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Kagi Small Web

kagi.com

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Re: Kagi Small Web

#161

Post by ravenstine »

ArtificeAccount wrote: post #31

I've been using the Kagi search engine for months now and I'm not impressed. I bought into it because there were a lot of posts saying that it was "just like old Google" but this has not been my experience. It's the same as new Google, you can type in what you're looking for exactly and you'll get random sort-of related websites. I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google,…

That's totally fair, though I personally don't share your experience. It could be that we just use search for slightly different reasons.

One of the reasons I love Kagi is that it respects double-quotes for exact matches. This might seem trivial except I remember being frustrated with both Google and DDG years ago for throwing irrelevant results at me even when I'm querying for an exact match. When Kagi was in beta and I got invited as an early adopter, my feedback to them was that I want a search engine that won't throw crap at me when I'm looking for an exact string match. They've honored that feedback! Even though Kagi doesn't necessarily have the most results, I want double-quotes and things like intitle to actually work as expected.

Another awesome thing about Kagi is how it lets you prioritize certain domain names. Likewise, it's great for blocking domains completely. All of this has made my search results very clean.

To each their own. I'm not saying you're wrong, but to me there's no comparison between Kagi's results and every alternative I've tried.

Oh, another thing I like about Kagi is that it's less censored than Google, Bing, and DDG these days. I used to be a fan of DDG until I noticed that results were sparse or nonexistent for anything even remotely controversial I queried. It became too PG-rated.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#162

Post by jeffalyanak »

hamdingers wrote: post #92

I'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web" product is a frustrating misnomer. To me the small web is any little website that was created to be interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom portals, web experiments, etc. Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or webcomic. You must have an RSS f…

I could definitely see value in filters for "has RSS" and "has recent posts"—maybe even as the default view—but I absolutely agree that this is much less interesting to me without the wider world of interesting, small sites.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#163

Post by Groxx »

mattmcal wrote: post #134
emacdona wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience. In my experience, Kagi used to be great... then it became good... and now it's "better than Google". "Better than Google" and the fact that I can choose websites to exclude from my search results are two features that I remain willing to pay for, however.

DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free

Only up to five of them, which is almost completely useless.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#164

Post by starkparker »

First impressions: My first five pages were stallman.org, a paywalled cybersec newsletter, a German-language blog, an AI-generated blog post ad for a cattle fencing service, and a blog republishing a Disney Parks press release

Re: Kagi Small Web

#165

Post by wiether »

hamdingers wrote: post #92

I'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web" product is a frustrating misnomer. To me the small web is any little website that was created to be interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom portals, web experiments, etc. Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or webcomic. You must have an RSS f…

Same feeling here

Heavy Kagi user and the idea behind small web was appealing; but how its implemented don't click with me

Their rules excludes an absolute gem like https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ which is, to me, the essence of what we could call the "small web".

Each times the topic pops up, I try a few random ones and never found anything interesting.

Re: Kagi Small Web

#166

Post by olejorgenb »

dawnerd wrote: post #142
malikNF wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really loved Kagi and was a paid customer for close to two years. But sadly this year I wont be renewing my plan. Kagi made search feel just “right” it was simple, got the job done and had some really simple but cool search features. But over time they started doing way too much, and I kept seeing more and more features that I really didn't want. It felt like I was paying for all this while I just wanted to type so…

I do agree actually but I’m sticking with them. Their mission of ending slop but also pushing ai tools seem at odds. On one hand they’re marketing to the anti ai crowd while also joining the ai hype? It’s weird.

As I'm not familiar with how Kagi is "pushing ai tools" this is mostly a comment on the framing of your question.

Are you really saying that a company specializing in search - natural language oriented at its core - should not make use of the biggest technological revolution for processing natural language?

Re: Kagi Small Web

#167

Post by windowliker »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #150
windowliker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the cloud. I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google servers in the background.)

So fwiw, browsing history shouldn’t be anywhere near that big making it unlikely there what it was. It compresses well, if they were to do it I’m sure they’d do it at regular intervals instead of a years’ worth at a time, etc. And, of course, Firefox is open source and this wouldn’t be kept a secret.

In which case I'd love to know what it was doing sending that much data to Google IPs when I don't use Google services...

I've read all the Mozilla help pages about what automatic connections Firefox makes and it wasn't accounted for there (unless possibly something to do with SafeBrowsing.)

Re: Kagi Small Web

#169

Post by dawnerd »

olejorgenb wrote: post #166
dawnerd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree actually but I’m sticking with them. Their mission of ending slop but also pushing ai tools seem at odds. On one hand they’re marketing to the anti ai crowd while also joining the ai hype? It’s weird.

As I'm not familiar with how Kagi is "pushing ai tools" this is mostly a comment on the framing of your question. Are you really saying that a company specializing in search - natural language oriented at its core - should not make use of the biggest technological revolution for processing natural language?

No, I meant their push of their assistant, summarizer, and news product (which is ai generated summaries).

Re: Kagi Small Web

#170

Post by input_sh »

chneu wrote: post #119
codethief wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, many links in the embedded blog posts don't work either, presumably because the target website doesn't allow embedding. On mobile I always have to open them in a new tab for them to work.

Some browsers actually block embedded pages. Lots of mozilla based browsers will.

No, it's the website owners setting a specific header (X-Frame-Options to SAMEORIGIN), as it prevents someone else from embedding your website and phishing for user credentials.

No browser prevents that by default, but this tip is found in pretty much every "best practices" hosting tutorial, so it's very common to stumble upon that browser error in the wild.

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