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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#371

Post by Izmaki »

vitally3643 wrote: post #27
d12bb wrote: post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now. If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it. It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face.…

I'm curious: what is your use-case for a search engine that justifies Kagi over free search engines? Are you not finding your results on page one, first try, with other engines?

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#372

Post by svachalek »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #279
rplnt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.

It’s particularly bad if you ask it how to do something in any given application. Most of the time it just hallucinates UI elements that aren’t there at all and confidently gives you instructions on how to do said thing in a way that is literally impossible. I think the model must be very lightweight since they’re automatically running most search queries through it and a decently powerful model like Gemini would cos…

Yeah I'm guessing it's using one of the gemini-flash-lite models which are really basic. What I don't get is how they settled on this idea rather than having full Gemini generate a good answer and CACHE IT rather than having this silly lite model generate a different answer a million times a day.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#374

Post by Zambyte »

WarmWash wrote: post #141
rpdillon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense. But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compet…

Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats

About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#375

Post by freediver »

lostmsu wrote: post #208
justinclift wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since. It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)

A good graph would start at 0

We started saving this data late :)

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#376

Post by QuantumFunnel »

amelius wrote: post #270
vitally3643 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now. If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it. It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face.…

Kagi uses Yandex which is Russian.

What's your point? Yandex is quite a competent search engine

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#378

Post by phendrenad2 »

I think the anti-AI sentiment is masking a lot of other complaints with Google. For example, right now if you search for any term, and start clicking through the pages of results, you'll see links to random company websites that have nothing to do with the search term (example: search for "most famous astonauts" and on page five you might find the homepage of KFC or Nintendo). Google search is just spectacularly imploding and AI is just the visible component.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#379

Post by notpushkin »

mort96 wrote: post #340
levhawk wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ru-speaking audience is ~2 times bigger than Russia, why would they cut this? Only because of SJWs like you? I'd much prefer one search engine that searches well on two languages, instead of using different engines for each language. Ru-net has huge amount of usefulness in it, cutting it out is like cutting a finger. Fun fact, before the RU-UKR war, most Ukranians contributed to the Runet, so that would cut their her…

Yandex isn't just a "Russian language search engine", it's a Russian company with quite close ties to the Kremlin. See: https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th... I'm frankly a bit surprised that it's even legal for a US company like Kagi to do business with Yandex, considering it's sanctioned: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=18711 . Though in fairness, I don't know enough…

Yandex has quite a few international entities, which are probably not direct subsidiaries, which in turn probably helps with sanctions. Yandex Cloud seems to be sold by a UAE company internationally: https://yandex.cloud/en/about#impressum

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#380

Post by severino »

smallerize wrote: post #352
yehat wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a search engine starts censoring by whatever means, I'll not be using it, neither free or paid no matter how good it is (and by definition it can't be). Shills can provide a list of countries they don't want to see, hopefully some crooked search engine will satisfy their desire for censorship.

Censorship? This isn't about free speech, there's a war on.

There's not just one war on, there are many. Should Kagi exclude all the results from American companies because of the actions of the US government in Iran?
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