251–260 of 338 posts
Do they still use Yandex? >I’ve been a happy Kagi user since early 2023 I was an unhappy Kagi user when I learnt it relied on Russian back ends fueling a war. Now I'm not a user anymore.
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Try anything related to visas. "us esta", "canada eta". On Kagi, the official government site is always the first result. On Google, it's buried beneath an avalanche of scammy lookalike services that pay for ads and SEO.
The government sites are the first result for both searches on Google for me. https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_1.png https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png
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Kagi founder here. I notice you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions. A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely…
Would it not be possible for the user to disallow certain sources for searching, so as to not pay them for the API call?
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> I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products You shouldn't. Word-of-mouth should be the primary way people discover products. In ye olden days, a region's best bakery or blacksmith didn't become well-known because they put up signposts everywhere, but because the quality of their craft made their name known far and wide. I feel very comfortable recommending products that are actually good, ran by a U…
Exactly. If you don't advertise what is good or bad through word-of-mouth and true reviews then the primary method of learning and evaluating productions is paid marketing. As you may suspect the opinion given by paid marketing is not reflective of product quality. This means that product quality has very little influence on market selection and we end up with tons of crap like we do now. Information from trusted ind…
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The government sites are the first result for both searches on Google for me. https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_1.png https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png
You probably have an adblocker running. I also did this test with ‘Canada eta’ and got the expected result on top. But when I reloaded the page without my content blockers, the official Canadian website was more than 1.5 iPad screen scrolls down.
Yeah, of course. Anyone with a brain does. But "Kagi doesn't have ads" is a different statement than "Kagi's results are better than Google's." I've never seen anyone actually give a search term that Kagi does better at.
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I didn't say internet search was optional. I said Kagi was optional.
… implication of my comment was: “Which search engine may I use that doesn't indirectly cause harm?”
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Do you personally sanction all countries that commit atrocities or is it specific to Russia? I don't care what you do or don't support with your money, but I'm genuinely curious about the mindset.
Let's assume the question has been asked in good faith. Yes, I actually do. And I lose money because of that, significant amounts, because I run a SaaS, where I (as an example) stopped service to all customers from Russia when the full invasion of Ukraine started. So it's not just about not paying, it's about refusing money as well. It's easy to fall into the "whataboutism" trap and do nothing, because one can always…
What?
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These days it's often the sites in the results themselves that are either ads or highly SEO-optimized low value sites. You can manage a blacklist and a list of sites to promote/demote in the search results. And manage different "lenses" to have different buckets of blacklist/promote/demote settings tailored for what you're researching. And can also be used for their Kagi Assistant when you allow it to perform web sea…
IMO this is really Kagi's killer feature. If I see a poor behaving site (Pinterest, for example), I can easily exclude the domain from every search I ever make. I don't have to carefully craft an enormous search query of all the sites I don't want to be shown. Demoting news sites that have a reputation for promoting bad takes, and prioritizing results from sites that are known to be good. The quick switch to move to…
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Kagi founder here. I notice you bring this up consistently in Kagi discussions. A search engine's job is to deliver the best possible results. We evaluate API sources on search quality, not geopolitics. Yandex represents 2% of our costs but contributes meaningfully to search quality - removing it would harm all users while having minimal economic impact. We've used their API since 2019 and evaluate all sources purely…
I cancelled my kagi subscription upon seeing this response. I donate to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. I lost a family member to Russian artillery as well while providing medical aid to civilians. I very much do not want my dollars to fund the very thing that my donations are intended to defend against. I'm going to assume you run a similar policy with Chinese search providers. After seeing Chinese warships of…
https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probab...
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Try Yandex...
Not a bad solution if you're looking for things that are usually removed from results in the west, eg, torrents and stuff like that.