381–390 of 421 posts
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Google was not the first search engine, and it certainly isn't the first search engine to fall from grace.
There is basically only before and after Google. No search engine was ever as important to the Internet. It’s basically a pillar of what we have now.
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NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too. Stupid modal popup with "Join the most real place on the internet" (yeah, right) banner that appears after about 20 seconds. I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break! (I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choic…
Yes "the most real place" where they can just ban you whenever (the site, or its legions of - installed? - subreddit mods)
Cool.
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> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles. Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid the…
The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.
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> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles. Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid the…
I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
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I've configured Claude to use their search MCP instead of vanilla Websearch and it has been great. I think it's subscriber-only but I've been on the $5/mo plan for a while and have never him my limit. I might bump up to a higher plan just out of how philosophically refreshing they are as a service. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp
I thought the Kagi API was entirely pay-as-you-go. EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
Edit: this is a one-time promotional credit. One must pay for credits thereafter, in addition to their subscription.
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Yeah I pretty much soley used assistant.kagi.com the last couple months. Traditional search days are really numbered. I'm finding though ChatGPT with sol 5.6 is as good or better, so I'm using that primarily these days. Can also do actions in browsers on your behalf, so you can have it book your whole vacation, etc. Pretty rad.
Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
ChatGPT is trained on all of Reddit and internet forums where most of the useful info is. It just automates the drudgery.
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I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
But then once you get shit results, don't you iterate on the prompt and try again? In this case, add what you actually care about, not just "best cuisine" which can mean a lot of things, and also straight up tell it to not focus on the website or whatever, then eventually you'll get somewhat reasonable and applicable results.
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I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad. I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone…
The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber! I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is p…
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something m…
I use kagi. The results quality is pretty good, but I probably use the uprank and downrank feature all the time. Being able to report stuff as AI and get little indicators that a site is AI slop is good.
As an example, serious eats is my go to recipe site, and I've got it tuned so it returns higher in my results.
I also really appreciate I can write my own custom css, and style every box and widget on the page.
And marine most of all, I love that their AI tool will not show up unless you end your query with a "?". Meaning I'm explicitly opting in to using it.
My last reason for liking it is ideological. No ads, no manipulation because of advertising tech. Just ... the stuff I searched for.
I do not like the image search page, however. It feels clunky in a way I can't put my finger on.
There's a few other things I really like, but it's hard to type them all out. So I often go, "kagi is great, love kagi."