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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#111

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,…

> w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.

I think you're living in the past. The w3schools of today isn't the w3schools from 10 years ago. For precision and detailed info I still go to MDN, but for a good comprehensive overview of the tag/property/what-have-you, w3schools is really good.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#112
post #69

Submission seems to be buried but not showing flagged/dead. Currently at 65 points, 63 comments, 2 hours old, popular domain, no flamewar or politics. Yet nowhere to be found in the first few pages. Weird that it got buried, maybe the topic is on the front page too often?

Seems to be unburied!

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#113
post #10

Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?

I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.

I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.

I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some examples of specific queries (like, tell me exactly what to type into the search bar) where you find Kagi returns better results than Google or DDG? I tried Kagi a couple times and didn't notice a significant difference in result quality, so I'd like to see what people find so nice about it.

You can blacklist whole domains (or subdomains) as well as upranking or downranking specific sites. This lets you avoid the seo spam (particularly bad for programming sites). For example. Say I want to know more about python’s built in sum() functions. A google search for “Python sum function” produces results on the first page from: - w3school - GeeksforGeeks - real python - programiz - code academy And only after d…

Thank you. Sounds like the search results are not actually much better on Kagi, but the features around search such as blocking domains is where you find the value. That would explain why I didn't see much of a difference when I tried it out without doing any customization.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#116
post #10

Serious question, so DuckDuckGo is not good enough?

with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#117

"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…

Use reader mode on your browser, and you can read most of the paywalled sites.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#119

About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense. This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far. What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I…

Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.

I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#120
> A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result.

Google's first result is the official government website that is summarized as requiring ETA (so you don't even need to click)

Now that you know the name, adding "apply ETA" to the query also gives you the official government website as the first result

Is that really a serious complaint about the fall of search quality?

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