounce back to Google (with uBlock).

Haven't tried Kagi yet — not sure the difference is big enough to pay for.

Honestly, I'm still stuck using some Google stuff anyway, like Maps. I'd like to de-Google a bit more, but in practice it's hard.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#78

Post by glenjamin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34
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.

No, it's "hard", because it requires an extension to monitor all requests to a different search enging and hijack those to perform a redirect.

This is a clever workaround by Kagi, but a glaring hole in the Safari extension API surface area.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#79

Post by kasey_junk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34
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.

If I were setting up Kagi just for my self that’s probably true. But the thing preventing me from paying for Kagi is I’d want it for my household. Setting it up and supporting it on all the devices was enough for me to take a pass.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#80

Post by wtmt »

I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.

But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.

I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.

[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.

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