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Back to Kagi

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Re: Back to Kagi

#151

Post by palata »

maelito wrote: post #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

I was a happy user of Kagi and I switched to Qwant a year ago because they are based in Europe (Ecosia seems to have US servers?).

But I have to say:

1. It's slow. As compared to Google or Kagi, getting the results of a search feels sloooow. I could live with that though.

2. The results are just not as good, it feels? And I don't think it's an impression: I left Google like 7 years ago. I have been happy with DuckDuckGo for years, then Kagi for years, and now Qwant... just frustrates me. I can't imagine why.

I wonder if I am using Qwant wrongly... maybe it tries to search in a different language because it's a French engine? In any case I end up searching in Google when I don't find what I want in Qwant, which I hadn't done with DuckDuckGo/Kagi in 7 years.

Am I the only one experiencing that? Maybe I should give a shot at Ecosia.

Re: Back to Kagi

#152

Post by insane_dreamer »

I’m a paying Kagi subscriber but hardly use it because honestly much of the time I’m searching for an answer to a specific question not a website to visit and therefor want the AI response without clicking on another website. Unless it’s mission critical but that’s more rare.

Re: Back to Kagi

#153

Post by secabeen »

tombert wrote: post #66
SadTrombone wrote: post #49

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.

$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.

Do they even expose much cross users? One of my sports apps has a Family Plan, and my "family" is three other players who organized ourselves on FB. We split the cost evenly and it saves us like 50% each. I don't even know their names.

Re: Back to Kagi

#155

Post by driverdan »

201984 wrote: post #106
SadTrombone wrote: post #49

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…

It's nothing until you have to buy a $10/m subscription for every basic thing you do, then it adds up.

Re: Back to Kagi

#156

Post by frio »

voidnap wrote: post #120
hbn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work. I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don'…

> I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually.…

Even well-supported, well-documented projects. I'm in the middle of a Spring Boot upgrade, which includes a collection of Hibernate updates. These are well-supported projects with -- theoretically -- fantastic documentation. But when something goes wrong, trawling them for what's happened is tedious and doesn't teach me much; you end up chasing down uncommon threads. The death of StackOverflow doesn't help much either. Previously, web searches might have found a commiserator, but that's all gone now.

A concrete example: during one of the updates, previously working code started throwing an OptimisticLockingException. Only in one place, annoyingly. My thought was that Hibernate was more strict about something it had previously been lenient about. I went down two or three false threads in the docs; I debugged the old version and the new version and read the guts of Hibernate but couldn't figure out why the persistence path had changed so significantly (or why it'd throw an OptimisticLock, it was saving a brand new row!). I was really struggling.

I set Opus on it, and it found the relevant section of the docs and zeroed in on the issue in the code: we were generating and setting an ID on a class that had an annotated @GeneratedValue. Old Hibernate said "whatever"; new Hibernate changed the persistence code so in this situation it calls `merge` instead of `save` (update rather than create AFAICT); there was no existing entity with the generated ID (of course, it's a new entity!); it fails.

While my hypothesis was broadly right, that _particular_ issue would've taken me days to chase down -- but the LLM correctly diagnosed in minutes with links to relevant documentation.

I vaguely hate LLMs, but this one saved me from a days long side quest that would've held up delivering the actual value of the project. I hope this doesn't sound like my brain is no longer functioning.

(edit -- reading it back I'm starting to write like one of the fucking things, which is probably the part of them I hate the absolute most)

Re: Back to Kagi

#158

Post by cautiouscat »

Kagi has been a great and worthwhile subscription to me. It feels like browsing the Google of the 10s in some ways. Way more private blogs and whatnot in the results.

Re: Back to Kagi

#159

Post by lostlogin »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #56
rpdillon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

It is a bit weird that a ‘search engine’ is using other companies search results. They aren’t the only one doing this though.

Re: Back to Kagi

#160

Post by gonzalohm »

lostlogin wrote: post #159
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?

It is a bit weird that a ‘search engine’ is using other companies search results. They aren’t the only one doing this though.

Why reindex everything? You just need to show the relevant information
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