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Back to Kagi

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Re: Back to Kagi

#211

Post by hgoel »

tuoret wrote: post #205
hgoel wrote: post #164

I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit tr…

> With Reddit trying to require logins to view the old layout Is this a thing now? The only reason I still find Reddit links in search results somewhat useful is because old.reddit redirect[1] ensures I don't get login prompts even when a subreddit happens to be NSFW for whatever reason. Though they've started to do this thing where it only shows a few top comments and then "relevant" threads below that, and you have…

I've had a redirect to old.reddit.com configured within Kagi for a while, but recently they announced that they would begin forcing logins on old.reddit too, using the flimsy excuse of security. The rollout hit me this week, can't even view the site without an account anymore.

Re: Back to Kagi

#212

Post by randallsquared »

andai wrote: post #192
hgoel wrote: post #164

I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit tr…

> It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearr…

> And of course, if you send them money, all the infuriating UX issues mysteriously disappear.

In the context of paying for Kagi instead of using Google for free, paying for YouTube instead of using, uh, YouTube for free seems like a solution, rather than the problem you seem to have implied it is.

Re: Back to Kagi

#213

Post by TwoFerMaggie »

nixgeek wrote: post #165
j1elo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices? In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying: * €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan. * €10/mo for 500…

I think I’m on the upper end of what’s normal in U.S. but also not super abnormal either — 1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”. 2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps. 3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.

> A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX

For about that price you can get a monthly subscription to a lot of local cinemas and unlimited viewings here. In my city all three cinemas are in this system so we just go see a movie whenever we want. Doesn't include IMAX ones and chains of course.

https://mein.cineville.de/en/order

Re: Back to Kagi

#214

Post by canpan »

SyneRyder wrote: post #178
Shadowmist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?

No, they don't, and I had a feedback request back in September 2024 about that: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-... I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of t…

I am trying this. I noticed I only browse a subset of sites a lot. Also HN works wonders for finding links. But how do you get around all those bot measures/cloudflare nowadays? It seems only google IPs get a special pass.

Re: Back to Kagi

#215

Post by inigyou »

andai wrote: post #192
hgoel wrote: post #164

I've been using Kagi for a few years. I'd say that the biggest thing to me about it is that it does exactly what so many other sites nowadays seem to hate. It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. I absolutely adore the ability to block/downrank domains. With Reddit tr…

> It stays out of your way and allows itself to blend into the background, no sudden UI changes, no pop ups advertising some way to get more money from me and no sudden drops in result quality. You have described here also the opposite of YouTube, which is Google's main other product. I suspect most of YouTube's revenue comes from that thing where, when you pause the video and try to do something, but then they rearr…

I have YouTube premium and the UX issues have increased over time. Most recently the UI panel that expands into the comments section just stops responding and then you have to force close and restart the app. Another problem is that it randomly just drops your queued videos, entirely - always when you force close it, but also randomly. Sometimes random icons are invisible. After leaving a comment you sometimes can't see it.

Re: Back to Kagi

#216

Post by inigyou »

Grombobulous wrote: post #174
rpdillon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.

My pushback on this idea and your previous comment in this thread is that a search engine is a service being provided to me. I pay Kagi, they give me search results. It’s not an ecosystem. None of their competitors are all that much of an ecosystem, either. If Kagi goes out of business tomorrow it’s really not my problem, with the exception of the prorated balance of the subscription. The only thing that really matte…

This. We are all too worried about the future. Like today's "I won't use Codeberg because tomorrow they could ban all repositories that contain Chinese characters." Well if that happens then you move. We all die in the end anyway.

Re: Back to Kagi

#217

Post by inigyou »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #207
nixgeek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I’m on the upper end of what’s normal in U.S. but also not super abnormal either — 1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”. 2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps. 3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.

you guys are getting ripped the fuck off

It's rent. Rent varies based on location, and sets a price floor for all goods and services in that location.

Re: Back to Kagi

#218

Post by inigyou »

sanderjd wrote: post #119
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thesis of these competitors was that Google got worse because of bad product decisions or implementation failures. But they did though. Google results got significantly worse after ads started lagging in revenue. So they hindered search and increased focus on the ad platform which shot up profits in 2019 I believe. The web becoming more inhospitable is true. But Google has the tools, the data, and the engineers…

This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Re: Back to Kagi

#219

Post by gf000 »

imzadi wrote: post #7
hyperionultra wrote: post #3

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.

One caveat is that many existing search engines are actively worse than what they had before.

Exact keyword matching had its use, but now they do some kind of vector search but without the text understanding of LLMs. Making anything more complex impossible to find without actually going to an LLM that understands what I'm actually going for and can help out.

Just recently I wanted to find out the mill build tool's special syntax to have the JVM version used for the build tool itself be the system version (on nixos, downloading a JVM won't work, but I can trivially pin a jdk version myself. Unfortunately mill will refuse to even start without this special line).

My Google/kagi fu absolutely failed, yet Claude managed to find me the exact syntax in a single prompt. (Do give it a try if you want to)

Re: Back to Kagi

#220

Post by inigyou »

Larrikin wrote: post #86
vivzkestrel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imagine if we had a browser like kagi with its own engine from scratch where you are not the product and it charged you a monthly subscription for privacy free browsing

What's wrong with Firefox and AdNauseum?

You're the product in Firefox, just a different kind than in chrome. Ad Nauseam is silly because ad companies know they are fake clicks and don't count them. Ads aren't the only thing you'd need to block from the internet.
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