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Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

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Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#131

Post by pokeymcsnatch »

cabalamat wrote: post #123
jsnell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they had it for a few years a decade ago. If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of sear…

> that's trying to establish an initial niche Which suggests to me that while kagi might be good now, if it gets popular it may undergo enshittification in an effort to monetise its popularity.

It's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'. Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd go under in a heartbeat.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#132

Post by SQueeeeeL »

pokeymcsnatch wrote: post #131
cabalamat wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's trying to establish an initial niche Which suggests to me that while kagi might be good now, if it gets popular it may undergo enshittification in an effort to monetise its popularity.

It's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'. Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd go under in a heartbeat.

See also, Whatsapp

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#134

Post by jrflowers »

It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#135

Post by MBCook »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #80
LAC-Tech wrote: post #77

I actually did a smaller thing for HN. I have client side JS that blocks results from a few domains that seemed to promote low quality discussions and/or irrelevant submissions. const boringDomains = [ "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com", "economist.com", "wired.co.uk", "bbc.com", "aella.substack.com", "hecolumn.substack.com", "wsj.com", "kqed", "voanews.com", "wusa9.com", "noemamag.com", "arstechnica.com", "independent.c…

...BBC? Ars Technica? ...KQED and VOA? You're blocking discussion of some of the most reliably factual reporting on the planet.

I’m mean they’re not wrong that more general news topics (especially if touching on politics at all) tends to produce horrible discussions.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#136

Post by antoniojtorres »

abtinf wrote: post #93
OJFord wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, I had no idea about this feature, but I now know I want it... I think I just need it to be cheaper, maybe $5 unlimited (or enough for me, which I think is certainly higher than 300, probably higher than 1000, at least without behaviour change) and I'd be in I assume it's a bit chicken and egg - marginal costs of new customers/extra searches is relatively low, it's the crawling & development/SRE that's expe…

I’m a former DDG user and current paying Kagi customer. One critical difference I’ve noticed is that frequently used bangs with DDG, but almost never with Kagi. I think this is because over a very short period of usage, I applied block/lower/raise/pin to various domains, and now my search results are almost always perfect . That said, I understand the value of going directly to a site. On that front, Kagi makes it tr…

This matches my experience as well. Kagi has useful results much more often.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#137

Post by Eisenstein »

jrflowers wrote: post #134

It is wholly unsurprising that a website that seems to exist solely to fuck up search results (Pinterest) is at the top of the block list. The existence of it is genuinely mind boggling in a way that’s similar to face tattoos or Toddlers and Tiaras. Why would anyone want that to exist? At all? What is wrong with humanity?

I would love to see a history and expose of Pinterest.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#138

Post by nine_k »

jsnell wrote: post #54
scarmig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.

Yes, they had it for a few years a decade ago. If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of sear…

I think you miss he point.

The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state.

The point is to remove certain well-known sites with information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for the particular user, me. That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc.

That is, if I search some info about a particular CSS trick, I want MDN be on top, some professional blogs be near top, and w3schools be on the third page. For someone else, priorities may be different, but I know what to expect for the search queries I issue, and I'd be glad if the search engine helped me.

Equally, certain domains are known to be more rich with information I happen to seek, like reddit.com, so I'd like to give them a boost. Some other people may prefer something else, or not give any boost at all.

So, this is personalization, not anti-spam. If Google kept it, it could even bring important insights into what ads I would skip and what would click :)

Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important: with more disposable income, more clout on social networks, more decision-making power. I suppose that the shutdown of Google Reader, which affected a relatively small number of users, affected all the wrong people, and destroyed so much goodwill that the losses from it are many orders of magnitude larger than whatever savings from not supporting it any more.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#140

Post by freediver »

abtinf wrote: post #95

The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari. It is infuriating and is the one thing that has caused me to seriously try other browsers on mobile. The problem is, they are all terrible in some small paper cutting ways (including Orion, though that has been rapidly improving).

Would you be kind to document the top 3 pet peeves you have with Orion iOS on OrionFeedback [1]. We are keen to improve.

[1] https://orionfeedback.org

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