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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

#161

Post by unshavedyak »

Nextgrid wrote: post #155
munk-a wrote: post #19

I'm surprised Reddit isn't higher on the list. Either I'm on a desktop and Reddit's website is a bit clunky to use - or I'm on mobile and I have to click past several attempts at them to funnel me into their app. It is a true shame that so much useful information gets trapped within their ecosystem.

Kagi has another feature that can rewrite search results' URLs based on regexes: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html . I successfully use it to automatically link to Old Reddit. I guess it can also be used to rewrite user-hostile websites' URLs such as YouTube/Twitter/etc to less hostile frontends such as Invidious or Nitter.

.. holy. I never thought of that, now i'm adding that. Thanks!

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#162

Post by Jaygles »

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?

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#163

Post by captn3m0 »

r00fus wrote: post #76
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.

Ah, but then they acquired Doubleclick (or was it the other way around?) and a monopoly was formed.

The feature definitely existed after the DC acquisition.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#164

Post by Nextgrid »

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?

Pinterest is a successful product that provides value to its users (I'm not the target market and I guess most of us aren't either, but there is a segment of people that do get value out of it). I don't believe they have any malicious intent to explicitly go out of their way to ruin image search. I'm sure they don't mind the free SEO but I don't believe there is an explicit effort to mislead search engine crawlers (especially considering other engines correctly ignore such pages).

The problem is that their pages unintentionally trigger a flaw in Google's crawler (it's unable to detect that the content is actually obscured by a JS-based login wall) and Google is unwilling to implement an override because this spam contributes to their bottom-line (increases "engagement" on the search results page).

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#165

Post by Nextgrid »

Jaygles wrote: post #162
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?

It goes to show how hard of a problem searching for relevant information is, when some of the world's smartest engineers can't help but return the world's most useless website in their web search.

There's no reason to believe those smartest engineers' incentives are to give you good search results. If this was a technical problem this would be solved long ago by a simple "if domain == 'pinterest.com': skip()".

The problem is that the company employing those engineers is acting maliciously and benefits from you wasting your time with irrelevant/unusable search results as it contributes to "engagement" on the search results page and makes the sponsored results (aka spam) more likely to be clicked (even if by accident). They can get away with it since (besides Kagi) the competition is no better due to having the exact same business model.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#167

Post by _delirium »

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…

> Kagi makes it trivial to define new bangs

Lately I’ve moved to doing this at the browser level instead of via a search engine. It’s not a huge speed difference, but in principle it seems wrong to have an extra round-trip out to a search engine to redirect me to another site, when I can set up the keywords locally and go directly. Firefox makes it easy to do: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#168

Post by malikNF »

12907835202 wrote: post #4

I've never quite understood the w3schools hate. It can be quite useful. My most used page is this one when I need to jog my memory: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php It's much better than this one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_selecto... Or any of the other results on the first page

Yep. W3schools is one of those sites that helped me begin my career. I still find it useful to look up something in a hurry. No idea why so many people hate it.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#169

Post by freediver »

arealaccount wrote: post #110

Tried out a few searches that I’ve recently struggled with on both DDG and Google, very impressed. Seems worth it, especially if I can get a license through work. I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass. Presumably Google would love to have useful results beneath all their ads, but can’t seem to win over all of the “organic” blogs.

> I wonder how they will keep their results shielded from SEO spam if they hit a critical mass.

We mitigate SEO spam effectively by downranking websites that use ads or trackers.

SEO spam websites predominantly rely on ads for monetization, which makes them easily detectable. This strategy of combating ads in every form, everywhere, has proven to be an efficient method for prioritizing high-quality web results.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#170

Post by epgui »

kccqzy wrote: post #26
jeffbee wrote: post #18

So, kagi has a couple hundred actives?

While this comment has a snarky tone, I agree with it. We need active user numbers to determine how statistically relevant this might be.

To me, the results seem interesting regardless of whether they are representative of the population or not. There are questions you can answer without relying on that assumption.

For example: "Can you imagine what your search results would look like if you had access to this tool?"

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