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Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

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Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#281
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What other countries do you want nothing to do with?

This is so funny, as though wanting to boycott specific entities is some kind of absurd notion, and as though saying "Sure, what ELSE don't you like?" is some kind of proof that it's an absurdity

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#282
Yandex is excellent if you want something that behaves more like a old PageRank version of google for news and historical information that isn’t filtered to amplify corporate media outlets. DuckDuckGo is also pretty good for that task, though it is interesting to compare and contrast DDG and Yandex output, they’re typically quite different, but equally useful.

The last use case I had for google was Google Scholar, but it now appears to block anyone who blocks google tracking. But this is where ChatGPT does an excellent job of generating lists of technical papers and reviews and it interprets natural language queries with no problems. The kind of complex logical search queries google used to support (what, 15 years ago?) can be written without strict logical language (! & | ()) and all that. Pubmed isn’t bad for cross-checking and simple searches. And if you put sci-hub into the yandex.com/search box and click on yandex ai it tends to tell you where the current active sci-hub sites are, which is handy.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense. But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compet…

> Nobody wants to pay for anything

Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It messes up sometimes i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.

For simple queries it’s fine. The main value it adds is that it’s above the ad spam.

But it was trained on ad spam wasn't it?

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#285
post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search ). All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing…

> they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google

Not the least bit surprising to me. I had the misfortune of talking to Kagi's CEO several years ago. Every word out of his mouth was a lie.

Kagi's the one search company I trust less than Google.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#286
post #18

I must be the only person in this website who is happy with the AI Overview feature. It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites. And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse. I would say that for almost all of my searches the AI Overview feature…

I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.

Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaining 700 users "speaks for itself"? All this stats page shows me is how few people actually use Kagi. You'd think it was millions of users based on the way people astroturf it here.

Why does it need millions of users to be useful to the individuals which use it? It's not a social media site, so I don't care how many other users they have as long as it's a sustainable business for them to keep providing a service to me.

I hope it stays small compared to the tech giants.

I want Kagi to have enough customers to run a business and earn a profit but not so many that they need to make the product worse to continue growing.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#288
post #116
post #7

I switched to Kagi little over a year ago and couldn’t recommend it enough. The search results are actually what I’m searching for, there is AI for the occasions I want it (and only then), and it comes with nice extras like search personalization and a great translation app. Tried to live without it when my first year of subscription ran out, but I didn’t last long…

Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.

Privacy Pass.

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#289
I used Kagi for a bit but began to question what I was paying for, there are plenty of other search providers basically doing the same thing, DDG, Ecosia, Brave search etc. I mostly just use DDG now because search as a paid offering that scrapes results from other indexes doesn’t seem like good value

Re: Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.

> Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system I think a large part of the blame is not on Google but on the websites themselves. The Internet has been enshittified by a gargantuan amount of spam sites and content mills created just to generate clicks and boost SEO. At least AI offers a way to filter out the noise at the cost of relying on how it was trained and what the creators thought is good d…

That one is 100% on Google. They intentionally enshittified their own search so that you spend more time in it. And they made it harder for genuine sites to be found unless they play the SEO game.
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