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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

#251

Post by 0x073 »

navanchauhan wrote: post #206
karaterobot wrote: post #82

Pinterest was certainly the first site I blocked. I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN, but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very simple question I must have asked, unlike something like Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what.

I never knew W3Schools had such a bad reputation. I learned HTML from that site almost a decade ago and found it pretty helpful. I loved their Try it Online!

I knew many developers that used w3schools that thought it was official source because w3c, I know it's not completely the sites fault but they named the domain. That's one reason I dislike, additional the quality of w3schools is compared with mdn for beginners that are not interested into the details.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#252

Post by matsemann »

karaterobot wrote: post #82

Pinterest was certainly the first site I blocked. I've never understood the hate for w3schools. No, it's not MDN, but it's not offensively bad either, and it's been a helpful reference from time to time. If w3schools comes up first in a search, I trust that it probably has the answer to whatever very simple question I must have asked, unlike something like Pinterest, which will just be spam no matter what.

See https://www.w3fools.com/

It's more a historical thing. Over a decade ago they were always on top, with often wrong/misleading/bad practice/insecure/simplified stuff. And lots of people thought of them as some kinde official entity because of their name similarity with W3C / w3.org

It's much better now, though. But for lots of old school frontenders the reputation stuck.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#253

Post by sam1r »

scarmig wrote: post #33
lolinder wrote: post #6

This feature is Kagi's single best innovation in search. It's what makes their results so much better than Google's: where Google's results are usually drowning in garbage websites, Kagi comes built-in with a great set of spam filters, and on top of that you can adapt your own personal list of good and bad domains as you go!

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, but 99.9 percent of its users do not know these filters/features exist. Still don't.

Google didn't prioritize it's visibility [intentioally] over the past 2 decades as well. Maybe it's time to do so.

I can't imagine how tedious the process may be to make very small changes on the main google home page.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#254

Post by Semaphor »

slaughtr wrote: post #108
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 was worried about the 1000 search limit, and it has so far (since beta) proven not to be a problem. I use Kagi for all my searches on all machines and my phone and average 800 or so a month. I haven’t modified my behavior at all, and consider myself a heavy search engine user. I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever, since the SEO spam would forc…

> I have a theory that I would actually need to do twice as many searches with Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever

FWIW, I counted searches I made with DDG (by parsing my FF history export) before joining the beta, and it was slightly over 1k, with Kagi my searches are in the 700-800 range.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#255

Post by Semaphor »

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…

> One critical difference I’ve noticed is that frequently used bangs with DDG, but almost never with Kagi.

I use bangs all the time and wouldn’t even use Kagi without them. It’s so convenient when I know I want results from a specific page.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#256

Post by int_19h »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #32
lloydatkinson wrote: post #5

I wonder why brietbart and Washington post are filtered so much?

It has the "wrong" bias for most of the HN crowd: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg To be fair, it is biased, but then so are most outlets one way or the other: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings

The problem with Breitbart isn't just bias, it's the amount of outright blatantly false claims.

(This isn't to say that other major media outlets don't have problems with accuracy. But the magnitude is very different.)

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#257

Post by kreeben »

abtinf wrote: post #92
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…

Could this be modified to block comments from a list of usernames too? The last time I looked at HN’s DOM made me sad. There are some prolific users who… while their comments are of normal quality, trigger a strong desire for me to respond. I’d rather simply not see their comments (and reply trees) at all.

Personally, I never reply. I only lurk. Because every time I reply I get sucked into the social media nightmare that is waiting for a response to my reply. So I opt out of that by never, ever replying, no matter how big the urge is to reply. I never do it. Almost never. 99.99% of the time, I skip replying. I think you might lack a discipline.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#258

Post by lelanthran »

nine_k wrote: post #138
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…

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 prese…

> I think you miss he point.

I don't think he did. He did say " it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public"

And looking at the data from the link, other than wikipedia and reddit, all the pinned domains are for developers or technical folk.

So it looks to me that kagi is not popular to the general public. If it was, programming-related sites wouldn't so heavily top the popular list.

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#259

Post by slaw »

int_19h wrote: post #248
microflash wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it is expensive in countries where dollar conversion rates are very high due to inflation. I did ask about introducing different prices based on purchasing power parity in different geographies but got a very polite rebuff :)

They claim that the prices are largely defined by the actual cost of the search, with fairly slim margins. In which case they literally can't do what you asked without becoming unprofitable.

So if buying search result from Google is too expensive, Kagi should use another provider, Brave search?

Re: Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

#260

Post by nomat »

7839284023 wrote: post #237
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.

Use this: " uBlacklist is a Google Search filter for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. " https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

it works for duckduckgo as well.
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