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Try Switching to Kagi

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Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#141

Post by stevekemp »

Ezhik wrote: post #76
mubou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sadly your incantation fails for me - I've been fighting this issue for years.

If I copy and paste your search-link but change the word from "hedgehog" to äiti I get back a page of Finnish results.

This drives me mad when I'm searching for a Finnish street-name, or store-brand. My account is setup in English, my browser accept-language headers are English and yet it will constantly decide to switch to Finnish for me. (Except for google maps which will universally show street-names in Swedish. Scream.)

Sometimes I get a "switch to English" link, sometimes I do not. Half the time that takes me to a settings page with a progress of "Saving" which does nothing, and half the time it redirects me back to English search results.

Google's approach to language has literally no rhyme or reason, and breaks on a daily basis for me. But I guess it is what it is, and I continue to put up with it for the times I use it.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#142

Post by stevekemp »

demaga wrote: post #37
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.

I have everything possible set to English, yet when searching for street-names or other random things I get shown Finnish about fifty percent of the time.

A "change to English" popup sometimes appears with the results, and it sometimes works. Other times it does nothing.

Searching in English for things which feel like they should be okay (e.g. a recent search was "Tag (2018)" to lookup details of the film) sometimes results in Finnish too.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#143

Post by inetknght »

SaberTail wrote: post #135
_aavaa_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Normal users don't want to have to remember magic incantations to not have to sift through malicious "businesses".

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#144

Post by jetbalsa »

harshitaneja wrote: post #126

My experience with Kagi was not as positive as everyone else's here. I didn't find the search results to be better and perhaps that's because I am used to google foo to extract decent results there. So I made Kagi my default engine everywhere and used it exclusively for more than a month before giving up. The response time for search results isn't too long but that difference from google's response time, which I had…

Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#145

Post by packetlost »

jrmg wrote: post #119
neogodless wrote: post #110

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 off…

That's weird because Kagi is one of the few subscriptions that gives me an email heads up days before they charge me during the normal monthly cycle.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#146

Post by jetbalsa »

schrectacular wrote: post #59

I just had a free month on them. It was great but for me the plans are weird. 300 searches a month is _probably_ enough but the fact that I'm on a countdown makes me super cagey with my searches. And I want to want to use the service if that makes sense. I'm not opposed to paying (I pay for email) and I know they share the reasons for the pricing, but my email account is something like $3 a month. I guess this is a l…

I guess I'm a power user, I'm at > Total searches this period 1,216 > Assistant interactions this period 92

I feel the 25$ is worth it for a product that I use this much and along with knowing the costs of trying to keep all this stuff alive at the smaller scale can be hard. until they get much larger I don't expect the prices to go down.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#147

Post by ndegruchy »

SaberTail wrote: post #135
_aavaa_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can search the official python docs on DDG with !python. So if you search for "!python sum", it takes you right there. They have a lot of other "bangs" that work really well, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

You can do that on Kagi, too. You just don't _need_ to.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#148

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#149

Post by ghc »

senko wrote: post #139
ghc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of search does Kagi excel at compared to Perplexity? I've been using Perplexity as a google replacement for about a year now, so I haven't tried Kagi, but seeing several people mention they use both has piqued my interest.

To me, personally, it's about the use case: searching for a page on the internet (Kagi) or researching a particular question or topic (Perplexity). If I know what info I want (say, that particular blog post that mentioned topic XYZ, or the web page for a car dealership, or docs for something where the site search is worse than a web search), using Kagi is quicker and easier. Edit to add: I just noticed I always use K…

Thanks for taking the time to explain; what you say makes a lot of sense. I'm definitely going to give Kagi a try.

Re: Try Switching to Kagi

#150

Post by righthand »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #148

Last year I was still sifting through irrelevant results, however the link pollution was much less compared to Google. I'll try it again, but I'm still not prepared to buy something that requires me to perform additional refining on top of a service that is a refining service.

It’s a refining service in that you the user can refine search results. I’m not sure what refinement you think Kagi is doing but they aren’t combing through search results for you. No other search engine allows you to do this. It is very powerful and worth every penny. It has shown me that there are indeed more content sites outside of the major ones on the internet. I have completely deranked reddit and spam sites and now get great variety of content and control of that content through Kagi.
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