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Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#191

Post by hoooooooooome »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #181
zhfanlqeo wrote: post #179

I used kagi for a while but got lazy with updating the subscription when moving and needing to change credit cards so I went back to DDG/Google and having to go back to having to skip the first result or first few results shows you just how obnoxious this practice is. When I have a few moments I'll resubscribe to kagi...

I've been trying to use DDG for the past 2-3 years, but way too often I have to add !g at the end to go to google where I can get better results. So I've been considering giving Kagi a try. Can you tell if in your experience Kagi has better results than DDG?

I switched to DDG from Google some years ago, and then to Kagi around the start of 2025.

I find the Kagi results to everything I need, and often lead me to more niche personal blog posts specific to what I am looking for. Surfacing small blogs posts is not something I remember getting much of in DDG and I'm really enjoying that.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#192

Post by decimalenough »

thisislife2 wrote: post #172

> Layer 3: Paid, subscription-based search Should actually be - Layer 3: Paid, ad-free , subscription-based search. (It's a subtle omission that indicates the direction Kagi search will eventually take).

Kagi has been pretty consistent about funding itself with paying users instead of ads. I, for one, am a paid user but would quit if there were ads injected, since not having them (and, more importantly, having result rankings corrupted by them) is the exact thing I'm paying for.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#193

Post by canpan »

decimalenough wrote: post #192
thisislife2 wrote: post #172

> Layer 3: Paid, subscription-based search Should actually be - Layer 3: Paid, ad-free , subscription-based search. (It's a subtle omission that indicates the direction Kagi search will eventually take).

Kagi has been pretty consistent about funding itself with paying users instead of ads. I, for one, am a paid user but would quit if there were ads injected, since not having them (and, more importantly, having result rankings corrupted by them) is the exact thing I'm paying for.

Another paying user here. Very happy with Kagi, but would cancel asap if there were ads. Don't mind paying more. I just don't want ads. But I cannot really imagine it, they would loose half their competitive advantage. (The other half being having good results)

For me it would probably mean to build a search from scratch. For 90% of my search use cases it's pretty straightforward. I mostly visit the same sites..

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#194

Post by dspillett »

lostlogin wrote: post #173
thisislife2 wrote: post #172

> Layer 3: Paid, subscription-based search Should actually be - Layer 3: Paid, ad-free , subscription-based search. (It's a subtle omission that indicates the direction Kagi search will eventually take).

It does say ‘without selling your attention.’ This isn’t quite the same thing though. I hope you are wrong, if not… wow.

TBH that sounds more creepy. It (sort of) rules out ads but not the stalking that is inherent in current adtech methods. I'm more bothered by the latter than the former.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#195

Post by shmeeed »

thisislife2 wrote: post #172

> Layer 3: Paid, subscription-based search Should actually be - Layer 3: Paid, ad-free , subscription-based search. (It's a subtle omission that indicates the direction Kagi search will eventually take).

I don't see how it's conductive to the underlying big stakes discussion if we start condemning Kagi over this omission instead of assuming good faith. It's just distracting from the real issue at hand that is Google's monopoly and the details of the rulings and their enforcement.

Call me naive, but I imagine Kagi would be VERY hesitant to force ads on their users, given that such a step would risk alienating a major part of their customer base, as they're well aware.

If they were secretly planning to to it somewhere down the road, they could just as well do it the usual and proven way and lie about it until they've build a sufficient moat, which they're not having right now. IMO, they have precious little to gain from hinting at it like this now.

And even if it were the case that this omission was consciously about keeping a door open for such a change in business models, there's a whole lot of leeway in approaches that involve ads, apart from the 100% user-as-a-product way that Google went with.

Given the high customizability of their search, they e.g. could give users the option to turn ads on or off. Some people (don't ask me who, but I keep being told they exist) don't mind being shown ads or might even desire them.

I remember way back when the first Google ads were clearly labeled as such and stood visually apart from organic search results. I personally don't think it would mean the end of the world if Kagi did something similar - in a transparent way, and preferrably as an opt-in.

But at this point it's all needless speculation in my view.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#196

Post by direwolf20 »

kavalg wrote: post #178
monooso wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost, presumably. From the article: > Microsoft spent roughly $100 billion over 20 years on Bing and still holds single-digit share. If Microsoft cannot close the gap, no startup can do it alone.

Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft opened the bing index for all.

Don't they? DDG and Kagi use it. I would think you have to pay money but it does seem like they're willing to get partners.

edit: this is wrong

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#197

Post by direwolf20 »

ghm2199 wrote: post #100
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah but no one uses it. I am not even sure people like using it because it was productized it pretty poorly. They invested 100 Billion dollars, which is a lot of wasted money TBH. I mean... Duckduckgo uses bing api iirc and I use duckduckgo and many people use duckduckgo. I also used bing once because bing used to cache websites which weren't available in wayback archive, I don't know how but It was pretty cool so…

Duck duck go is really cool. I am almost fully rooting for them and they are my default mobile and web browser. The small distributed team grinding it out against the goliath. They are awesome and perhaps the right example of what a path like this would look like. Maybe someone from their team can chime in on the difficulties of building a search engine that works in the face of tremendous odds.

DDG is mostly just an anonymizing proxy for Bing. Microsoft encourages it because it increases Bing's market share over Google.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#198

Post by direwolf20 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #124
dylan604 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine the users of DDG to be closer to a rounding error than an actual percentage of users. I'd imagine theGoog would love and hate to have 100%. They'd love it because all the data, and hate it as it would prove the monopoly. At the end of the day, the % that is not going to them probably doesn't cause theGoog to lose much sleep

It's just so wild how great Duckduckgo is & how under-rated it is. It's available in all major browsers (Here in zen browser, it doesn't even have a default browser but rather on the start page it asks between the three options, google duckduckgo and bing but yes if you press next it starts from google but zen can even start from ddg, its not such a big deal) Duckduckgo is super amazing. I mean they are so amazing an…

DDG is just an anonymizing front-end for Bing. Your DDG results are Bing results.

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#199

Post by direwolf20 »

visarga wrote: post #155
renegat0x0 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scraping is hard, and is not hard that much at the same time. There are many projects about scraping, so with a few lines you can do implement scraper using curl cffi, or playwright. People complain that user-agent need to be filled. Boo-hoo, are we on hacker news, or what? Can't we just provide cookies, and user-agent? Not a big deal, right? I myself have implemented a simple solution that is able to go through many…

> Search engines affect me less, and less every day. I have my own small "index" / "bookmarks" with many domains, github projects, youtube channels Exactly, why can't we just hoard our bookmarks and a list of curated sources, say 1M or 10M small search stubs, and have a LLM direct the scraping operation? The idea is to have starting points for a scraper, such as blogs, awesome lists, specialized search engines, news…

Marginalia Search does something like this

Re: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

#200

Post by direwolf20 »

manquer wrote: post #151
xnx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies allegedly have used SerpAPI (probably to check visibility), but not to resell a Google Search knock-off.

> knock-off Is it though? It feels so better than Google results[1], while being still built partly with Google results. In the last 3 years as a Kagi customer i have rarely if ever felt the need to use bangs !g and on few occasions i did use them, it was with instant regret. In the previous decade or so using DDG, using bangs !g Google would be 30-50% of searches, i would have to consciously try the results first in…

DDG's results are primarily Bing results while Kagi's results are primarily Google results. It makes sense that you feel the need to escape from Bing to Google more often than from Google to Google.
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