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Back to Kagi

blog.melashri.net

101–110 of 264 posts

Re: Back to Kagi

#101
post #7

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.

Compared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.

Re: Back to Kagi

#102

Brave is as good results as Kagi for me and more anonymity-focused, because your searches aren't tied to an account, but I like that Kagi has a simple business model. I would pay for either if I could pay 3 dollars or less per month with Monero.

Kagi does have some methods for enhanced privacy if you are concerned about having an account. See https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/anonymity.html

Re: Back to Kagi

#103
I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.

Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?

That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.

Re: Back to Kagi

#104
post #2

How'd you solve the Arabic issue? (the previous blog post mentioned Arabic language news sources as a major pain point, so I'm wondering if anything changed.)

Author here (I didn't submit the post though)

Actually I did not solve it. I find the alternatives is worse. Google News seems better but my news reading is not a main activity.

Also I live ib Switzerland and don't speak French and I hate when websites like Google always assumes that (being logged solves it but then we have privacy issues too)

Nowadays I just go to the arabic version of Aljazeera and skim the headlines for quick overview on what is happening.

Re: Back to Kagi

#105
post #7

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.

Convenience is a massive leverage here. And most people trust LLM de facto. If a tool is good enough for 85% of audience - anything else is irrelevant.

Re: Back to Kagi

#106

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.

Re: Back to Kagi

#108
I'm surprised there is so little attention given to Staan.ai, the european search indexed built by Ecosia and Qwant.

The API is now available, you can make a query after creating your token.

This could enable SE innovation based on other sources than Google, Bing and Brave.

I wonder if Kagi's using it.

Edit : thanks, corrected the URL

Re: Back to Kagi

#109
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr? Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good. You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.

I have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.

I think it’s well worth it but we all make compromises. I have an iPhone after all lol.

Re: Back to Kagi

#110

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).
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